Midtown Magic with Dream Baby Press

March 08, 2024

It’s the night before my English midterm for “Writing New York” — I haven’t studied because I’m too busy hanging out with writers in New York. We’re in Tannen’s Magic Shop with drawers suggestively labeled “Ropes. Blindfolds. Sticky Stuff.” “When we first started Dream Baby Press,” starts Matt Starr, “We had three places we wanted to do readings: Burger King, a porn shop, and a magic shop. We're completing the trifecta.” He speaks with a certain grandeur that fits the century-old magic shop. Dream Baby co-founder Zack Roif notes, “There’s something magical (no pun intended) about seeing something happen in a place that wasn’t designed to function in that way.”

It’s real “New York Normal” in here — magicians, siblings of child actors, and artists who “pantomime American tragedy.” What does it mean to hold an air of prestige within a counterpublic? The pieces were legible yet insular, so while I felt alone in my unfamiliarity with the readers themselves, the casual oversharing rapid-fire trauma-dumping that characterizes alt-lit makes me see the readers, and makes me see myself in the pieces. Everyone is fashionably referential and painfully self-aware — sardonic but endeared by the naivety around them in a very “downtown goes midtown” way.

By Izzy Capulong
Photos Taryn Segal

We open with magic from Noah Levine, who says that tonight, we are all becoming part of “magic’s inner circle.” Meanwhile, I’ve never solved a Rubik’s Cube. He starts, saying, “You can probably tell I was a kid who had a magic kit growing up.” We can. “Did anyone else have a magic kit?” Some people shyly raise their hands. Fire offhandedly comes out of his fingers. Noah makes marbles appear in cups and other fun magical things. After the reading, Vilda and I admit to each other that we were looking for any sleights of hand. We couldn’t find any.

Ruby McCollister opens ranting about how the atomic bomb made men unable to have sex, saying, “The more violence released into the world, the more hysterical men’s penises get, softening like hysterical women in couches.” Bombs are phallic and most militarism is a hegemonically masculine display of power — there has to be some correlation. She then goes on a frenzied analysis of Al Pacino’s natal chart. His Mars in Gemini means he’s a sub. “Most actors are submissives,” she says. “I’d admit to my own submissive tendencies, but instead my aunt died.” We take a break from Al Pacino sex talk to analyze her late Aunt Nancy’s natal chart. Two of Aunt Nancy’s Big Three are Libra. The room groans in solidarity.

Ruby talks about her family affairs and I feel like I shouldn’t be allowed to know anything she reads. Aunt Nancy had an affair that resulted in something vaguely incestuous (not by blood, she just had kids with her brother-in-law). Her grandfather was a descendant of Mormon polygamists and “like a child who’s endlessly at his own cowboy-themed birthday party.” Her father was sued by the IRS for never paying taxes. She half-cynically half-lovingly describes her parents as “cultural dilettantes,” (the same attitude can be transferred to the downtown literary scene), but Nancy gets the debt down from $100,000 to $20,000 before going to work for the IRS. According to Ruby, “Nancy lived normal but in a perverse way.” Don’t we all.

Alex Auder was born in the Chelsea Hotel to superstar Viva. WAP plays as Alex walks up and we can’t stop it. From her memoir, Don’t Call Me Home, she turns to a chapter named “G spot” and reads nostalgically about puberty — she and her friends used to fight over who has more pubes and who has “cherry pits or peach pits for tits.” Bitingly funny, Alex speaks matter-of-factly yet leaves us howling. It takes a certain level of grace and maturity to be able to tell strangers about your most awkward “secret lusts.” We joke that there are no original experiences in girlhood. But once in her youth, Alex and a friend had pretended to be wives on the Western Frontier sleeping with their husbands, straddling Grandma’s horsehair pillows next to each other. A young Alex had called for a stop, shyly asking, “Would we really… do it next to each other on the wagon?” The friend takes a beat before solemnly responding, “We would do whatever it took to survive.” Perhaps there are a few original experiences.

