Kay Gabriel: Happy birthday, Bobby.
Charlene Incarnate: Thank you. Do you know Company?
KG: Oh, every word. Not to “Getting Married Today.”
CI: So you had the full depth of appreciation for the intention: to adapt that music to my life to express the same thing that the George Furth book does for that straight man, Bobby. Company is a survey and exploration of the beginning of middle age, the loneliness of single experience. Frankly it’s quite boring when it’s applied to marriage in the original book, but as a thesis for a tranny tell-all cabaret, it’s helpful.
KG: I’m curious about the choice to include stories of real strife, conflict and loss as the substance of the show.
CI: The thesis was Bobby ain’t got shit on me. It was an idea that I had when I met Raúl Esparza in 2023. Esparza played Bobby in the Company revival in 2006, when I saw it and decided to move to New York. It’s a watershed moment for me in my life. And when I met Raúl in 2023 I told him about that moment and he said, “You’re doing better than Bobby.” And I said, “I’m really not.” And I was like, what do I mean by that? And that’s when I had the idea for the show.
KG: Let’s talk about a dynamic you explore in the show: one where some amazing, talented, high-achieving trans woman becomes the favorite of a scene of mostly gay men who express their adoration in sometimes overwhelming ways and can even also sometimes be sexualizing of us, but are frequently insensitive about the actual differences in terms of how they go through the world and how we do.
CI: And the intimacy available to us, and the singularity of our position—that really is what ties us together. You know how many tgirls who take a while to come out get caught up in thinking that they’re too specific to qualify for sexual attention? And the real galaxy brain moment comes when you realize that the whole key to your transition and your gender expression is how people are picking it up. So you’re figuring what to put down so it gets picked up in the way you want. And when it doesn’t and when it incessantly doesn’t, what then, you know?
I wanted all of the stories to be based in New York or my life and directly adjacent to New York. Company is also a New York tale, contributing extremely for the time to the media history and narrative of New York. It’s the beginning of Friends, basically. That whole mystique and allure of the specific sort of social life that’s available to one here. I wanted it to have that vibe to it. That’s why I wasn’t talking about the trauma my mother inflicted on me. It was all like, what happened here? What got me to this place at 35 where I’m reflecting on my losses, relationships, intimacies? It’s not: all my friends are married. My friends are on drugs, or otherwise caught up in some weird, crazy spiral. And that’s what’s queer about it. That’s the “all my friends are married” of being gay.
KG: The struggle of the Bobby character that you play isn’t “I’m 35 and I risk living a superficial life compared to my friends.” But there’s an ample gulf that opens up between Bobby and the friends, which is expressed in terms of gender primarily and the comparative ease with which they move through a difficult world compared to how you do.
CI: Yeah. I mean, I didn’t want it to just be like an exposé of my pain. That’s why I removed myself from it with the name. I wanted to play Bobby and be like, this is a Bobby narrative.
KG: Everybody wants to have a charismatic, talented doll in their orbit. And it’s frustrating when they turn around and realize that this girl has needs of her own, ones that she’s going to articulate in the way that women do, which is maybe like a bitch. I see the version of this dynamic in a bunch of other girls and gays.
CI: I do too. I do also believe it’s a sacred bond. As do you. I think that what frustrates me is that it really does fall upon us to be the keeper of that bond in a way that’s not fair. That feels so unfair to me considering how much fun they get to have.
KG: When I saw Cuntpany I was really reminded of Bryn Kelly’s writing as well. Kelly typically turns herself into her own primary antagonist. Not just because she’s the one who’s consistently frustrating herself, but also because her character is a high-octane bitch in the most feminine way possible. Talk a little more about the choice to make yourself the antagonist of your own show.
CI: Elizabeth Koke said the same thing about Bryn’s writing and the show, so it’s not just you.
My belief that I am despicable is the primary intersection of pretty much all of the interactions in Cuntpany. It’s the ugliest thing that shows up in trans women’s relationships too, our insecurities and our disbelief that we can be loved, because of who we know ourselves to be. I think that I took responsibility for all of it. I am the bad guy here. Cunt-pany. Instances in which I’m being a cunt.
