Honoring Mother Flawless Sabrina, The Queer Icon Who Taught Me How to Live

Last Saturday, March 18, a memorial service was held for Jack Doroshow, better known as Mother Flawless Sabrina, who passed away on November 18, 2017. A prolific drag queen and activist, Flawless Sabrina was a queer icon without parallel, whose work and mentorship has profoundly influenced (and continues to influence) generations of LGBTQ+ people. Among Flawless Sabrina’s closest confidantes was Zackary Drucker, an artist and cultural producer who is working to preserve Sabrina’s legacy through the Flawless Sabrina Archive. Below, Zackary reflects on Sabrina’s influence on her life, and the lifework Sabrina gifted the world.

I will tell this story for the rest of my life: As a genderqueer teenager in Syracuse, NY, I wore a dress to my prom and moved to New York City the week I graduated high school. Growing up, I had no access to queer subcultures, so I found my people in the world of film instead. I watched Barry Shils’ 1996 documentary Wigstock on repeat, memorizing the names of the glorious queens and trans women it exalted, including heroes of mine I still idolize today: Chloe Dzubilo, Tabboo, Leigh Bowery, Candis Cayne, Lina Bradford. Van Barnes makes a gem of an appearance.

The year I moved to New York, I didn’t have $20 to get into the actual Wigstock drag festival, but I had a camera and film. I stood outside the gates to photograph performers and festival goers as they left, which felt as awkward as it sounds, until I laid eyes on Mother Flawless Sabrina. She happily consented to being photographed, pointed her finger directly in my lens and said, “you’re on the wrong side of the camera, kid!” I was home.

Two planes hit the twin towers a few days later, and my fledgling adulthood smoldered in destruction and uncertainty. I taped my portrait of Flawless to the wall, directly in view of my futon on the floor, and she became this ancient mythical guardian queen watching over me as I dreamed and sexed my way into adulthood. Subconsciously, I manifested her as a leading touchstone in my life.

I started seeing Flawless in the hottest downtown clubs of the moment; in her 60s, she was a generation or two older than the club kids and reigning divas there. Her outfits were elaborately designed performance pieces, a cavalcade of eccentric personalities and statements, always wildly different and masterfully executed. She self-identified as a gender clown.

I can see her floating through Spa nightclub, a resplendent vision of homemade couture — taped together household items, elaborately constructed wigs, and kabuki rodeo-clown make-up. I can see her at Boysroom, ruling the dance floor all night in heels she tied around her ankles with shoelaces. Flawless had a discerning and spontaneous sense of style, putting her unique stamp on every moment like a punk-rock gender-fuck Diana Vreeland. If she didn’t exist, we would’ve had to invent her.

I made my way up to her legendary salon apartment on East 73rd street one night, as she hosted an opening for a photographer whose portraits of Brazilian trans women hung on her brown ultra-suede-encased walls. By then I had rented a VHS tape of the 1968 verité documentary about her pre-Stonewall drag contests, The Queen, and discovered her in Linda Simpson’s zine My Comrade, so I knew exactly who she was. "Welcome to the time capsule," a cross-dresser told me as I was ushered into her rickety cage elevator. "God knows if we're going forward or back." This proved prophetic: her space could tell the story of the last 15 years of my life.

Flawless had lived in her nook off Central Park since 1967. She had pasted tinfoil to the ceiling in the early 70s, and over the years it had turned gold from cigarette smoke. The ghosts of Truman Capote, William Burroughs, Judy Garland and other icons lingered around her mystic presence, a bygone relic of old New York echoing through time. Diana Tourjee, a fellow granddaughter of Sabrina’s, observed to me recently that speaking to Flawless was like speaking with a house full of spirits. This is the time travel of being human — we bring our predecessors and influences into the future with us and pass their secrets to a new generation, just in time for us to be ushered out, too.

It will happen in a moment, as quickly as these words will be lost.

I became one of the regular young people who clung close to Grandma, gleaning wisdom while breathless with laughter. I would smoke her More menthol cigarettes and get lost in her brilliant stream of consciousness, her shrewd, irreverent, banter. Her space was a constantly evolving assemblage of ephemera, art, and collage, with notes on lampshades and piles of notebooks on her desk — a hermetically sealed time capsule.

I should mention that Flawless had no preference for pronouns or names, and even I have called her different things at different points in my life: Grandma, Flawless, Sabrina, Jack. He, she, they, it was all okay. At your pleasure.

She was an unrelenting cheerleader, encouraging everyone around her to live their best lives, give those around them the benefit of the doubt, and believe in themselves without question. She would move between profound wisdom and preposterous humor, from the subjective to universal, dip in and out of her deeply anti-capitalist, anti-establishment values. She wrote and doodled every day, and repeated catch phrases with such frequency that they now seem to emerge out of thin air:

Normal is a setting on the dryer.

Wherever you are is the center of the universe.

Reality is a mass hunch.

You are the person you’ve been waiting for.

If it doesn’t make you nervous, it isn’t worth doing.

Everything you do is perfect.

You’re the boss applesauce. It’s your movie, OWN IT!

Through her 78 years, she had lost an entire generation of friends, lovers, and contemporaries. She had shared her life with people who are a part of our lineage — Sylvia Rivera, Crystal Lebeija, Dorian Corey, International Chrysis, and countless others whose names we may never know. Flawless had become a master survivor, a veteran of loss. Her antidote for grief was to look to the future and build relationships with young people. She wanted us to trust that we were part of a larger struggle towards gender liberation that stretches back to the earliest civilizations. We are ancient, magical survivors, and we are infinite.

While I moved to LA in 2005, I made frequent trips back to New York City to visit. I kept my New York cell phone number because Sabrina didn’t have long distance calling, and I wanted to make sure that she could always reach me. I visited every chance I could, spending long stretches of time in New York over the years. Sharing her little bed one night, I remember talking until we fell asleep, our conversation continuing seamlessly as we both began to dream.

Ten years ago, Flawless and I went to London together for an esoteric performance festival. She gave tarot readings while I laid naked on a table, inviting participants to pluck out my body hair. My eyes were closed for the duration of the performance, but I could feel her on the edge of the crowd when she approached my body; that sensation is similar to the way I feel her now — not by seeing or hearing her, but by sensing her alone.

In her last days, I have realized how hard it is for the passing to let go. I didn’t want to let her go. And she must have felt that a thousand times more, to leave all her loved ones behind knowing what we would have to face ahead. Sitting at her bedside, I told her that we were going to take care of each other, continue to make her proud, and use all the tools she gave us for our survival.

Her psychic realm was broader than ever, expanding until the very end. I’ve held onto her love and built a bridge to her inside of me. Our connection stays strong, and now, instead of dreaming, we maintain a transcendent bridge that spans dimensions and generations.

A few days after her passing, I returned home to Los Angeles late at night. The next morning, I walked into my kitchen & stepped into a puddle muddled with shattered glass; a bottle of champagne had spontaneously combusted in the middle of the night. My immediate instinct was that Grandma had arrived and was celebrating — that she was reaching through space to let me know that our reality is not as fixed as it seems.

I still have that original photograph I took of Sabrina at Wigstock in 2001, now framed. I talk to her and light a candle to bring her back to me every night, my heart obliterated, but still beating.

Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals, is an Emmy-nominated Producer for the docu-series This Is Me, as well as a Producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Transparent.