Joshua landed in San Francisco with little money and no job. Unsure of what the city had in store, he had been urged by John Waters—another Maryland native, and the area’s best-known advocate for the weird and queer—to skip New York and Los Angeles for the City by the Bay. Waters told Joshua, known today as Peaches Christ, the free-wheeling nature of San Francisco suited his love of drag and queerness better than those two coastal behemoths.
Peaches landed during a renaissance of drag, when the city was celebrating the end of the worst period of the AIDS crisis and was looking for something—anything—to celebrate. Trannyshack, now considered a staple of San Francisco’s nightlife scene, had just begun, and rent was still relatively cheap. Now, nearly two decades later, after the immense success of her Midnight Mass screenings and stage productions—which have deep ties to the city but have conquered the world, from Belfast to New York—Peaches looks back at that venture to San Francisco in a very different light.
“Coming here with no money and no job was stupid. If some kid said they were planning on doing that today, I’d talk them out of it,” Peaches says. “In the San Francisco of today, you’d end up homeless.”
Yet despite the city’s well-known housing crisis, rapidly rising living expenses and the influx of Silicon Valley cash changing the city, San Francisco remains a drag Mecca, setting the scene for bigger cities and incubating talent that, elsewhere, would not find an audience. In the current landscape, drag is a huge part of LGBT nightlife—with queens promoting, hosting, performing at and literally owning a city’s after-dark options—but while New York may have the sassiest queens and Los Angeles is awash in slick production value, San Francisco just keeps it real.