♪ La la la la la la la la ♪
♪ I'm putting on a dress and some diamond studded shoes ♪
♪ I'm feeling quite sassy in a girlish kind of mood ♪
♪ I'm so enamored with all the fun and glamour ♪
♪ Oh I love being a girl ♪
- My name is Vanessa Lengies.
I've been acting since I was seven years old.
I am a happy go lucky free spirit
who spent my whole life embodying all kinds of characters.
But in my real life I've been struggling
with my sexuality.
Who am I?
I wanna take away the fear of talking
about sex and sexuality and I'm going to bare it all.
This is my journey.
One of my biggest questions has been about my gender.
Woman or man, my whole life I haven't felt
like I cleanly belong to either.
Going to a gender therapist
feels like a safe place to talk about this stuff
for the first time.
So when I was little I wouldn't say I wasn't drawn
to things that things are drawn to
but I was just drawn to more things,
like I liked Ninja Turtles instead of Barbies,
but I liked stuffed animals.
I dressed constantly in my dad's clothes
and I remember getting made fun of at school
and being horrified.
If I think about my mom, she's very feminine.
She's like goddess woman, all woman,
and I think of my dad, he's man,
and then I don't really identify
with the person that I see, even in the mirror sometimes.
- You've been lied to.
You've been told that you have to choose male or female
and that if you're not comfortable in one
then you absolutely have to be comfortable in the other one.
And there's about hundreds or thousands
of identities in between those.
- This very powerful masculine side of me
either gets stronger or less strong.
I've never felt the feeling of being woman.
- It's less about which gender am I wanting to be
or comfortable with.
It's who do you want to be?
What do you want to look like?
What do you want to wear?
And really finding the confidence in that.
The word's actually queer, where queer used to mean gay
but queer now means non-normative.
I don't have to choose a label.
So it's actually healthy to say I've been told I'm a boy
but I don't feel comfortable with that and I challenge that
or I challenge being a girl.
That's healthy.
Unhealthy is I'll take on all these expectations.
So you're in a good place.
What's your current relational status?
What's going on?
- I got engaged last July to a man.
We have been fighting.
Just this whole docu-series about sexuality
has brought so much up.
So how do you suggest to your clients
on starting that conversation with their partners?
- Honestly and authentically.
- How?
- Let me tell you.
- Like, I'm sorry babe,
I'm sexually fluid.
What does that mean?
It means you're never gonna get
the same person ever forever.
- There's a beauty in that.
See when I hear that, I get excited.
I think that's phenomenal.
If you have shame or guilt or anxiety
about parts of you sexually or your identity,
you cannot move through the world
feeling confident and secure.
So until you've worked through that
you won't feel like a whole person in the world.
- I totally get it.
Hi.
Okay, are you here?
You can catch this?
- Yes.
- Let yourself in.
- [Alex] Vanessa.
- Alex, I miss you
- What are you doing?
What's going on?
- I thought we could paint.
- Okay.
- When I thought about who I would even
go to talk to about exploring my own gender,
you came to my mind because of
the story you told me about how it was
for your on Glee Project.
- When the producers of the Glee Project
came to me at a wee 18 years old
to do drag for the very first time
I was just like huh, what do you mean?
No, I can't do that because of my background
of being Christian.
And at the end of the day I did it
because I always thought about it,
'cause I've always wanted to play Effie in Dreamgirls.
That's the thing.
- And what is it about drag?
What do you get from it?
- For me it's expression.
I feel like that's what it is.
It's an art form.
It felt right and I don't know why it felt so right
and so natural and why I was so good at walking in heels.
I'm like amazing at it.
You don't even know.
- So you surprised yourself?
- I shocked the hell out of myself.
What are your questions about yourself?
- Something doesn't fit with the way that I look
and the way that I feel.
If there is somebody who is going through a transition
from woman to man or man to woman
and then I come out and say guys, I don't know
if I feel 100% like a woman,
is that offensive to their process?
