Behind drag queen Courtney Act's sassy exterior was a young man struggling with his identity

Updated

Shane Jenek doesn't seem like a man who struggles with his identity.

Dressed in a pink T-shirt and matching pink shorts and looking a good decade younger than his 38 years, he saunters down Sydney's Oxford Street like he owns the place.

A British backpacker approaches and asks to pose with him for a selfie. It's a common experience since Jenek and his alter ego, drag queen Courtney Act, won Celebrity Big Brother in the UK two years ago.

"Courtney is huge now in the UK," says British comedian Matt Lucas, who contacted Jenek after watching the show and has since become a friend.

"Courtney just won us all over; I think the whole nation was smitten."

Given Courtney Act's ever-growing global profile, Jenek's visits to Australia are infrequent and invariably packed with engagements. Today he is filming with Australian Story at the Stonewall Hotel, the gay bar he first visited in 1999 as a nervous 18-year-old, fresh from Brisbane.

It was, he recalls with a grin, "the beginning of my big queer life".

Jenek took to the Oxford Street gay scene like a duck to water, discovering a passion for drag and stepping out as Courtney Act for the first time at the dawn of 2001.

Courtney's drag aesthetic was at odds with the post-Priscilla look that dominated drag at the time and she faced some resistance from the old guard.

But it didn't take long for Courtney to become a fixture on the scene, winning the drag industry's DIVA Rising Star Award in 2002.

But Courtney's confident, sassy exterior masked an identity crisis that would continue for well over a decade.

'What's wrong with Shane?'

Drag queens tend to operate on the fringes of society but Courtney is an exception.

"My style of drag is extremely accessible to a mainstream audience," Jenek tells Australian Story.

"It has always been very feminine, very sort of female illusion."

In fact, by conforming to stereotypical notions of feminine beauty, Courtney is in many ways more conventional than Shane, who had always been a very feminine boy.

Growing up in suburban Brisbane in the 1980s, Shane's appearance, and passion for performance, attracted some hostility from his peers.

"School, for the most part, I found to be quite stressful," he says.

"I found it to be quite hard to enjoy and fit in because of bullying or ostracism by, primarily, the boys."

"I wasn't being bullied for who I was attracted to," he explains. "I wasn't even aware that I was attracted to boys.

"I was just bullied for being different and liking different things."

Just a few years later, however, Courtney was attracting a very different kind of attention from the same kind of boys that had picked on him at school.

Australian Idol judge Ian Dickson, who championed Courtney when she appeared on the first season of the show in 2003, laughs as he recalls Courtney's effect on men.

"When we went on tour together, his dance card was full most nights," he says.

"And it wasn't with gay guys, it was with straight guys, who I'm sure had a very interesting internal monologue on their way to work the following morning."

For someone who had been bullied and rejected growing up, this acceptance must have been intoxicating.

"The idea of not passing as a boy or a man as Shane used to be one of the most threatening things in my identity," Jenek says. "So Courtney was very much a refuge in that I could find a place where I could express my femininity and it could be accepted."

Such was Courtney's popularity that Jenek would even find himself feeling jealous of his alter ego.

"When I was younger, people would say, 'Can you come to our party, but can you come as Courtney?' And I used to take that personally and I remember feeling like, what's wrong with Shane?"

But such jealousy only hinted at a more profound struggle.

Gender fluid: A place in the middle

While using Courtney as a socially acceptable way to express his femininity provided Jenek with some comfort it had forced him to compartmentalise his identity.

"Courtney was an extreme and Shane was an extreme and I had just never thought that there was a place in the middle, even though that's essentially where I'd lived for all of my life."

As he reached his thirties, Jenek found maintaining those two separate identities more and more stressful and at times he would wonder whether he should consider transitioning to a woman. "It was such a point of trauma and struggle in my identity," he says.

The turning point came in 2014, when he became friends with transgender activist Chaz Bono, who he met when he appeared on the US reality TV show RuPaul's Drag Race.

It was Bono who introduced Jenek to the term "gender fluid" — the idea that gender exists on a spectrum and you don't have to conform to one extreme or the other.

