Faux Queen: A Life in Drag

Faux Queen: A Life in Drag is the memoir of a ballet-obsessed girl who moves to San Francisco from the suburbs and finds her people at the drag club.

It joyously chronicles Monique Jenkinson's creation of her drag persona Fauxnique, the people and cultural practices that crash her identity into being, her journey through one of the most experimental moments in queer cultural history, and her rise through the nightlife underground to become the first cisgender woman crowned as a major pageant-winning drag queen.

Jenkinson finds authenticity through the glee of drag artifice and articulation through the immediacy of performing bodies. She pens a valentine to gay men and their culture while relaying the making of an open-minded feminist and queer ally. Faux Queen finds deep healing in irreverence and posits that it might be possible for us--queer, straight, and almost everyone on either side and in between--to come together in fabulous difference on the dance floor.

Author: Monique Jenkinson
Publisher: Bywater Books
Published: 01/25/2022
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9781612942216
ISBN10: 1612942210
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Entertainment & Performing Arts
- Biography & Autobiography | LGBTQ+
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs

About the Author

Monique Jenkinson is an artist, performer, choreographer, and writer. Lauded for a "campy, intellectual juxtaposition of pop culture and high art," her work considers the performance of femininity as a powerful, vulnerable, and subversive act. She made "herstory" as the first cis-woman to win a major drag queen pageant and subsequently her solo performance works have toured nationally and internationally in wide-ranging contexts from nightclubs to theaters to museums--from Joe's Pub, New Museum, and the historic Stonewall in New York City, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC Theater, The Stud, CounterPulse, and de Young Museum in San Francisco, and in Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Provincetown, London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Zurich, Paris, Reykjavik, Rome, Catania, and Cork.

Professional honors include residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Tanzhaus Zurich and Atlantic Center for the Arts, an Irvine Fellowship, and residency at the de Young Museum, San Francisco Bay Guardian GOLDIE and Bay Area Reporter BESTIE awards, and 7X7 Magazine's "Hot 20." She has been nominated for the Theater Bay Area, Isadora Duncan Dance (IZZIE), and Herb Alpert Foundation awards and has received support from San Francisco Arts Commission, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, CHIME, Center for Cultural Innovation, and the Kenneth Rainin and Zellerbach Family foundations.