- No, not at all, because it's that part
of gender non-conforming.
You have to make yourself happy
because you can't live for everybody else
and what they think about you either.
This is your journey.
It's nobody else's journey.
- If I were to do drag.
- Perform, what?
- Drag performance.
- You performing?
Yes, you gonna perform Vanessa?
Oh I think that'd be amazing.
- Using drag to explore my gender feels right.
Who better to guide me
than one of the best drag kings in town?
Hi I'm Vanessa.
- Hi, nice to meet you.
- Would you like me to call you Landon or Kristine?
- Whatever feels more comfortable for you.
- Okay.
Tonight is my first drag king performance
and it's going to be awesome.
What's your name?
- [Lucky] Lucky Johnson.
- [Vanessa] Lucky Johnson, and you'd like me to say him.
- Yeah, my preferred gender pronouns are he and him
- Okay, awesome.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- And you're trans, you used to be a woman
and now you're transitioning to a man
and you're a drag king?
- Right.
I identify mainly as queer,
even though walking down the street
a lot of people will just see me as a straight white man.
- Right, I just wanna know what gender means
in the drag community.
- Sure, well I think a really succinct way to put it
is we all, we're born naked, the rest is drag.
So gender is a performance and whatever it is,
everything, even if you're not thinking
you're performing, every morning you perform.
Even cis, straight, white people
are performing their gender.
They're just so used to it they don't even realize.
- I realize because I am constantly
looking at myself in projects that I film,
looking at somebody who's not me.
- And you're not necessarily--
- And I'm not there.
Is getting ready a part of the draw for you?
- Well I come from the theater background
so I was always cast playing all these feminine roles,
waiting for a man to come save her.
And I remember going to the drag shows at the gay bar
and I remember thinking I wanna do that.
- If I were to question my gender
and then talk to somebody about it,
the jump to conclusions to changing your gender completely
is something that people are thinking now.
- They're assuming that that's the only way to go.
My kind of go to with the way I describe myself
is I celebrate my femininity,
I celebrate my masculinity,
and I celebrate fluidity between the two.
Masculinity and femininity doesn't mean man or woman.
It's just a term that we threw on for, I'm sorry.
- That's okay.
- How you wanna present yourself.
If you feel masculine inside
you can dress and look however you want.
How you feel is how you feel
and there's no should it be, no judgment by other people,
and if they judge you, who cares what they have to say
because you still know it's true to you.
- Damn.
Oh my ing God.
Amanda are you seeing this?
- Father son.
- Yeah.
- I painted my face on you, literally.
- I'm your son.
I'm your child.
- I'm your son.
You know what's funny?
I thought that I wouldn't be able to smile
'cause when I dressed as a guy at home,
uh oh, I'm out, when I dressed as a guy at home,
I never do my makeup to look like a guy,
so I always try not to smile.
But Landon did such a good job that I just smile
and I still look like a guy.
- [MC] Give all your energy to the debut of Mak Ram.
- Oh my goodness.
You're a professional at this.
- It felt really really good.
- Did it feel amazing?
- That's how I am.
That's how I am.
- Have you done daytime boy drag?
Just live that day as a man.
- [Vanessa] I feel like a little boy
who got to be a grown up for a day.
I am really excited to give myself permission
to play with my gender on a daily basis
and just see how that feels,
and really listen to myself and notice the places
where I wanna express my masculinity.
It's okay just to explore and keep asking more questions,
like, how will this affect other parts of my sexuality?
I think I need a sex-ed crash course from an expert.
- Do you know how many sperm are released per ejaculation?
- Three?
I don't know, I have no idea.
- Three?
- I mean there's the stigma surrounding the nipple.
The more we show healthy images of women topless.
- I wanna do it with you today.
- Done.
- Thank you for watching that episode.
It was a transformative experience exploring my gender.
I wanna know more about you
so feel free to share any stories you may have
of your own sexuality or your own explorations in gender
or if something opened up for you after watching this.