There’s a whole cast of characters — Eastern European neighbors, would-be rockstars, and Alex’s hot math teacher, who she fantasized about mounting in his swivel chair. There was a 16-year-old Esther dating a 20-something-year-old Basquiat. There was a timely allure to age gaps, and Alex says “their coolness blurred their ages.” I’m a 20-something, people say I’m pretty cool, and I’m not dating any 16-year-olds. Vincent Gallo is a recurring character. Reuniting with a high-school aged Alex, he told her, “You’ve grown up so much.” There was a decade between them, so we groan at that. When Alex lost the role in Dangerous Liaisons to Uma Thurman, Vincent had her take off her top “to compare their bodies.” We all groan some more. Her next few misadventures involve trying to sleep with him. Alex believed she had to “pay a penance to use a penis.” She pretended be wowed by his rare guitar collection and freakishly pristine closet. The two sleep together after Viva, following a plastic surgery-related mental breakdown, tells Alex, “Go out tonight,” and in the same breath adds, “Also I might commit suicide.”

Peyton Dix picks “I’m Coming Out” as her walkout song. She starts with a booming, “Heterosexuality!” Someone guffaws. “Exactly,” she says in response. She talks about how gay she is: “Gay like Meg from Hercules” (received with multiple hums of recognition), gay like the monologue from Hereditary (which she and I recite together). She writes about her first male relationship after many years of lesbianism. “Lesbians need a vacation. Dykes need a day off. It’s a lot to be constantly checking in.” She emphasizes these last two words like she’s dated a girl who weaponized therapy speak. “Being a woman who loves women is the hardest thing you can do. It’s actually straight women who need allies, not lesbians.” The room is quiet, but I get it. With a thinly veiled brag about how she once had sex for six hours, she explains how, after multiple heavy relationships, she needed something “easy and simple. And what’s more simple than a man?”

“But,” she starts, leaning on the magic counter, “the thing about good dick — you get crazy.” Another hum of solidarity from the audience. “I’ve seen some of the best minds of my generation go insane over some dude named [redacted].” Here, I audibly screech. Peyton had just named an ex of mine. I’m floored. At this moment, Matt takes a particularly unflattering picture of me. Aside from getting her heart broken by a man, Peyton speaks of her worries: “What does this mean for my identity? Will I lose my pride gigs?” The piece ends when she hears back from her ex in an apology email, regretting how he was “hearing, not listening.” “This man sounds like a lesbian,” she says. We laugh. “I can taste what it feels like to be loved by him.” We stop laughing. Peyton ends with a consideration that she might be bi — “Bi as in Obama. Bi as in that one interracial Bedstuy couple. Bi as in ‘I went to film school.’ Bi as in, ‘It was Emerson College.’”

The Rubin walks out blindfolded. Feeling his way around the counter, he says, “Someone will ask me, ‘Isn’t it easier to do magic without a blindfold?’ to which I’ll say, ‘Who’s talking?’” I make a noise of approval. He (attempts to) point at me, saying, “This guy gets it!” Perfect situational irony. The Rubin materializes a lit joint. Nice. A few tricks later, he turns a paper crane into another lit joint. I think he just wanted to smoke inside, but what’s more magical than that? He throws a bunch of cards into the air and makes a funny performance of supposedly grabbing the wrong card midair, to which he yells, “BEHOLD,” does an impressively high kick, and conjures the correct card. He’s like if Jack Black were a magician.

Mackenzie Thomas is noted to have gotten an 11 on her ACT Superscore. Cheers all around. She shares short diary entries that document everything — from her disgust at Bobby Flay’s face to the time Justin Bieber peed in a janitor’s bucket while saying “Fuck Bill Clinton.” The piece turns into a letter to an (ex?) lover, as she reads, “You texted me and then I got pushed into the intersection while on a Bird scooter. A woman in a t-shirt that said ‘Pugs Not Drugs’ carried me to the pavement.” We learn more about Mackenzie than we ever planned, as she tells us, “The first time I masturbated was to a College Humor skit on workplace dynamics. My first boyfriend never showed me his ballsack because he was afraid I wouldn’t like it. Whenever I sucked his dick, he’d tuck his balls in his underwear.” Not once since she’s started reading have we stopped laughing.