To realise that it was possible to marry the two extremes of his identity — that it was alright for Shane to be a feminine man — was a transformative moment for Jenek, allowing him to cast off a lifetime of shame and internalised homophobia.

"This idea of gender identity being binary, of male and female, that was the real issue," Jenek says.

"Once I was able to break free from that and just accept that whoever I was was correct and allowed and should be expressed, that was the thing that really set me free."

More than a soundbite on reality TV

Having come to terms with the opposing forces of his own identity, Jenek found himself less judgemental of others and more willing to engage with other points of view.

In 2016, he made a series of videos for Australian pop-culture site Junkee.com, starting with a visit to a Donald Trump rally dressed as Courtney.

"I didn't want to go and make fun of people or tell them that they were stupid, I just wanted to go and try and understand them a little bit," Jenek says.

"I think the interviews that Shane did for us gave him a taste of how he could use his profile to educate people on a wider scale," says Junkee publisher Tim Duggan.

That opportunity came in early 2018, when he was invited to take part in Celebrity Big Brother in the UK, as Courtney and as Shane.

Reality TV had been a constant in Jenek's career but Celebrity Big Brother provided a unique platform.

"Usually on reality television, you're edited down to a soundbite and there's not much opportunity for depth of character," Jenek explains. "But on Celebrity Big Brother there's so much airtime to fill that I was allowed to just talk."

"Shane was a brilliant communicator because he uses Courtney so effectively," Lucas observes. "You're so beguiled by the way Courtney looks but what she says is often quite challenging and provocative."

But Jenek didn't just talk; he also listened.

One of his fellow housemates was former Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe, who was vehemently opposed to many of the issues Jenek held dear.

The expectation was that she and Jenek would clash but while they agreed about little, Jenek surprised Widdecombe by hearing her out.

"The very first conversation we had, we finished and she was like, 'Thank you for that. Normally someone would have called me a homophobe or raised their voice or stormed out and you didn't, you just listened and we just talked'. And she was shocked by that gesture," he says.

"I'm sure it wasn't what the producers were expecting, but I think it was gold," says Ian Dickson, who watched his former protege proudly from Australia.

"I think it was even better than a faux fight or a bit of reality TV biff."

Viewers were clearly impressed by the show of civility, with Widdecombe and Jenek the final two contestants in the house after four weeks of publicly voted eliminations. When the final votes were counted it was Courtney Act who emerged the winner.

'I have a voice; I'm no longer the sideshow act'

Reality TV might seem an unlikely force for good in the world, but what Shane and Courtney were able to do over four weeks in the Big Brother house was present an alternative to the polarisation that increasingly defines public discourse.

"If you picture two people on either side of the room yelling at each other, not much gets communicated. And I feel that's where the world is at," Jenek says.

"If we walk towards the middle, we lower the tone and listen to what the other person is saying, that's the way we change.

"That's the way we evolve."

Winning Celebrity Big Brother made Shane and Courtney household names in the UK. Courtney was invited to appear on news and current affairs show to give her opinion not only on gender issues but also more general topics such as Brexit and the state of the NHS.

"More than being a winner, I came out of the house having a voice, and people being interested in that voice," Jenek says. "And it was so empowering and so exciting to no longer just be a sideshow act."

Having achieved fame in Britain and the US, Jenek turned his sights once more towards his homeland.

Last year, Courtney was runner up on Dancing with the Stars and last week Shane and Courtney finished filming a multi-episode storyline on the long-running soap opera Neighbours.

When Shane and Courtney's episodes begin to air next week, it will be another step in a long and steady march towards mainstream acceptance that began with Australian Idol in 2003.

You could say that Shane and Courtney are winning over middle Australia, one television show at a time.

"You can have all the Mardi Gras you want," says Jenek, "but if no straight people are coming it's only an internal memo that goes out. You need straight allies to accept queer people as well to take it to the mainstream."

Watch Australian Story's Caught in the Act on iview or Youtube.

Topics: human-interest, arts-and-entertainment, sydney-2000

First posted