‘Caught In The Act’ Reveals The Person That ‘Drag Race’ Hid

Shane Jenek was never worried about not having enough stories for his memoir Caught In The Act — which reveals out not just the still-overlooked pun behind his drag name, Courtney Act, but the highs and lows of his 39 years.

“I got to the end of the first draft and I’d written 220,000 words,” he laughs over Zoom, from his Sydney apartment. “[My editor] was like, ‘oh, well that’s definitely too much. That’s longer than Obama’s book’.”

To be fair to Jenek, there’s a lot to cover, and he could be certainly be considered presidential within Australia’s drag world — or at the least, a diplomat between Oxford Street and Australia (then the world). At 21, Courtney made it to the final thirteen of Australian Idol‘s first season, after returning to the auditions in drag having been knocked back the previous day as Shane (revealed in the book to be a planned stunt with the show’s producers).

Afterwards, she signed a recording deal with BMG (now Sony) with the caveat that she was never able to publicly mention the “pink glittery elephant in the room” that everyone already knew: she was a drag queen. The bubble of pop-stardom burst as her overtly sexed-up, camp-free singles failed to perform, described in the memoir as the “humbling I needed” as someone who thanked “Paris Hilton for being my friend and not yours” while accepting an award at the 2004 DIVAs, essentially the Logies of drag.

Still, Act remained one of Australia’s most well-known drag queens, remaining blessed and booked across clubs, shows and theatres — and that was well before making it to the final three on the sixth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2012, or winning Celebrity Big Brother UK in 2018.

Caught In The Act is filled with fascinating insights into those experiences (and yes, details Jenek’s ambivalent feelings about the “dehumanising” experience of Drag Race) but beyond that, is a profound, funny and honest entry into Australia’s growing canon of LGBTIQ+ memoirs, one which dissects in raw (and occasionally raw-dog) detail Jenek’s exploration of gender, sex, drugs and drag.

Red-handed, Not Red-haired

While Jenek’s original drag persona was going to be a “redheaded shag-cut nightclub singer” named Ginger LeBon, Courtney Act is much more apt — while the connection isn’t drawn in the memoir, it links to one of his first queer sexual encounters, where Jenek was found in a club cubicle.

Caught In The Act begins with Jenek’s childhood in Brisbane, but really kicks off when he arrives in Sydney for a weekend as an 18-year-old, and ends up spending his entire time there not checking out NIDA or scoping out acting opportunities as planned, but crawling in and out of gay bars across Oxford St.

After years of repression, his sexuality comes out in full force: two days after his first same-sex kiss, he’s cruising in the Oxford Hotel bathrooms. Just as he’s about to go down on someone, a bartender throws a bucket of champagne ice over the stall, and this stranger, a “guardian angel”, teaches him about HIV and the importance of safe sex, as well as a few other tricks.

“I feel like for me, the book feels really starts when I arrive in Sydney, but I think that all of that childhood stuff was important because it informs all of those choices that are made later on,” he says.

“By the time you get to Sydney and I’m soliciting men at a urinal at the Oxford Hotel — if [the book] started at that, you’d be like, ‘oh, what is this depravity’? But because of like the story that led up to it, you’re like, ‘oh, this kid just like so excited to be experiencing sexuality for the first time ever’. Maybe what some of might have seen as being gross, depraved and disgusting, they might see with some compassion, and see a different side to sex in a public restroom.”

“Some of might have seen as being gross, depraved and disgusting, they might see with some compassion, and see a different side to sex in a public restroom.”

Sex is central to Caught In The Act, with Jenek describing in detail his experiences with men, women and groups, as both Shane and as Courtney. It’s a mixture of both tips (“you gotta get those balls in your mouth and use your tongue on the taint while you work the shaft”, plus the Courtney Act Patented Lubing Technique, which I have dog-eared) and tenderness. It’s detailed in a way few memoirs are, with Jenek joking towards the book’s start it’s “part sexed-up Tumblr fan-fic”, though that undersells how well (i.e. not cringe) they’re written.

“I wanted to explore the different facets of sexuality, to describe it not as binary or just one thing,” he says of the choice to include sex scenes. “And to explain that I had different experiences, a ‘show them, don’t tell’ thing worked well. I also like the idea of talking about sex in an open and honest way, because I don’t think we normally do. And I don’t think that’s healthy. Those encounters are quite sensational experiences in our lives, and so when writing about those experiences, it seemed natural to include descriptions of sex.”

One memorable relationship is with Oscar, a 21-year-old American who meets Jenek as Courtney. The night they meet, it’s Oscar’s first time with someone with a penis, and Jenek is remarkably slow and considerate. He stays in a bra, wig and makeup during, and describes the moment where he was going to shower post-coitus, and would return “as a boy”.

“I think some of it was edited out, but we connected on ‘a staring into each other’s eyes’ [level],” he says. “When I got out of drag and he came back into the room, it was our eye contact that allowed him to realize that I was the same person.”

“When there’s trauma or questions from past experiences, there’s a little reminder like files that weren’t saved properly. Every six months it pops off and it’s like, ‘Hey, gender identity here. When are you going to examine this?'”

