The Judgment of T Rex
LUCY STOOLE WAS WRAPPED IN A FLOWING RAINBOW poncho, her hair in Afro puffs, a pink facemask covering her beard. When she removed the mask onstage at the corner of Halsted and Grace, it was to address an assembled crowd of thousands, the attendees of June 14’s Drag March for Change, people who’d been walking in the heat and chanting, “White silence is white violence!” and “Black lives matter!” and “Trans lives matter!” Her anger was pointed and eloquent. “I refuse to be quiet,” she said, “because I’ve never felt peace a day of my life.”
Many things were at a boil: COVID-19 had shut down the bars that the drag community performs in and calls home; the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor had brought lifetimes of frustration to a bursting point; the racism that had been festering in Boystown from its inception was being called out, with people speaking louder about what they saw as racist policing and a racist vibe among bar patrons and staff; and just to be a queer person of color in 2020 was inherently stressful. The speeches reflected all this. Shea Couleé, a Black star of the Chicago drag scene who rose to national prominence on season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, took the microphone: “We built this. I should not have to stand here on a loudspeaker and ask you for fucking permission to walk through the door. Y’all need to hire Black people in your bars. And I’m not just talking about to wipe up your drinks. … I want to see Black people deciding who gets to come in and who gets to make the money.”
Jo MaMa, a drag performer who organized the march and led it dressed in a powder-blue blazer, spoke last and called out one key figure in Chicago drag by name: T Rex (formerly Trannika Rex), the 32-year-old white queen who hosted, booked, and managed shows at Berlin and Roscoe’s Tavern — including Berlin’s hugely popular Saturday night Drag Matinee — and was widely considered a gatekeeper for the city’s drag scene. Those present remember it as a moment when the floodgates opened.
“There was this huge pink elephant in the room,” Stoole, 36, told me in early August over Zoom. (The queens I spoke to all preferred I use their drag names and feminine pronouns for this article. That said, the Lucy Stoole I met virtually wasn’t wearing makeup, her Zoom handle was her legal name, and the only visible sign of her drag life was her long chartreuse nails.) “No one wanted to talk about this one issue, this one person that was such a huge influence. … When Jo MaMa ‘threw the first necklace at IHOP,’ as some of our friends love to say, … that was monumental. For so many of us sitting there, it made us feel like, ‘I can finally say this out loud.’ ”
In the days that followed, more than 50 Chicago drag performers signed an open letter to T Rex, vowing to stop working her shows unless she significantly changed her MO. The letter enumerated microaggressions, talked about double standards for queens of color, and referred to her “dictatorship over number selection.” Among the demands of the letter was that T Rex book more Black performers and trade off Drag Matinee every other week with a Black host. “You have taken a position of power,” the letter stated,
