Courtney Act: If people don’t understand your identity, that’s a reflection of them

RuPaul’s Drag Race fans fall in love with Courtney Act following her stellar performance in series six, but the 38-year-old saw her career go stratospheric after she took the crown in one of the most controversial series of Celebrity Big Brother to date.

Courtney’s exposure to mainstream British media has seen her career go from strength to strength; she’s landed her own dating show, The Bi Life, appeared on the Australian Strictly and even land a part in the beloved Aussie soap Neighbours.

And even during a worldwide pandemic, the drag performer isn’t taking a a break as she’s now preparing for her pop-cabaret tour, Fluid, which she’ll take on the road in April next year.

“The messages and the themes are always, very much who I am,” she tells Standard Online. “So my shows end up being about sexuality or gender, and identity.

“The struggle with sexuality or gender identity wasn’t relevant to me, but I still found that there was a real universal nature to the messages, like understanding who you are.”

Act’s stage show, then, is increasingly urgent. While June is officially to be the UK’s Pride Month, social media sites are still littered with harmful and offensive comments about the LBGTQ+ community.

Act, real name Shane Jenek, says she has noticed the increasingly polarising nature of social media in more recent years.

“There’s so much noise [on social media], people just yelling from opposite sides of the room,” she says. “And I think what’s more important is, you know, walking towards the middle and having a conversation and working out how we can be.

“The world is fluid. Flow is constantly evolving, nothing stays the same. It’s the nature of, of everything. And I just think for some reason, we got kind of stuck on some pretty polarised binary fixed ideas about life.

Act continues: “On social media, people love sensationalised stuff – We’ll try our image and our words on social media to get attention. And I think that we just have to look at what our values are and why and what we actually want.

“I think that social media sort of has gone through puberty, and we’re all learning like, Whoa, look, our bodies dumped, that feels good. And I think by learning how to use it, my hope is that we will come out of puberty and go into social media adulthood forms as well rounded individuals.”

It’s Act’s level-headed, articulate and reasoned approach that won her the legions of fans she’s retained since Big Brother 2018. During numerous debates with the former Conservative Party MP (and CBB runner-up) Ann Widdecombe, Act’s extraordinary levels of patience helped her educate not only her housemates, but the viewing public.

Speaking of her time with Widdecombe, Act says: “My ambition is to be effective, rather than right.

“And I think it’s very easy to sit there and say, ‘You’re wrong’. I don’t think that that changes anybody’s mind it just validates me in feeling ‘superior.’

“I realised that I wasn’t trying to change Ann’s opinion. She’s been in Parliament for 23 years. And she’s more than just your bigoted grandma, she’s someone who actively legislated against my right to exist for 23 years of her career.

“I thought, I’m not going to change her mind. But perhaps the conversations that we have other people will hear and understand things differently, and the other housemates will hear.”

Since Act’s appearance on CBB, the world of drag has become far more mainstream. Act herself has gone on to push more boundaries and educate people further by being in the English-speaking world’s first same-sex dance couple for Australia’s Dancing With the Stars.

Performing with Joshua Keefe, Act came second in the 2019 contest, amid growing calls for the UK’s own Strictly Come Dancing to feature a same-sex couple.

“I feel like [Strictly] use the institution of ballroom as sort of an excuse to deny that sort of storyline,” Act says.

“And it just makes it more interesting if you’ve got different stories being told. And I think Josh, my dance partner, and I showed that there was nothing to be afraid of.

“The sky didn’t fall in. Everybody loved the extra layer of colour and creativity that I that I added to the show I loved it.”

Drag Race itself is now an increasingly popular beast. The British version of the show saw over 6.5 million iPlayer requests just over halfway through the series, with The Vivienne and Baga Chipz later landing their own Gogglebox-like YouTube series.

While Act praises Drag Race for its success, she notes the show has seemingly changed in its more recent iterations.

“On series four Phi Phi O’Hara said to Willam: ‘This a competition for people with talent, not a competition for people know how to buy nice shoes.’ I think weirdly now, Drag Race in the US is the kind of competition for people who know how to buy nice shoes,” she says.

“But Drag Race UK was so great because it just got back to the character and the personality and the fun, punk nature of drag. It wasn’t as polished, and I found that really refreshing.”

She adds that Drag Race’s mainstream success just shows that society is changing for the better – albeit not at the rate we may always want it to be.

“If I look back over the 20 years of my career, it’s gobsmacking to see how much the world has changed,” Act says.

“And I think at this point, if you are someone who is a queer person who feels comfortable with their identity, then maybe take the opportunity to look around and lift up other people who aren’t as fortunate and understand that the queer community intersects with so many others.

“Just because you’re a white gay man doesn’t mean that you understand the experience of the queer identity and investing the time and understanding to track the trans identity or what it’s like to be a gay woman or a black trans woman.

“I think if people don’t understand your identity, that’s not a reflection of you. It’s a reflection of them. And I think that the greatest lesson that I’ve learned is that who I am to who I am and however that manifests in how I act, who I sleep with what I wear. All of that is completely my prerogative and there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s no shame to be having it.

“And the more we can express that and share it with other people, the better.”

Courtney Act’s tour Fluid will take place in April 2021 and visit 11 cities across the UK and Ireland, including the London Palladium.