I think that’s the only real way to inspire empathy. I don’t see myself as blameless or anything. I’m a part of all my stories. The antagonist thing, it’s about me having conflict. And there’s like moments of relief, but they still are like meditations on frustration. But I didn’t make a conscious choice to be the antagonist. If I were to just bitch about the people in my life, it would not have been genuine, and would not have resonated with people, and resonating with people was the first priority. And Bobby in Company is doing that to himself the whole time. It’s true what they say about playing Bobby, you kind of have to be 35.
I was this close to cutting “Being Alive.” I was going to end with “Ladies Who Lunch” and say: fuck “Being Alive.” It’s like Barbra Streisand singing “Woman in Love.” It’s one of her biggest hits and she’s like, I hate it. I hate the words.
KG: I’m glad it’s there. Because in the Sondheim you see this man who has constructed a shield of irony around his entire life, and at the end the shield cracks and he breaks down and begs to be loved. It’s profound on its own. In the context of your show, the real feelings of heartbreak and isolation and loss that you evoke, it hits even harder.
And then you bring back the funny at the end with the “Getting Married Today” lip sync. You love a patter song.
CI: A patter song is rapping. It’s rap. And I love rap. I love patter. It’s the only real way to turn lip syncing into a real talent. Into something that’s actually impressive.
With drag, the performance has to be so much greater than the sum of the parts. Because when you boil it down to what’s happening, it’s a faggot moving his lips to someone else’s music. It’s a bodily interpretation of music, that’s a little bit more of an eloquent and complimentary way to say that. That’s how we bring it to life. And if there’s not enough going on in the words themselves, which there seldom is, you need to be bringing femme cunt. I don’t know how else to say that. You need to be feminine, you need to be dancing, you need to be moving well, you need to be doing hair. And if the words are enough, they’re enough. That’s why I love patter.
My most known patter performance is “Trouble” [from The Music Man]. It was a covid performance. So it was on video. I was noticing how drag queens who were doing online shows were doing these dance tracks in their bedroom. You know, doing stunts and kicks. I’m like, no, that’s not what a ring light makes exciting. Or just sitting there and lip syncing. If all we have is the words, then you need something where the words are enough. So for “Trouble,” I’m sitting in an armchair and I don’t get up. I’m just acting the words. The bust is the tableau then. You’re like tightening the spotlight. That’s the point when lip syncing becomes enough, that’s the point at which it actually is a talent.
KG: There’s all these different elements that make a Charlene performance. There’s body, all of the body, there’s the fan, there’s your hair, there’s the repertoire. I’m curious how it all comes together.
CI: Those are the elements, honey. The repertoire is the boom clap of it all. It’s basically the talent of DJing. It’s about what’s going to electrify the room at this moment. You gotta know when the theater is gonna pop and it’s not at the club. It’s the most important thing. That’s the lip syncing of DJing. It’s vibe and energy. That’s what makes the difference between a good DJ and a bad DJ. It’s not the tracks themselves. It’s the selection and timing. Reading the room, understanding the context and feeling energy. It’s magic. It’s what people call magic. It actually is vibrational. It sounds like magic to me.
KG: When you get 300 people to all do the same thing at the same time, that’s magic.
CI: Drag is a burst of that. It’s not a long-form version of it. You have one shot.
When I began to perform with Carry Nation [in their monthly party at Good Room], we just put the show in the set so that the energy is not disrupted.
The energetic component of drag, the sorcery of it, that’s what makes New York set the standard. Our community specifically. And it comes from this ideology that was introduced to me when we started Casa Diva. The show became decontextualized from the bar and the drag stage and the LEDs. I was like, oh, we are casting spells.
KG: I was gonna ask specifically about Casa Diva.
CI: We are a thirty-second walk from Casa Diva right now [at Nostrand and Atlantic].
KG: I feel like I was born on that roof.
CI: I’m so flattered to hear you say that. Your presence at Casa Diva was proof that we were doing it. With the electrical tape over your tits.
KG: Brand new tits. Really fresh. In the Wig shot of me, they’re still stiff.
I think of Casa Diva as a legendary, no longer existing underground nightlife space. Can you talk about how it came together and its legacy?
CI: It was a physical space that was sort of a spiritual extension at first of Chez Deep, which was a prior iteration of Casa Diva with a different cast.