It’s less poetry and more documentation of growing up. Taking us back to elementary school, Mackenzie tells us of a boy who pretended to like her just so he could organize her backpack — “a radical act of love.” I wonder what bell hooks would say. Now, she writes of passing young girls and wondering “if they can tell that I was once young.” People laugh some more. I’m not sure if I can. She finishes realizing her own youth and dependence — from the homeless woman who gave her twenty dollars because she was afraid Mackenzie wasn’t eating enough, to the time she got her eyes dilated and went to the supermarket. “What awoke within me was a primal desire to be illiterate.” She wasn’t sure what was better — getting to ask everyone what things were, or her newfound access to “a helplessness that felt justified.”

Leah Victoria Hennessey reads what’s been dubbed “homoerotic fanfic.” The Guardian called it “quite literally the end of civilization,” so I have high hopes. Leah shouts out Emily Allan — each piece is a poem Leah had written to Emily during the pandemic. Why? “Because we’re obsessed with each other,” as Emily says. During the pandemic, Leah would only leave her house to mail a poem to Emily. They came to dub themselves as the reincarnations of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. It was as if they were separated by war (one of them was living in LES, the other on the UWS). It's literally a labor of love, as Emily had edited and made a zine out of every poem Leah had sent her. I want a love like that.

Each piece is short and cute. “What’s poetry?” Leah starts. “Correspondences between poets and the moon. Some genius gets it in his head to talk to the sun.” It’s love letters mixed with cultural commentary and fragmented musings, as Leah reads, “One more tenant of dogma: I love you.” “Being a romantic means cultivating a subordinate relationship to the muse.” The first few pieces are a high-up and airy, but as she continues, she reads quicker — less like someone reading poetry and more like someone realizing something: “What if this is really all we got? That haircut and someone else’s porn, masturbating to my rage for Brett Anderson.” With longing looks shot to Emily and an enveloping toothy smile, Leah drops her zine. If she’s blushing, I can’t tell. “This really is for Emily and Byron,” she adds tenderly. It feels like we’re intruding. “No one in yoga knows what I know,” she says, cheekily. And right before she finishes, she makes direct eye contact with me and says “Don’t tell anyone.”

Ena Da dances out saying, “Under every Elon Musk tweet is a gathering of idiots.” Instantly, I think of how I was blocked by Elon Musk on Instagram for “cyberbullying.” Ena says that we are no longer readers at a reading, but a council of wizards at a magical gathering. We play a game in which Ena has had “mortals from Instagram” submit their curses for consideration, and we — the wizard council — can either choose to lift the curse or let the curse remain. Among the mortals is not, however, Andrew Tate. “No amount of magic can help Andrew Tate,” says Ena. The first curse: “Mid pussy.” “In defense of the curse!” Ena shouts theatrically, “The stars must gleam against the night sky to shine, good pussy must gleam against mid pussy to shine.” That was poetic. Unanimously, we choose to not lift the curse.

One curse is perpetual lateness. Ena says, “We need people to be late and make us feel better about ourselves.” Unanimously, we agree the curse stays. “SUFFER!” yells Ena. Another curse comes from someone “who never has a normal amount of pens in their pocket — either five pens or none at all.” “In defense of this curse,” Ena says, “there is a penis joke in here, should they find it.” The curse stays. The next few curses include too-small earholes, broccoli-induced hiccups, and owners with cats who eat their earwax. Apparently, this last one is pretty common — four people in the room say their cat does the same thing. The last curse comes from someone who sneezes like a dad. In defense of this curse, Ena says it’s “healing for those with daddy issues.” When asked if we would lift this curse, the council yells out a resounding, “NO!”

Ivy Wolk reads a devastating piece about a girl she had feelings for — whether or not they were positive feelings is lost unto me (and Ivy herself, I think). Intimate yet relatable, it’s a piece about that weird intersection of love and hate. “I’m friends with everyone she’s a fan of,” she starts, “But the association doesn’t help if you have a bad personality.” How New York. “She tells me all my friends are just caricatures performing references they know, but then she quotes a book to me and I don’t tell her that she’s doing it too.” Clout will not save you. Your crushes are just as performative as the people around you. And your ex-friend seeing you on Instagram will not make them forgive you. These are all hard-learned lessons.

