“I spent two hours in the morning and two hours every night on a school bus to and from school, so it was four hours a day listening to music,” Firkus says over Zoom ahead of an Australian tour. He grew up in rural Wisconsin, “a weird little gay kid who was scared of sports and being around straight guys”, and learnt to play guitar as a teenager. Long before the exaggerated contouring and extreme eye make-up – part Barbie, part ’80s drag legend Divine – Firkus had always wanted to be a singer. Needle-drop: a drag queen singing country music? Mattel’s choice of genre is certainly singular in the drag scene - and she’s definitely the only autoharp-playing queen. Then there’s her career as a country-folk singer. Trixie Mattel: TV star, author, cosmetics entrepreneur, comedian, singer-songwriter - and drag queen. Mattel has since built an empire that spans comedy, TV, books, a podcast, merch and a brand of cosmetics. When that ended, they reverted to UNHhhh on YouTube, where it still runs and has almost 2 million subscribers. Their series UNHhhh, in which they discuss random topics in biting, dry style, was picked up by Viceland and evolved into The Trixie & Katya Show. The alter ego of 34-year-old Brian Firkus, Mattel didn’t even win the competition she placed sixth on the show’s seventh season in 2015, (although she won the 2018 All Stars spin-off).īut crucially, in between those appearances, Mattel launched a web series with fellow contestant Katya (Brian McCook), and the pair’s cult following quickly grew. The legacy of the massively popular reality series RuPaul’s Drag Race, in which drag queens compete to win the title of next drag superstar, has been a wider acceptance of a once-fringe subculture, a visible platform for LGBTQ performers and the phenomenon that is Trixie Mattel.
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