Monique Jenkinson (born March 8, 1971) also known as Fauxnique, is an American artist, choreographer, drag performer, and author. Her book Faux Queen: A Life in Drag ISBN 978-1-61294-221-6, a memoir, was published in January 2022 by Amble Press.[1] Her drag-queen alter-ego Fauxnique came to prominence in 2003 when she won the Miss Trannyshack Pageant in San Francisco, becoming the first cis-gender woman to be crowned as a pageant-winning drag queen. In an article published to coincide with the release of Faux Queen, arts writer Tony Bravo in the San Francisco Chronicle referred to Jenkinson as a "drag anthropologist".[2] The anthropologist reference echoes a pull quote on the front cover of the book from singer songwriter and cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond who referred to Jenkinson as "The Jane Goodall of drag."
Jenkinson was born in Dallas, Texas but moved weeks later to Los Angeles, California and grew up in San Pedro. The family later moved to Modesto in the central valley, then to Broomfield, Colorado, just north of Denver. As noted in Faux Queen, she grew up obsessed by ballet, fashion and 1980s music. She left Broomfield for Bennington College at the age of 17 to study dance and writing. Moving to San Francisco in 1992, she continued her dance practice and became a professional dancer, working with a number of cutting edge San Francisco choreographers including Kathleen Hermesdorf and Sara Shelton Mann.
Jenkinson began going to Trannyshack, the infamous Tuesday night drag club at The Stud, in the late 1990s and first performed there in 1998 alongside Kevin Clarke, with whom she would later forge a performing partnership under the name Hagen & Simone, an allusion to Nina Hagen and Nina Simone. The partnership would go on to produce Future Perfect, a dance piece that deconstructed style and performance through the prisms of Vogue Magazine Fashion Editor Diana Vreeland, and the authors of The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White.[3]
Jenkinson would go on to create a body of solo performance works with Crying in Public (2007) up to the present day with Notes on Faux (2023). Awards and accolades include 7 X 7 Magazine's Hot 20,[4] SF Bay Guardian's GOLDIE awards, the Bay Area Reporter's Bestie awards and Theatre Bay Area and Isadora Duncan Dance Award nominations.
Winning the Miss Trannyshack Pageant as Fauxnique generated controversy because it was the first time a cis-gender woman had been crowned as a major pageant-winning drag queen. There were also those who questioned whether a cis-gender woman really qualified as a drag queen in the first place. But overall, Jenkinson (and by extension Fauxnique) were met with open arms by the San Francisco drag community. "Call me a faux queen if you want, and then you'll see how real a performance I do. I mean, my name is Fauxnique, so I love playing with the idea of faux. I am an artist, and that is where my drag comes from. Part of being an artist is creating artifice."[5]
2009 saw the debut of Faux Real, a long-running evening length solo cabaret performance in which Fauxnique dealt with these and other questions. Leah Garchik writing in the San Francisco Chronicle called it "performance art" while noting the "amazingly skillful performance" and "how the sweat changes the medium of makeup and the tension that creates."[6]
Faux Real was also performed that same year at The New Museum in New York in All Made Up, a shared evening with Narcissister as well as in 2013 when she performed sections of the piece at LGBTQ Pride in Catania, Sicily and paired these sections with a lecture at the Genderotica Festival in Rome, Italy.
A year later came the debut of Luxury Items which continued the conversation about drag while simultaneously deconstructing the idea of luxury and featuring Jenkinson's portrayal of Coco Chanel and Marie Antoinette attempting to explain themselves.
2015 saw the debut of The F Word at Hackney Attic in London. Versions of the show ran until 2018 and played in Berlin, Cambridge, Williamstown, Provincetown, New Orleans, Seattle, San Francisco and at Joe's Pub in New York City.
In an interview with The Bay Area Reporter she explained that the F was for both Fauxnique and Feminism. "We've sort of dismantled the idea that drag is 'female impersonation,' and that women doing drag is just as much of a performance as men doing drag. Drag has always been, for me, a reclaiming of the performance of femininity."[7]
In 2017, C*NT, or, The Horror of Nothing To See, premiered at ODC's Walking Distance Dance Festival. In writing about the work, Marie Tollon called it "an investigation of aging, ugliness and rage," that also plays with the expectation of a what a drag queen's show looks like.[8]
Jenkinson's other notable appearances and collaborations, both in and outside of her Fauxnique persona, include:
Faux Queen traces the narrative of Jenkinson's path from ballet-obsessed girl and teenager amid the cultural swirl of the 1970s, '80s and later into the '90s when she found both freedom and her true voice through the art of drag. Author Michelle Tea described Faux Queen as "A playful, engaging, critically serious, counter-culturally crucial memoir that is full of joy - the primal joys of art-making, fandom, connecting with like-minded weirdos, finding your place in the world and allowing your art and obsessions to lead you to it."
This is echoed in the forward to the book by author and essayist Evan James, who notes: "In those years in San Francisco, drag appeared to be enjoying a special moment, part of a long and continuing process of mutation. Drag was busy both celebrating and transcending itself: the drag scene there was also a performance art movement, one that predated and foreshadowed drag's storming the gates of popular culture."
Chapter headings such as What's in My Purse, English Boys in Eyeliner, Art Damaged, That's Problematic, Real Ladies, and Genderful represent the expanse of cultural discourse and points of view engaged with over the course of its 291 pages.
On April 27, 2022, Jenkinson guested on episode #33 of The Midnight Mass Podcast hosted by Peaches Christ and Michael Varrati, where she discussed her lifetime of love for the film Cabaret and how it has informed her work.
Jenkinson lives in San Francisco with her husband, musician and podcaster Marc Kate.[11]