Ivy despairs rapidly. “She unfollowed me on Twitter because she ‘only wanted to hear about herself in the long-form,'” says Ivy. “But she wouldn’t like anything I had to write.” It’s a conundrum well-known downtown, the urge to self-mythologize and the neurotic curating that follows. Ivy’s piece is about wreckage — lost friends and purged desires. When you are forced to finish loving someone, what do you do with whatever you have left for them? “If she died, no one would tell me,” says Ivy. What do you do with that? Ivy doesn’t seem to know any more than I do. “I say I love her twice a day and I say it out loud. I think I love her because she hates me and we don’t talk anymore.” It’s sickening how much I understand her. “She said she wants to show up on my doorstep addicted to heroin so I can take care of her. I want the same thing. I want to hold her scabby arms and give her clean needles.” Oh my god. “I’m sure she feels normal right now.” Double oh my god.

Ronald Wohlman is described as “overly medicated, not seeing a shrink.” More cheers. He writes playfully, saying “I can’t find one person on the Upper West Side who will share their Ozempic with me, so I have to lose weight with an old-fashioned diet…I was eating three meals a day of nothing.” We laugh, silently wondering if someone needs to check on Ronald. Reading off massive playing cards, he writes of buying a chicken on the way to the gym, of the push and pull between temptation and the things we do to resist them. He eats the chicken on a bench on an island on Broadway. “If you drove past,” he starts, “You’d think, ‘How does New York City turn their middle-aged men into that guy?’” And yet, he licks each finger twice.

Ronald writes about going to the gym after, having shoved the leftovers in his gym bag. But no great hero story is complete without the ultimate confrontation — Ronald left his gym membership card at the bottom of the chicken bag, and the last thing he wants to do is broadcast to the whole gym that he has an entire chicken in his bag. Nevertheless, he persists, and with as much pride as he can muster, reveals the chicken to reach his card. The line of elderly Jews behind him let out a collective gasp — the chicken was not kosher. From his imagined thoughts of the people around him, to his third-person viewing of himself eating chicken on the island on Broadway, Ronald seems to be stuck in the cycle of shame and self-surveillance that we see writers so often engage in. I wonder if they know I'm going to be detailing tonight on my Substack.

Culture

Mowalola x Miss Sixty Launch with H. Lorenzo

I swing my legs over the ropes that guard the VIP entrance. Always over (I’m 5’10), never under. I’m late to the H. Lorenzo x Mowalola event, and the line is wrapped around the block. I don’t want to be an asshole, but I hate waiting in lines; it just ruins everything.

“Hey, my friend is DJing right now. My name should be down,” I say.

The youngish security guard looks me up and down. I have made an adventurous choice for this type of crowd. Neon pink hoodie, bright orange vest, my Raimundo jeans, and Jeremy Scott animal print sneakers. I let him take me in and look over his shoulder. Hmmm… I will be swathed in darkness when he lets me in. Dark night, dark clothes, dark makeup, furs, hoods, leather accessories, and sunglasses. I don’t recognize anyone, but it’s hard to tell who anyone is because I can’t see after 8 pm without my glasses. Night blindness. I can still catch a vibe though.

“She’s in the bathroom,” Mr. Guard says, interrupting my squinting.

“Who?,” I ask.

“The woman in charge of the list.”

That’s a drag. I want to dance. Lately, I am going out in the name of music.

“So…can I go in?” I ask.

“Just wait for her to get back.”

That sounded fine. I wait. The outdoor smoking area is packed. I imagine the inside to be a mirror of this, hopefully with people dancing instead of blowing smoke in each other’s eyes.

“You got instagram?” The guard asks me after about ten minutes of flirting.

“Can I go in?” I said.

He laughs. He lets me in the event without a wristband.

Inside, I understand why the other guard was gone for so long. I made a mental note to not drink too much liquid, the bathroom line is almost as long as the line outside. The party is popping, far from a flop.

