It’s me and the drag queens backstage. Here we are in the heart of Chicago’s underground queer nightlife — as in, we are literally in the basement. “How do you pee when you’re in a look?” I ask. The closest bathroom is upstairs and I don’t want to prematurely reveal my outfit to the crowd. “Well, there’s this drainage hole back there…” a queen named Imp responds. “It’s an old queen trick!” And there I am, my own drag Piss Christ, inaugurated into the world of queer drag in all its grit and glamour.

It’s Pride week in Chicago and I’m here for a performance at a local gay club, and Imp Queen is up on the roster before me. She is wearing a pink number with cartoonishly sized fabric-stuffed breasts (a collaboration between her and Ophelia Bulletz). It’s garish and deeply endearing, and very Imp. She takes control of the center of the dance floor while singing one of her tracks, “Amanda Lepore,” named after the legendary NYC club icon.

Then she takes a shot of estrogen right there in front of us.

It’s a work of political art.

Just a few months ago RuPaul, one of the preeminent drag queens in the world, expressed his resistance to trans women participating in Drag Race because when it’s not cis men doing it, “drag loses its sense of danger.” And here we have Imp Queen: a trans woman drag performance artist taking the very hormones that RuPaul dismissed as “performance-enhancing drugs.”

Take that!

Imp is an iconoclast — one of the most visible drag queens on social media who has not been a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. She uses her Instagram to document the looks she wears out for nightlife gigs in Chicago: dazzling the masses with her iconic pink countenance, regal balloon crowns, and unyielding reservoir of creativity. In Imp’s world looks are a postgender bliss…to be found on aisle five in heaven next to the neon lip liner...thank you very much! What is striking about Imp’s online presence is she doesn’t only turn looks, she also talks shop. She goes live speaking candidly about her transition, her struggles with mental health and harassment, and her own frustrations with the drag scene. In this way she poses a double whammy: She can contour your face to the gods and lecture you on queer performance theory along the ride.

Over the past decade with the success of RuPaul’s Drag Race, DragCon conventions, and the popularity of local drag festivals like Bushwig, drag is experiencing a sort of renaissance. Drag queens have become interchangeably our self-help gurus and seasonal lookbooks, IRL memes that we use to communicate who we are. “Who’s your favorite drag queen?” is the new “What’s your astrological sign?”

We put drag queens on stages to sell us fantasy — they become the symbols through which we learn to love ourselves and reconcile our own difference. But I wonder if in all of the mythology we create about drag queens we neglect their materiality. In other words: Who heals the healer? Do we allow drag queens to struggle, be depressed, let alone exist beyond their utility?

What happens when a drag queen speaks out about her own violation from the very people snapping for her? What happens when the fantasy becomes a nightmare?

Imp Queen’s journey is a story about the Internet and how, like most things that give birth to us, it finds a way to abuse us and call it love. It’s story about trauma and how we try our best to adorn it, call it “art” and hopefully even a living. A story about impossibility, false lashes that might be more real than we think, and the things we do not say. Mostly, Imp Queen’s is a story about transmisogyny: how they live for her performances and don’t care about what happens to her when they’re over.