Their relationship continues when it can, around Courtney’s touring schedule. It’s in describing their fling to friend Chaz Bono when a door unlocks. Chaz introduces the term gender-fluid to Jenek, who was confident she wasn’t trans, but uncertain what the joy and power of being Courtney in romantic, sexual and social situations off-stage mean.

Throughout the book, Jenek describes an internal agony over not fitting in with Sydney’s heteronormative masculine gay scene, or within the trans community either. Gender-fluidity simply wasn’t a concept in her world, coming of queer age, with many trans women often recognising Jenek as one of their own, despite her denials.

“[In Sydney], it was that weird binary of cis or trans — people may not think of as a binary, but it is just another one,” he says. “I wasn’t consistently tortured until I worked out the answer, but every six months or so I would have to confront [it], and I think our brains work like that in a weird way.”

“When there’s trauma or questions from past experiences, there’s a little reminder like files that weren’t saved properly. Every six months it pops off and it’s like, ‘Hey, gender identity here. When are you going to examine this?’. You have all of this shame about who you are and it’s not yours. It’s society’s… It really wasn’t until I had the language of the term genderfluid that I was like, ‘oh, oh, this makes much more sense’.”

The insecurities around gender were surprising to read, given Jenek has been Courtney since she was 20: from the outside, it seemed that she was always comfortable existing in-between, and has made a career, partially, out of explaining ideas of gender and sexuality to the masses (which she continues in the memoir with ‘Courtney Facts’, 101s on pronouns, heteroflexibility and more). Caught In The Act is a reminder that desirability often restricts gay men, compelled into a performance of masculinity and manliness to be given a sense of worth in social and sexual contexts (often one and the same).

“If you were a [gay] man, you had to be like a very narrow bandwidth of what a man is expected to be,” he says. “That certainly like played out and impacted how I felt about myself, I always remember going to the gym and wanting pecs and abs. I wanted to be attractive because that’s how I would find myself to be valuable.”

Jenek acknowledges that beauty is part of her brand: as she said on Drag Race, Courtney knows how to do sexy. He says that while he has, in some ways, the ‘ideal body’ he wanted as a 20something, it has arrived from place of self-assuredness, which he tries to let guide everything, from social media (“my friend once said my Instagram was brave”, he laughs) to meeting fans.

“Drag Race Is Very Much An Imperial Force”

Drag Race complicates authenticity. Caught In The Act details Jenek’s pain in watching himself be ‘villanised’ on season six, where his confidence was seen as robotic, and his Australian wit was interpreted as constant barbs against other competitors. To this day, he gets messages about being ‘mean’ to Joslyn Fox over a conversation from nine years ago where laughter was edited out: when he mentions this, I can’t help but ask about RuPaul’s new song, ‘Blame It On The Edit’ (“you wanna blame it on the edit?/you the one who said it, bitch”).

“Oh, the gaslighting anthem of 2021?” he laughs. “But as I pointed out [in Caught In The Act], when Michelle Visage left the Big Brother house, she literally the first thing she tweeted was blaming the edit.”

“I think Drag Race is unique [here] as well. If you come out of the Big Brother house and you start bitching about the experience, they kind of love that — the production company love it, the tabloids love it, everybody gets all over it and it becomes more fodder for the show. But Drag Race is very much an imperial force that doesn’t like to be questioned — you know, Ru talks about ‘don’t think don’t take things so seriously’, like that’s his one of his MOs. Yet, don’t you dare blame the edit, otherwise you’re an enemy of the state.”

Back in 2012, Courtney was the least favoured finalist to win Drag Race, to the point the show filmed four endings in front of a live audience: each of the three winning, and a tie win between Bianca Del Rio and Adore Delano. In the book, Jenek describes how humiliated by the moment he was, and how he was ‘dehumanised’ by the experience, reduced to an archetype — a process, again, not unique to Drag Race, but, due to the social’s intense fanbase and the way a post Drag Race career can live or die by that audience, is uniquely intense.

At one point during Caught In The Act, drag makeup artist and photographer Magnus Hastings tells Jenek that she has no ‘dark’ reason behind her drag: talking to him, I say this gets to the crux of her Drag Race edit. There was no tension, though Jenek says she was open with producers about her issues around meth use in Sydney, though they didn’t use it in the show — the memoir marks her first public acknowledgement of the period.

“I remember the story producer being like ‘this doesn’t… you’re not… you not making it sound horrible’,” he says. “And I’m like, ‘well, a lot of it was really fun’, though there were really dark bits, too.”

“I think the thing that I observed is I was the most boring person in the room on Drag Race. And I’m the most interesting person in the room on Celebrity Big Brother or on Dancing With The Stars, just by default of who I am. All I have to do is exist and I’ve got the story.”

But outside of the restrictions of reality TV, Jenek is filled with stories: complex and fleeting affairs, anxieties over gender, queer community and some useful sex tips. Caught In The Act reveals the person beyond what you’ve seen.

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Caught In The Act is out now via Pantera Press.

Jared Richards is Junkee’s Drag Race recapper, and a freelance writer for The Guardian, NME, The Monthly and more. He’s on Twitter @jrdjms.

Photo Credit: Joseph Sinclair