FEATURE
DNA: You’ve shied away from nothing in this book. Any worries about your parents’ reactions, for example? Shane Jenek: They both said, “Gosh, we didn’t know a lot of this stuff. I wish you could’ve told us.” But that was the problem: I didn’t know either. I didn’t have the language to explain confusion about gender and sexuality. The book reads as you finding out who you are and reshaping your voice. Looking back, I can completely see how the idea of gender and sexuality had been fluid in my life and in the world around me, but I never had the tools or the language to understand it, which is where the shame comes from. In Grade 4, my confrontation with an alpha male schoolteacher was the first sign that I was different to what I was supposed to be. I didn’t fit the ideal. Understanding that gender is fluid came from my friendship with Chaz Bono, who explained that it was okay for boys to be feminine and girls to be masculine. That was in 2015. I feel bad it took someone to say it out loud to me because it was so apparent, so obvious. It was probably the most liberating moment for me, feeling at peace with who I am. Gay, straight, bi, trans men, CIS men – some of those categories are more prone to interrogating their masculinity than others, but there’s this rigid box of what a man is supposed to be that limits so many people. There’s no finite “this is a man”, “this is a woman”. How successful do you think gay men are, generally, at working that out? Some more than others. Toxic masculinity and heteronormativity are the waters we all swim in. It’s the world we grew up in. Lots of gay men struggle with the intersection of their gender and their sexuality. The older I get, the more I realise I am all of those high-school labels and words and accusations. I have epitomised and embodied and outdone it all! If those kids in high school could see me now as a drag queen doing what I do, I’m much more to their disgust than they ever could have imagined [laughs]! I’ve let go of all that shame but, for a lot 66 DNA
A lot of gay men still have a deep shame about their identity… It’s important for our healing that we unpack that shame.
JOSEPH SINCLAIR
Courtney Act is a beautiful woman, except she isn’t, and that’s the key to the cherished stereotypes that her alter ego, Shane Jenek, has set about smashing, albeit graciously! With an autobiography, Caught In The Act, out now, Shane spoke to Ian Horner.
Showgirl, Courtney.
WORD UP! of gay men, there’s still a real struggle with masculine and feminine ideals, even down to bottom shaming. Little Nas X, in one music video, depicts himself as a bottom in a shower scene and that’s a wonderful ownership of his sexuality as a gay man. But it’s not how you’d normally picture the protagonist of their own story. There are all those phobias that gay, bi and queer men struggle with still. Sometimes gay men think they understand it all because they’ve overcome one hurdle. But we often don’t see a lot of allyship for the intersections of queer identities, whether
that’s gay men of colour, sexual racism, even misogyny in the gay male community. Brené Brown [US professor and author] says empathy cannot exist where shame does. A lot of gay men still have a deep level of shame about their identity, so there’s a lack of empathy for other experiences. It’s important for our healing that gay men unpack that shame and understand it, that it’s not theirs, it was given to them. What do you want Courtney to do next? I love being on stage, performing, entertaining. Wrapped up in that is making people think differently about things they believe to be true
