Peppermint appeared like a flash tornado that just dropped out of the sky. In a knitted poncho, long braids, and two (maybe three) garment bags, everything about her seemed to be spinning—no, twirling. Peppermint was fully twirling. Twirling between tables and chairs, and even past a couple of patrons who did not sign up to be sideswiped by garment bags holding gold sequin evening gowns. Once she figured out a way to keep them from wrinkling, she stopped twirling, ignored the waitress, and immediately leaned in for a hug, and pulled back to confirm, “You’re Justin, right? I’m sorry I’m late.”
That is Peppermint at her core—twirling, smiling, and taking a situation you thought you were in control of and making it her own. There’s a lot of ways to identify her: a native Pennsylvanian, raised in Delaware. A drag queen who competed on season nine of the cultishly popular RuPaul’s Drag Race. A fan of The Walking Dead (even though she’s started falling off this past season because who hasn’t?) And, of course, a trans woman. But for now, Peppermint is most notably...busy. Busy and kind of hungry? So she ordered some avocado toast and told me about the day ahead.
As drag culture is reaching a cultural high point with a growing mainstream audience, Peppermint has found herself with more opportunities than ever. She’s also found herself the center of multiple difficult conversations. Drag has typically been regarded as the art of cisgender men putting on women’s clothes. But past the surface, drag has always been driven by people who don’t subscribe to gender in the way most people are familiar with it. As transgender and queer people become more visible in society and pop culture, a debate has ensued—does drag belong to one gender?
For the time being, it’s clear that it at least belongs to Peppermint. On this day in particular, she stopped at Hamilton’s before heading to midtown to rehearse for Billboard’s Grammys red carpet show. After that, she’ll start prepping for a tour in South America. The schedule is a bit of a perfect storm that results from drag’s most recent pop culture moment, increased visibility for the transgender community, and of course, a lot of talent. But with the mainstream success comes mainstream questions. She admitted, “You would think the LGBT+ community is very open-minded, but unfortunately, there’s discrimination.”
A mainstay in the New York drag scene, Peppermint’s appearance on RuPaul’s Drag Race brought her drag to a nationwide audience. On her season, Peppermint, who chooses to keep her non-stage name private, came out to her fellow contestants as transgender. While past transgender contestants had come out after their seasons, Peppermint’s on-camera announcement marked the first time an openly transgender drag queen competed on the show, all while it was building its largest audience to date. What started out as a show introducing drag to a national audience, nine seasons in, featured an openly trans woman competing in a drag competition on a major cable network.
For those unfamiliar with Drag Race, the VH1 show is a journey all its own. Imagine the main competition elements of American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway, and So, You Think You Can Dance? combined into one. Now put on a dress. Now push your balls up into your body and tape your penis down. That’s Drag Race. But for there to be so many elements at stake, some critics of drag place a strange amount of emphasis on that last task—the penis part—which is ironic for an artform designed to subvert the concept of gender norms. While the inclusion of anyone not identifying as a man might cause issue for some, Peppermint’s season nine presence feels like progress.
With that progress comes a learning curve, especially in regard to someone like Peppermint, whose off-stage persona isn’t too different from the one she uses while performing. “There’s a lot of queens who can’t wait to get out of their makeup and leave it all on their dresser,” she admitted. “My drag persona is cast from the mold that was originally meant to be my trans identity.” The distinction between the two is an important one. Drag is a performance that happens on the outside—the makeup, the clothing, the exuberance. Drag relies on creating an illusion. Being transgender is a feeling that doesn’t turn off. It can’t be put on or removed. When I asked her how she would describe what it means to be both of those things, she called upon the words of another trans drag queen and Drag Race alum, Monica Beverly Hillz: “Drag is what I do. Trans is who I am.”
Conveying Peppermint’s overlap is just as difficult to explain to some of her contemporaries in the drag world as it is to mainstream audiences. A couple of months ago, The Pew Research Center reported about a third of Americans say society has gone too far in accepting transgender people. Statistics like that are disheartening, but sadly expected. What’s less expected, though, is that the LGBT community finds itself just as splintered at times, creating its own set of hurdles for transgender people.
In a recent interview with RuPaul in The Guardian, the host and creator of Drag Race was asked if he’d accept a contestant who had fully transitioned, to which he said, “Probably not. You can identify as a woman and say you’re transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body. It takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we’re doing.” In the days following the interview, RuPaul doubled down on his statement, likening the transitioning of transgender people to the Drag Race equivalent of “performance enhancing drugs.” (He has since walked back those comments.)
Sentiments like those, especially from leaders in the drag world, muddy the water, conflating drag and transgender people into the same spectrum. In the world RuPaul described, only men can do drag. But the transgender community has long been involved in the drag scene, even if they haven’t been prominently featured in drag’s most recent big cultural moment. As drag emerges as a mainstream form of entertainment, those comments matter more and more, and the future of Peppermint and women like her are being shaped with every perspective, including that of her mentor’s.
