Gigi Monroe on watching Juneau Drag grow up

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.

When Gigi Monroe started Juneau Drag in 2014, the city quickly embraced the art form — a performance of exaggerated gender, with flashy costumes and, often, choreography. Its roots are in spaces that the LGBTQ+ community carved out for self-expression throughout history. 

Monroe’s annual New Yearʼs Eve drag show will be the group’s 10th anniversary celebration — a time to reflect, not only on the past year, but the decade of performances before it.

It’s also a reflection of Monroe’s decade as Juneau’s drag mother. That’s an experienced drag performer who mentors new talent. She says watching performers evolve their drag and their performances has been one of the highlights of leading this community.

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Gigi Monroe: Hi. This is Gigi Monroe, and I am the Drag Mother of the Juneau Drag group. I moved here in 2013 and I had been a full-time drag performer for about 10 years before that. I knew that this was a really artistic community and a really progressive community, and it was probably a pretty open-minded scene for drag to start happening on a regular basis. 

So we really were born out of the Femme Fatale drag show that was a tradition here for every year to raise money for the Alaskan AIDS Assistance Association, and there were always local performers who participated in that fundraising event. 

And so in 2014, that was a really big event, and a lot of people came out, and a lot of people were interested, and so I offered to start mentoring folks and having workshops, teaching makeup classes, starting to make costumes for people. And so we started then, and it was just kind of one-by-one, as people were interested.

In our 10 years, we’ve had over 40 performers, all local Juneau performers, who have come and gone. People move away, or they have kids or other life situations, and it’s been a really wonderful and welcoming revolving door. 

My favorite part, above everything else, is working with the individual performers and watching them, those who have stuck with it for many years, and we even have a few performers that are still performing and started with us 10 years ago. 

And just to look back at those old pictures and videos and look at them today, and just see how much they’ve grown and really have become very talented drag performers in their own right. 

That’s been so rewarding and so fulfilling, and it really makes me feel like the drag mother that I claim to be when you see your kids just grow up and figure out their own characters and what they want to do with this art form and establish a community with it. 

There have been a few milestones that we’ve hit along the way. One of them was when we had our very first Pride drag show, Glitz, in 2015.

I’d been here about a year and a half, and I kept hearing from the community that people wanted a really big pride party and a show and something to do. And when, like 300 people packed into the Rockwell Ballroom in June of 2015 and were just literally jumping out of their skin. They were so excited just to be there.

And it was like 95 degrees in there with no circulation, of course, and all the performers were just like full of energy and burst out onto stage. It was awesome. We brought in a performer from RuPaul’s Drag Race that everybody went nuts over. And it was like, “Okay, we are really doing the right thing here.” And I think that pushed us into having monthly shows.