I push through the crowd solo, following the speakers to the DJ booth. The immersive visuals provided me with enough light to make out Mowalola in a gold bikini and her low rise denim. My pulse races like the horse printed on the front of her coochie. That’s the point of the collection, obviously.

My hips swing around before I head towards the open bar. I smile to myself, noting that it’s a mezcal forward menu. I see a drink that disgusts me so I order it without hesitation. It’s a mezcal coffee concoction. My heart ’s ran through already, why not go all in? I head back to dance when I hear Shigecki’s set start. I’m jumping around, sweating, and when I pause for a beat I let out a yelp. There are strippers working poles opposite and behind the DJ booth. Good. Events should be sexy.

I end the night smoking my friend’s Korean strawberry cigarettes taking in the air of cool- when a man comes up to me wild-eyed exclaiming that we look just like one another. I look at him- no, not at all. I turn slowly, remembering what I should be doing: listening to DJ G2G’s set. Back inside, she is playing reggaeton type beats with lasers beaming out of her headphones (I want these). A rave in it of herself.

Too bad all the events end at 2 am in LA.

Culture

Vans Pipe Masters 2024

On the first night, Steve Van Doren and the Vans team hosted the heat draw for the competitors at a casual backyard barbecue. The son of Vans’ co-founder Paul Van Doren, Steve has worked in the family business for decades, and is now known as the Ambassador of Fun. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a cowboy hat made out of old shoes, he was definitely dressed for the part. The surfers, along with family and friends gathered in a relaxed setting as 40 men’s and 20 women’s names were drawn from a shoebox. The competition would run in 3 rounds, the top 4 men and 4 women with the highest scores moving onto the finals. When asked about their strategies, most gave answers along the lines of “get waves.” Refreshingly simple.

After waiting a few days for favorable conditions, the first day of competition kicked off with Women’s Round 1. It was finally time to see Pipeline in action. Banzai Pipeline is known as one of the most dangerous places to surf due to the powerful waves breaking over shallow and sharp reefs. With the potential to crash into the rocky edges or have leashes caught in caves, it takes a ton of skill–-and even more courage–to surf here. No stranger to these risks, the first heat included favorites Caity Simmers and “Queen of Pipeline” Moana Jones Wong, who showed off exactly why they’d been successful here in the past. Midway through the heats, Mother Nature decided to throw in another element as a light drizzle turned into a proper downpour. Rain or shine, the athletes went out unfazed, focused on getting their first points on the board.

After another short day’s break, the competition continued with the women’s second round and the men’s first. The beach was filled with spectators, locals and tourists alike, as the competition was free for all to attend. While fans rooted equally for the women and men, the most popular were the local Hawaiian athletes, which made up about half the competition. The women started off the day again, hyping up the crowd with incredible rides. One ride by Bettylou Sakura Johnson earned the first Bag of Cash of the day– a cash prize (of undisclosed amount) awarded in a brown paper bag to any surfer that pulls off a wow moment, excites the crowd, and pulls off something spectacular regardless of what the conditions might look like.

Winds picked up as the men’s competition began and two strategies quickly emerged: an aggressive approach, targeting any decent waves to build small scores; and a patient approach, waiting for the perfect wave to chase a high single score. Even the waves that were unrideable were a spectacle in itself. The sheer size, illustrated by the length of surfboards riding up and over, and the following crash of white water spray was hypnotizing. Then imagining having to experience it out on the water, duck diving under or being lifted over, brought a renewed respect for the surfers.

After watching these early rounds, it was time for office to head back to the cold. With the competition officially spanning from December 8-20, it seemed the forecast was gearing up for some massive waves— and it didn’t disappoint. Following from afar through Vans’ Instagram and live updates, we saw the full extent of what it means to surf at Pipeline. After a series of electrifying and daring surfs, the 2024 winners were crowned: Erin Brooks and Nathan Florence.

The thrill of watching top athletes compete at the highest level of their sport, even remotely, never fails to inspire. Few sports surrender so completely to the forces of nature as surfing does. And at its core, surfing is all about having a deep respect for the ocean—its unpredictable whims, its immense power, and its ever-changing moods.

