I hope all of you people from out of town who came to Austin, Texas – I hope y’all take this song home with you. It will fit on your airplane. It will fit in your luggage. It will fit up your asshole. It will fit in your heart, in your pussy. It will fit up anywhere where someone can put a fist up that fucking shithole you have at the rear end of your body. … Whenever they try to punch-fuck their love up inside of you, take advantage of your lifestyle, you remember that I will cry with you, and I will wipe your tears away every day.1

CHRISTEENE with C Baby and T Gravel. Image courtesy the artist.

Like Prince, CHRISTEENE would die 4 U. But Prince kind of doesn’t mean it, except rhetorically. Not to slight the emotional impact of that song or any other of Prince’s—surely the king freak behind “How Come You Don’t Call Me” knows something about shouting down the sadness—but pop music anesthetizes its most outrageous statements, and we always know the shorthand when we see it. On the other hand, if you come to a CHRISTEENE show, no matter who you are or what you think of this whirling, humping dervish in ripped clubwear and bruises and smeary lipstick, CHRISTEENE wants to take your pain away.

Paul Soileau, who created and performs as CHRISTEENE, explained it by offering the first of many food metaphors to surface in our discussion: “The people in the crowd are able to put all of their anxiety, their insecurities, or their anger or their happiness onto this lead singer. And this lead singer will die for you and take all of that pain and churn it and spit it up into the air and not into your face. Kind of like this weird food processor. And I gladly do it. I love dying for people on a stage.”

If that sounds a little intense, it is. Confrontational, too, if only because an audience expecting some semblance of drag’s sometimes frosty and pristine surfaces will find instead a relentlessly unvarnished, artfully disheveled presence imploring them to shake their shit to a rather virtuosic lip synch to “Bette Davis Eyes.” Soileau doesn’t disdain pretty drag; he also performs as Rebecca Havemeyer, a charming Southern belle with a beaver that likes to bite. Given Rebecca’s massive success—hosting the Celluloid Handbag film series, and giving scads of shows in Austin and beyond—you’d think that CHRISTEENE’s beginnings might mirror some Marvel Comics origin story, but the reality is much simpler: “Rebecca’s real slow and you ease into her, and I just wanted this switchblade that popped open and stabbed them quick. And something that was fast for me as well: something I could put on and fuck up.”

Paul Soileau. Headshot courtesy the artist.

This immediacy can be puzzling to encounter as an audience member. When I saw CHRISTEENE perform in May at Club 1808 in Austin, the crowd clearly needed a few songs to resolve its attitude toward what it was seeing. But it didn’t take long for the scene to dissolve into sweaty flailing and also a profoundly unexpected joy. “I like to think that you see something that is maybe for most people a little difficult to register with, to understand, so your first reaction is to stand back and safely observe. Austin of course has a reputation of standing with your arms crossed regardless, so if you play in Austin you expect that no matter what, because people just do not seem to know how to shake a hip in this town. It’s safety at first.”

“It’s nice because they usually do that, especially at the beginning when we didn’t do a lot of shows and we were very “fresh”—or dirty—it’s nice because people start to enjoy the music, and I think the first thing they realize is it’s not a drag act. They expect it to be, but they see this kind of man in this wig and when you hear drag or see that, you immediately think that a Whitney Houston song is going to bust out. Or it’s going to be this comical sideshow or freak show, and it’s not. It’s a musical group. It’s a professional musical group, and I think after the first two songs usually people start to understand that this is not a game and this is not a freak show and it’s live and in your face and it’s present. It’s real and it’s raw.  And then they meet the character, the lead singer, and it’s actually a person with a personality who is in this strange way charming or sweet, so not only are they welcomed into this nightmare, but they’re also greeted with a friendly hand. And once they realize that, they have to make the decision. Am I going to go with this? Or am I going to just stand there and not move? And nine times out of ten they go with it.”
     “Because it’s way more fun to go with it,” I added.
     “Always! You’d just be a boring fool to not and go home! Just waste a lot of money on some booze and you’re not going to get laid.”

Then again, it isn’t just about the nasty, at least regarding the creation of a character: “When you start to develop a character, it’s kind of like you’re dating somebody and you don’t know shit about them. You really don’t know shit about what this thing is that’s coming out of you, so I look at it like a date. And you start to date them and then you start to discover more and more things about them. Sometimes you go down roads and are like, uh-uh; you have the power to mold your lover … It all evolves and when it starts to stick you build on it, and the next thing I know, CHRISTEENE requires heavy bruising, requires contacts, requires a wig and requires an outfit that has to devolve throughout the show. That’s the most exciting part, when you marry your lover.”

CHRISTEENE with C Baby and T Gravel. Image courtesy the artist. 

Soileau describes CHRISTEENE as a powerhouse performer who is nevertheless a little shy offstage. There’s a mix of naievete and total filth, baby talk grown up. “There’s a tinge of ignorance to it but I think the emotion makes up for the intelligence that’s needed. CHRISTEENE is at the shit level of it all, so CHRISTEENE doesn’t have to talk perfectly and doesn’t look perfect by any means but the heart of CHRISTEENE is so strong—and it’s what most people don’t have—and that’s the step up that CHRISTEENE has over everybody. That’s CHRISTEENE’s intelligence: CHRISTEENE’s heart. Total passion and honesty. Will sit with anyone, will talk to anyone, will hug and kiss on anyone, will take abuse from anyone, and that’s the intelligence, so the rest of it is just part of the picture that works.”

The many criticisms CHRISTEENE engenders seem to overlook this part of the picture, criticizing the portrayal as a harmfully flippant portrayal of trans women or working class women or sex workers or any number of other things, but Soileau is quick to contrast CHRISTEENE performances with drag performances, pointing out that CHRISTEENE “is in no way how I perceive a female. It’s the way I perceive society and the world I grew up in and the world I’m living in right now. Because that’s what it is. It’s all this shit I eat every day, the things that make me feel heavy in life, and CHRISTEENE is like a vessel that all this shit gets pumped into. ‘What gender, what race, where are you from, why do you talk like this?’ It’s just a big mass of all of this to me, all of this shit we see, and that’s kind of why people have a problem with it sometimes. They don’t know where to go with it.” In developing a character whose magnetism transcends performances, videos, and honest-to-goodness jams, Soileau is definitely following his own dictum: “Make these people eat what you put on the plate. Don’t be a cafeteria worker in their cafeteria.”

In spite of all the butt plugs and punch-fucking jokes a CHRISTEENE show entails, or the sometimes-uncomfortable questions it brings up, nothing is ultimately more shocking than the fact that CHRISTEENE is a sweetheart. The outrageous statement isn’t anesthetized; it hurts, and CHRISTEENE will help you feel it. Summarizing how this works, Soileau says: “‘I’m safe here to do what I want to do because this thing up here is going to take the blame for everything,’ so you’re free to be who you want to be. I think that’s what works for these people, that this thing is going to take all of it, and then you can do whatever the fuck you want. ‘It’s that thing’s fault, not mine! Did you see what CHRISTEENE did? She pulled a butt plug out of her ass—I was just dancing!’”

• 1. CHRISTEENE introduced "Tears From My Pussy" during a South by Southwest performance at Chain Drive with these words.