“I think what’s next is to see drag kings and trans performers be accepted into the world of Drag Race,” Peppermint said, well before The Guardian interview came out. “I think the joke, especially on shows like Drag Race, is to see a straight guy fumble and fail. But I want to see a straight guy be the fiercest queen on that show and do kicks and leaps in heels and sashay down that runway like no one has ever seen. I think if you’re a fierce queen who can work it, you should be allowed to do it.”
That impossibly idealistic notion of inclusion comes from an understanding that Peppermint stands in a lot of cultural intersections: black, transgender, drag queen. For a woman whose identity is defined by mixed identities, sharing pieces of her culture comes as second nature. “For queer folk, we’re not all necessarily related,” she said. “It takes a connection for us to pass things on from generation to generation, and those connections get broken by certain -isms— racism, sexism, etc. But there have been queer folk in every group that’s ever existed. Sometimes people feel the need to single that out or extract it, but it’s very much related.
The binding nature of the LGBT community is a hopeful concept—if it can identify its own shortcomings. “As long as the role of people of color are different in our larger society, it will be different in the queer community as well,” Peppermint says. “I think that’s something we have to unpack and really deal with.” The complicated history of in-fighting within the LGBT community is a complex one. The community has a history of alienating parts of its own acronym, whitewashing history, and fetishizing masculinity. And the transgender community takes particularly hard hits.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve marched for marriage equality,” Peppermint recalled, “and I cannot tell you how many gay men have shown up when a trans woman has been killed in this neighborhood, and there’s been a vigil. None. Maybe one.” And yet, with a history of exclusion working against people like her, she doesn’t feel the same need to safeguard drag and gay culture from the hands of more advantaged groups.
In regard to drag, Peppermint sees the addition of new audiences and performers as a sign of progress. “For a lot of people, maybe the local gay bar didn’t feel like a safe space for them,” she said. “If people in the LGBT community want equality, including being accepted in any and everywhere we want to be—which is what should happen—then the flipside is essential. In order for the queer community to be accepted by the mainstream, then the mainstream has to be accepted by the queer community.”
That requires a level of trust among a straight or cisgender population that is still fine-tuning its opinion of the LGBT population. And even for a subculture like drag, which has a rich history reaching back much longer than RuPaul’s Drag Race, it’s a risk. Opinions on the inside of the drag community question whether bringing such a mainstay of the queer community into the mainstream spotlight will cause more harm than good. But like most pieces of art, Peppermint believes that drag is for the people. “Once something becomes mainstream, it feels like it becomes watered down and cheapened because it’s really brought to the lowest common denominator,” she said. “The eccentricities and complexities and colors and flavors are boiled down to blah. And then maybe it’s time to create a new art form or turn it on its head, and then it’s ours for a while.”
The creation of that art all depends on the artists who are around to make it. The space that Peppermint is filling is a large one—remember, girl’s gotta have space to twirl. Her style is an extravagant mix of pageantry, comedy, and music. She’s just released a new album with Cazwell called Harlem Cleopatra. She’s slated to be the first trans woman to originate a role on Broadway in the Go-Go’s-inspired musical Head Over Heels. Those are all feats that would be unthinkable for a transgender person even fifteen years ago. She would know. She’s been working on it for longer than that.
With two decades of experience under her belt, she’s balancing propelling the history of drag forward and carrying the torch for trans people, though she’s astutely aware that both of those tasks are a process. “You can’t talk about trans folk and trans issues as an isolated thing,” she said, “without talking about how you treat trans people, your relationship to them, and what steps you’re willing to take to make a trans person easier.” Part of that is for those already in the space to allow veterans like Peppermint to create and lead in the fields they choose.
For a triple threat like Peppermint, she’s choosing not to choose. She knows that she likes to entertain, so she’ll start there. And through the entertaining, she continues to teach those around her. She’s recently wrapped a documentary chronicling her own transition called Project Peppermint with Oriel Pe’er. In the coming weeks, she’ll continue to work on music videos to promote her new album, and if time permits, she’ll catch up on The Walking Dead. Maybe.
When her phone went off to remind her to leave, she’d only finished half of her avocado toast. She had a lot to say, but to be fair, she warned me about that when she sat down by leaning directly into the microphone and loudly announcing, “I HAVE STUFF TO SAY!” She opened up her garment bag to check out the gold dress one more time before collecting her stuff and giving me another hug. Before I could get out the door myself, she’s gone. Maybe into the sky again. Probably to the Grammys. But no matter what stage she’s twirled off to, you can rest assured she’s ready to be there.