I moved in because Alexis [Blair Penney] cruised me to. She basically said: you need to be here and we need to do drag here. I had already begun to feel the call of dissatisfaction with the drag bar circuit. I wanted more and I wanted community and I wanted family. I was also being introduced to Faeries and I was realizing how important spaces are for communal living. At first when I moved in, it was Alexis and Sam [Banks] and I and a mystery fourth man who I barely remember. He left a few months after I got there and that’s when I moved Oddly in. Colin [Self] lived next door, next to Gaines [Parker] and Bryn.
We threw the first Casa Diva on New Year’s Eve 2016. Which was a few months after I moved in, in the fall of 2015.
Alexis was the drag energetic center. She was the ringmaster of Casa Diva until she moved out, which is maybe around the time that you started coming, when me and Sam took over officially. The way I say it is I had my own DIY space in Brooklyn in my twenties.
We had a sound system, we had DJ friends, it was all family all the time. Sissy Elliot, Anthony DiCapua. Al B/ Lemon Verbena used to DJ for us too. I was also entering the trans community at this time. With the patio open and weather good enough for the patio, we had 300 people at peak. Isn’t that insane? We don’t have that anymore. At the time, DIY was really concentrated in this neighborhood. Kimberly was across the street from Casa Diva.
What happened [to force us to close] is we got fatigued by the uptick in police presence. We had faggots on the sidewalk, it was an obvious party. Remember we had that big street-facing window. So you look up from the street and it looks like hooligans. It’s fully like a silhouette of a huge party, like Home Alone. Waving gay hands and someone spinning on the pole.
KG: Can you tell me about the history of Brooklyn drag? When we got dinner in the fall, you told me you wanted to document it.
CI: Really what I want to do is an oral history. Because time is really ticking and I really wanted the story to be told by everyone and to facilitate it. I think I’m the girl to do it.
What someone understands when they say Brooklyn drag—it was dormant if not dead not long before Bushwig. The popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race created the need and Brooklyn didn’t have anything going on. It was also the next step of gentrification for Williamsburg in North Brooklyn, the kind of space that would allow drag to happen in the first place. You need this fever pitch of space where there’s a balance—it’s like a particular point in gentrification that allows for it, in a city where space is limited like New York. And there was a need for Brooklyn to have a scene.
Also when we say Brooklyn drag, the narrative that we’re talking about, that’s a scene that’s informed by the current-day economy and definition of drag. So obviously there’s ballroom culture here before that counts as drag. There’s a million different cultures that all have their own gay cross-dressing here. When we say Brooklyn drag, we are talking about the artistically slanted scene that arose in contrast to Manhattan, in 2012, roughly. Which was three years after the beginning of Drag Race, as the show was gaining popularity within queerness. It had not made the VH1 jump yet, so it was still a gay thing. It was still on Monday night, so Monday night was a big going out night. Macy’s show Bath Salts was on Monday night. Metro was hugely popular among the fae-leaning faggot slut crowd. Everyone gay was out on Monday night. There was just a primordial soup moment that produced a lucky combination of space and need.
The Big Bang, as I call it, that Bushwig is a part of, and Merrie Cherrie is a part of, happened in 2012. Merrie implemented Metropolitan and TNT and Sugar Land as drag spaces. She cultivated new talent, and Horrorchatta and Babes started Bushwig. Untitled Queen was the first winner of Dragnet. So by the time I came around in 2013, it was implemented. And there were no dolls yet.
Before the Big Bang—well, before Mountain Olympus, there are the queens who I call the Titans. That’s Epiphany Get Paid, Misty and Mocha, and Thorgy Thor. They were the girls who were working in Brooklyn before it was a thing.
Merrie Cherrie is retiring after Labor Day this year. So many of the important people from the beginning are gone now and they’ll be tough to gather together. And I really want it to be an oral history that’s not just a book written by me. But also it’s a collective narrative.
KG: So what’s changed since then?
