“He passed away of alcoholism,” Firkus says in Moving Parts, finishing with a flourish: “ Ba-dum-chh. Though his mother wasn’t entirely discouraging (she eventually relented and gave her son a Ken doll), his stepfather, who Firkus says was both physically and verbally abusive, called Firkus “a Trixie” any time his behavior was deemed “too feminine.” At fifteen, not long after his stepfather allegedly pointed a gun at his head, social services relocated Firkus to his grandparents’ house, a little over 20 miles away in Wausaukee. His first love was dolls - he idolized Barbie - but for most of his childhood, he wasn’t allowed to have any of his own. Growing up in tiny Silver Cliff, Wisconsin (population 480), where he was raised by his Ojibwe mother alongside an older brother and two younger sisters, Firkus’ home life was marked by poverty, alcoholism, and instability. He’s too aware of everything that stood in the way of getting here. If it’s gauche to proclaim your own success, to assert that it was intentional or (gasp) the result of a concerted effort to be someone, Firkus doesn’t care. Even this hotel room is bigger than the house I grew up in. I have two billboards up in Times Square. “I grew up in a trailer on a dead-end dirt road where we lived so far out, we couldn’t even get public access television because it was too snowy. “What is going on?” Firkus says with a laugh, plopping back down on the couch and taking in the ridiculousness of the moment. (Trixie uses she/her pronouns out of drag, Firkus uses he/him.) As if on cue, a hotel employee has arrived to deliver a complimentary bottle of wine. A few hours before she’s set to take the stage as a quasi-Barbie doll drag queen known for her biting sense of humor and warm, honeyed voice, Trixie Mattel is just Brian Firkus - a “bald, unprepossessing person, who’s not from a great family, not from a happy background, who has used a bucket of paint to cheat the system,” as Firkus puts it plainly.Īt the moment, Firkus, 32, is lounging in a robe at the Ritz-Carlton Perth, reminiscing over Zoom about his start more than a decade ago - before Trixie won RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, before she released her first country pop album, before she started touring the world to far-flung places like Australia - when there’s a knock at the door.
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