The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians and performers in places that matter to them.

"Being here today after being on Drag Race is, like, full circle," the Vixen says. It's a sunny April morning, and the 27-year-old drag queen is sitting pretty with a curly pink wig and beat face inside the Jeffery Pub, where she first performed professionally. Located at 7041 S. Jeffery, the pub is not just Chicago's only black-owned gay club but also one of the oldest LGBTQ+ spots in the country, operating since 1965, according to owner Jamal Junior.

Olivia Obineme

In April 2013, the Vixen was born onstage at the Jeffery Pub—Chicago’s only black-owned gay club and one of the oldest LGBTQ+ spots in the country.

At the time, fiercely popular VH1 reality show RuPaul's Drag Race was only about four episodes into season ten and already seething with controversy. A blowup between the Vixen and fellow contestant Aquaria left the former battling the "angry black woman" stereotype while the latter cried white tears—a display that cast the Vixen as the irrational aggressor and Aquaria as the fragile victim. In the real world, though, the season had completed filming before the Vixen's shoot with the Block Beat, so she already knew she'd be eliminated. Her final appearance was in episode eight, "The Unauthorized Rusical," which aired on Thursday, May 10—her Cher impersonation left RuPaul Charles and his judges unimpressed. The Vixen's "full circle" musing carried emotional weight for her that we couldn't feel during our interview, because she wasn't yet free to reveal her fate. Olivia Obineme

An uncharacteristically quiet moment at the Jeffery Pub "It feels like I've come all the way from Calvary back to Bethlehem," she says—an apt analogy, considering everything she's already endured as a black drag queen. The Vixen was born at Jeffery Pub in April 2013. "My drag started as live performances, because I love to rap," she explains. "I was rapping and doing my own thing, but I had never been to a drag show. So a drag queen happened to stumble upon my show and invited me to the Jeffery Pub to perform—and it changed my life." Underneath a disco ball that hovered above the stage, she left behind her boy alias, Tony, and assumed her queenhood. She performed a medley of her favorite Beyoncé jams, including "If I Were a Boy" and "End of Time." "I was nervous as all hell," the Vixen says. "But the crowd was really there for it. Thankfully my drag mother, Savannah Westbrooke, was there to egg me on from the microphone, and she was very supportive. It just pumped me up." Walking around the pub takes her back in time. "It's very strange to be looking at the curtain, literally the birth canal that Vixen walked through on the first time she ever came out to the stage," she says. "It's very exciting to be here, and I feel just so blessed to look back at how far I've come." The Vixen's progress came in spite of Chicago's unyielding racial segregation, which makes it difficult for black queens to advance their careers while performing in their neighborhoods. In 2013, she says, folks who came to Chicago in search of queens for big opportunities like TV shows rarely looked beyond Boystown. The Vixen soon shifted her professional efforts from the south side to the north-side queer scene so she could be seen too.

Olivia Obineme

World-class accessorizing

"As far as the girls working the bars in Boystown, they're more likely to get on Drag Race," she explains. "Those bars are more mainstream. When you audition, they're more likely to say, 'Oh, I've heard of Roscoe's. I haven't heard of Jeffery Pub.'" Once in Boystown, the Vixen found a new set of challenges. As far as she could tell, bars and venues would book one token black drag queen per show and stop there. "No one would say it," she says, "but you would look at the posters and you'd never see more than one [black] queen per night." Junior, who used to party in Boystown in his younger years, agrees that the north-side neighborhood struggles with inclusivity. "We have a lot of black promoters in the city of Chicago, and the venues they have these events at is white owned, and you don't really see us behind the bars we support," he says. "Sometimes you go to these spaces and you can tell they're not happy about you being in there. They just there to collect their money."

Olivia Obineme

When you click your heels, these shoes don’t take you to Kansas.