Culture

The Cost of Queendom

December 17, 2024

One summer afternoon in New York, a few days after their New York premiere of the acclaimed documentary Queendom, office met up with documentary filmmaker Agniia Galdanova and producer Igor Myakotin at a tattoo parlor on the west side of Manhattan. While Agniia received a tattoo of the portmanteau “DOCU CUNT” across her fists, she — unfazed by the needle on her knuckles — answered our questions alongside Igor about the making of the stirring story that has traveled around the world.

One of the opening scenes of Queendom depicts a ritual many of us are all too familiar with in the 21st century. Jenna Marvin, the documentary film’s central subject, takes her friend along with her to take photos for Instagram. When she finds a suitable backdrop, she poses, poses, poses, and then reviews the photos. Dissatisfied, she gives her notes, and then returns to pose, pose, pose again.

By Brook Aster
Photos by Liv Solomon

The ritual may be familiar, but nothing else about the scene — from its setting to its stakes — is ordinary. The backdrop behind Jenna is a sweeping expanse of ice and snow in a small Russian port town called Magadan. Jenna is dressed in drag, but not drag of the Rupaul’s Drag Race variety; her drag has been referred to as “creature drag.” Her signature white face paint, platform heels and surrealist costumes, with their exaggerated sculptural proportions and use of duct tape and repurposed items, catches the ire of her neighbors and the love of online admirers alike. Jenna eventually accrued a following on social media for her public and technically illegal drag performances, which often involved little more than her walking or being in public spaces but nevertheless were often met with abuse and threats of imprisonment.

But when Agniia first encountered Jenna, she hadn’t yet reached the level of virality that would eventually come in the years to follow. The filmmaker was researching different drag performers in Russia for her sophomore project, which she thought would be a docuseries, when she heard from a friend about a young drag queen from Magadan. “I was like, this is impossible. I have to meet this person,” Agniia remembers. “And I could not actually go meet her because I was in Moscow and she was in Saint Petersburg, so I sent a friend of mine with whom I’d been studying with in film school, and she went and filmed the sample.” The simple video, showing Jenna and her friend getting dressed up for a party, struck something in Agniia. The drag was an earlier, more prototypical version of the style Jenna is now known for; less duct tape and ornamentation, but still that signature striking makeup. “Something sparked. I knew I just had to stick to this feeling,” Agniia says. She decided to turn the docuseries into a documentary solely focused on Jenna.

Around that time, the entire world came to a grinding halt: the onset of COVID-19 pandemic had just led to lockdowns around the globe. With only a couple thousand followers on social media at that point in time, Jenna had tried to branch out and connect with other drag artists in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but faced rejection; her drag was extremely unconventional, and not even other drag artists quite understood it. “I think we found each other at the right moment, because nobody knew what to do, how to cope with all this,” Agniia says. “Jenna was saying that she was lost, and she also didn't know how to develop her art next.”

Unlike some of the other artists Agniia had initially researched, Jenna didn’t need much convincing to allow the camera into her life. “[Especially] after COVID came, there wasn't really [any] drag in my life,” Jenna recounts when I speak to her later over Zoom. “I realized that what drag is for me is not just a costume, a dress, something that you leave, that you take off and then in the dead of the night you put back on. Later, I understood that this is who I am, that I am art and I am drag, and that this is way bigger and more important than just clothing or costume.”

[LEFT TO RIGHT: Agniia Galdanova, Jenna Marvin, Igor Myakotin]

When it came time to move into production stages, Agniia sent a clip to Igor, who had been referred to her by a past colleague. When Igor saw the footage, he was similarly struck by Jenna — and even more struck to find out she shared his small hometown of Magadan. “It was just so fateful to know that I also come from this town, and I've never seen it through this cinematic lens, through the vision that Agniia has,” he says. “I was mesmerized by the footage, mesmerized by Jenna. I thought to myself, I have to do everything I can [for us] to work together, whatever the collaboration is gonna be.”

The two followed Jenna for over three years; Agniia first relocated to St. Petersburg, where Jenna had taken up residence after leaving her grandparents’ home in Magadan, and later Jenna moved in with Agniia in her home in Moscow. All the while, Igor and his team worked remotely from the United States to meet Agniia’s production needs. Inevitably, with all their time spent together, Agniia and Jenna became close.