CI: At the time, there was an intentional artistic framing of Brooklyn drag in terms of its contrast to Manhattan, which was normie and mainstream. So Brooklyn was the beginning of your de facto alt drag. And when I say alt, I also mean alternative to Drag Race. It became very distinctive very quickly. We also had media representation. Huffington Post was very big at the time. We had a writer covering us at all times, James Nichols. So that was responsible for framing the narrative too. We were an artistic community, a community of artists who happened to be drag queens.
That has changed considerably, as has the expectation of how good you look. You’re expected to look good now in Brooklyn. I don’t mind that. It was too messy for too long. And there was not a level of caliber to it. There’s a level of caliber to the drag. There aren’t enough gigs to go around. So it does self-select into extremely talented people. And the pool of people who wanna do it is much bigger.
Brooklyn drag used to be people who fell into it for whatever reason. And now it’s people who come in hot with intention. And the intention is usually the money that comes from being on Drag Race. Whereas back in the day we had to have a different intention, because it was who we were. We were contra Drag Race. And I think that led a lot of us to do other shit eventually.
We also make more money now. It was really the generation that came after me that implemented the culture of tipping at the rate that we do it now, and the expectation that we are paid fairly. Previously it was familiar faces and smaller crowds and so less tips. Casa Diva was definitely not about tips.
I’ve got two modes of performance now. And one is spiritual, and I’m not pulling money. Then there’s one where I’m pulling money. And it has two subdivisions. One is I’m pulling money for just myself and I’m not splitting. And the other is an act of courtesy to the people I’m pooling with if I’m pooling.
KG: I love that Faggots Are Women got to be on the spiritual side. [FAW is a party I throw, where Charlene performed in March.]
When I talked to Ty Mitchell about booking you for FAW he said of course it would have to be Charlene, of course you would perform the first drag act at FAW and set the standard for what drag could do for the party. Originally people gave me a little pushback on it, cause they were like, is it gonna disrupt the energy? And then Ty said you used to perform at raves in 2016, 2017. What parties was he talking about?
CI: Culture Whore and Psychic. The Culture Whore was a duo, Rose Dommu and Paul Leopold. They would throw raves—there was a Christmas rave called Dick the Balls. Psychic was by our friend David who also threw Hot Fruit, Monday nights at Metropolitan. Psychic was kind of like fae-leaning fairy space in New York. So I would perform at those two. The vibe was always the grooviest, most family nights, the first ravey experiences. That’s where I heard Analog Soul for the first time.
Wait, there was a conversation before FAW about whether drag would interrupt the vibe?
KG: Well, the post-pandemic three-day carry crowd is not used to thinking about drag as part of a musical event. And it’s true that there are three miles and many social universes between Basement and C’mon Everybody. So before we did it I think that people were struggling to put the ideas together, even though it’s obvious to me that drag needs to be part of the vibe. Because of the things that you were saying before about drag being magic, drag having the ability to collect and concentrate energy and make people punch past their own inhibitions to just be fully present. And that was obvious to me from Carry Nation and Honcho Campout and I knew we needed it for FAW as well.
CI: That’s an ancient role that we play. That quality to transform the space instantaneously, to direct energy into like a prism-like cone formation towards the heavens. The ability to inspire others in a moment. The joy of abandon, the unbridled joy of physical expression. Those are feminine things. And also they have been categorically, culturally performed by trans women. Trans women specifically have that quality that’s trickstery at worst and diva at best—it’s meant to be an energetic tit for everyone to suck on. That’s what you’re offering up yourself as, as a drag queen. You’re giving everybody a little milk.
KG: That relates to the feeling of the endless creativity of it. It could just go on forever. Which is what the breast does. It’s creativity that goes on forever. And that’s also why it’s gratifying to do and also why it’s exhausting to do.
CI: My biggest psychedelic break was surrounding that—my “worst trip ever.” I am shackled to this performance of self. And I have to be Charlene everywhere I go. And if I elect out, opt out of it, then I am no one, and I am not at home. If I am, then I have to be Charlene. Congratulations, this is what you wanted.
KG: Bringing it full circle, I think that comes out a lot in Cuntpany as well.
CI: Yeah, like I’m the architect of my own isolation. And I think that’s kind of something that trans people have in common. It’s a dark way to see it, but it’s important to reclaim the element of choice in it too, and agency. Which is what it takes to be trans, a choice, an agency towards action.