“There is an unspoken rule in documentary filmmaking that you have to keep this line, and you can’t overcome certain boundaries,” Agniia explains. “In my first film, it was not an easy subject [to do this with] as well. I was following a family for seven months, and [we became] close, but I always was trying to keep my distance, and was constantly thinking about it. How much should I say? How much should I give?” But as she got to know Jenna, it became clear that this time, that distance wouldn’t be possible. “With Jenna almost from the very beginning, I was like, fuck it. That’s not going to work with this one. I'm going to break this rule 100%. I never regretted it, because that's actually what built up the trust that is there.”

As Jenna's public performances continued and began to garner more public attention, her online audience multiplied. Among her virtual admirers was French fashion maven Michèle Lamy, who would eventually sign onto Queendom as an executive producer. Lamy's discovery of Jenna led to an invitation to walk in the Rick Owens show in Paris — her first time modeling, and her first time leaving Russia in her life. Of course, Agniia and her camera followed. But most of their excursions were not so glamorous; many of Jenna's performances shown in the documentary were undertaken at a real risk to her physical safety, and by extension, to the safety of Agniia. But neither of them were daunted.

I remember who I am. And this is what carries me through this life.

After all, Jenna was used to both taking risks and documenting them well before she was the subject of a film; she and her friends long filmed the often impassioned, sometimes violent reactions of strangers and policemen to their mere existence in public spaces in drag. And after a protest performance in which she wrapped herself in the Russian flag, Jenna was kicked out of beauty school, her last attempt at a practical route before pursuing her drag as a full time venture.

The only time Agniia tried to dissuade her was on Paratrooper’s Day, a Russian military holiday often characterized by the drunk soldiers roaming the streets. The risk for violence was especially high. “On Paratroopers Day, people say you can't come out in skinny jeans or with nail polish,” Jenna describes. “[I think] you should do the opposite. You should really make a statement and come out wearing what you want to wear. I think that clothes, what we wear, is really at some point beyond our psyche, our mind, our understanding. It is as if it's a certain kind of spice that is enticing you and you follow the scent of that spice and you don't see anything else except that scent and you follow it. That's how I see it.”

“I was like, ‘girl, maybe we should not do that,’” Agniia says. “Igor was stressing out and she told us, ‘well, you don't need to follow me. I'm gonna go and do it. I don't care if you're coming or not.’” In the end, Jenna ventured out for her performance anyway, protesting the then-recent invasion of Ukraine. Agniia followed. Not shown in the film is that the two were arrested, and managed to talk the police out of their arrest.

Not too long after, she would have to leave Russia again, this time moving for Paris for good; the film follows her struggles to get a visa in time to leave the country after the onset of the war. “It's already been three years that I've been in France, and it is important for me to understand and remember who I am, and to remember that pain, those moments when we were back in Russia doing drag, fighting with the police and law enforcement,” Jenna says. “It is important that this resistance continues and that those voices are not being silenced. Yes, here there’s much more freedom, there are pride parades and queer people can get married, but this is an illusion because there are also places where you cannot get married and you cannot enjoy the same freedoms. I cling to who I am, who I was from the very beginning. I remember who I am. And this is what carries me through this life.”

“Meeting Jenna gave me hope for the future of the country, because governments come and go, people in power come and go, but the generations change at the same time,” Igor says. “So it warms my heart to see that someone like her came from somewhere like that. If I saw her back then at a similar age, it would be even more personal. I think I would’ve accepted myself as gay quicker, and I wouldn't be nervous or closed and not open to the world or myself… Working with this project also meant that we were amplifying the voices of many, many people who couldn't speak like Jenna could.”

For Agniia, the honor of telling Jenna's story is only paralleled by the honor of having her in her life. “We found each other,” Agniia says. “And what I learned from Jenna is so precious; about life, about art, about surviving. And I appreciate it a lot. This film grew so much larger than just a documentary, because I have a family now, a working family.”

Queendom is now available to stream on Apple TV.