“Pride is the Olympics of drag,” Nicki Jizz tells me. This is said with the cadence of a joke, but the hard-won stoicism of someone currently in the thick of it. “It’s nonstop.”
Nicki, for the uninitiated, is San Francisco drag royalty — a gleeful, raunchy performer whose sense of community and camaraderie has made her a beloved figure in the city.
And she’s busy. Nicki has 23 gigs across 17 days, some of those days with a fair share of doubles. As we spoke in early June, she was in the middle of prepping a very Y2K mashup of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” and TLC’s “No Scrubs” for Mall Drag, a show put on by the New York drag queen Miss Ma’amShe. She is tired, but in 10 years of doing this, Nicki’s learned to take breaks where she can get them. Massages and scheduled errand days abound. A weeklong hibernation is in her future come July.
“A lot of people just see us out there smiling, but there's so much work that goes in behind-the-scenes,” Nicki says, before taking a beat. “But it's a really fun time. I do love Pride. I love being out with our community, surrounded by happiness and feeling people just be themselves.”
The centerpiece of her Pride Month calendar is Reparations, the all-Black drag revue that’s celebrating its fifth anniversary Saturday night with a lineup of Reparations all-stars including her friend, Drag Race alum LaLa Ri, headlining and a murderer’s row of Bay Area drag talent, including Militia Scunt, Mahlae Balenciaga, and of course, the queen herself.
Reparations started humbly as a virtual show during the pandemic but has grown to become an award-winning San Francisco institution, the sort of show that already feels integral to the city’s cultural life.
Jizz started it as a way to celebrate and pay Black drag talent in San Francisco at a time when opportunities for live performance were nonexistent and queer Black art and culture needed to be uplifted. The one-off set was so successful that the digital tip jar brought in so much money, PayPal briefly suspended it, possibly assuming some sort of fraud. More Reparations shows were streamed on Twitch up until mid-2021.
When San Francisco nightlife started to return, Reparations leapt from URL to IRL. It only grew from there, bringing big-name drag stars and local icons to packed houses at Oasis just about every second weekend of the month. This is a space that centers Blackness, from the performers cast to the cover: Non-Black and indigenous attendees pay $5 more, with the option to tip extra for a Black attendee to get in for free if they need to.
The ultimate refrain of the show is a tongue-in-cheek call-and-response: “If you don’t tip—” Nicki says, “you’re racist!” the crowd shouts back. She is uncompromising in this: Nicki has insisted that what she called “bouts of white guilt” should be resolved with attendees opening up their wallets.
Reparations is one of the rare events in San Francisco where Black queer people can really share space together, KaiKai Bee Michaels, a drag artist who performed in the first Reparations told me.
It also offers a freedom of expression for performers who, in the past, may have felt limited. When the show first launched, Nicki spoke in frustration of being typecast by bookers — Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj nights, Lil’ Kim in “Lady Marmalade” and Scary Spice. Opening up a night dedicated to Black talent allows her and her fellow performers more room to experiment and be weird.
“When you perform at Reparations,” Michaels says, “you don’t have to codeswitch. You’re mostly playing to your people.”
Nicki is more succinct: “It’s probably one of the greatest achievements of my life.”
Five years in, Reparations has only grown more explicit in its politics. So, too, has Nicki. Drag is — and always will be — a political act. The politics of the era in which she created her show find themselves expressed in the performances. With militant ICE raids, the war in Gaza, and the piecemeal demolition of civil rights for Black and LGBT people, Nicki feels an added urgency to protect the space she created and to use her stature in San Francisco’s gay nightlife scene to make political waves.
“There's pressure with Reparations,” Nicki says. “It’s not a show that I'm doing for clout or for publicity. It's for people to have a good time. But I'm doing a show that means a lot to a lot of Black and brown people, that means a lot to the culture.”
“As I've grown over the five years of doing Reparations, seeing the things that we've had to deal with, I've pulled out of shows because of my morals and my ethics about aligning with certain groups about how they handle things.”
Nicki cancelled a planned Reparations show at the SoSF Pride music festival following comments festival representatives made about R&B artist Kehlani’s support of Palestinian people. Nicki told Gazetteer in a follow-up email that she pulled out “due to their treatment of Kehlani and making statements about not agreeing with her stance on being pro-Palestine and anti-genocide.” “There is no pride in genocide and now more than ever is when we need to use our voices and platforms to speak out against injustices,” she wrote.
With Reparations, Nicki Jizz has established a precedent for other drag shows in San Francisco focused on different ethnic groups: In San Francisco, there’s already a handful of shows dedicated to Latine culture; some of her friends in Chicago throw an all-Asian and Pacific Islander drag brunch.
“All over the city, over the country, there should be more shows like this.”
Diversity is still a vital part of San Francisco’s drag culture and the local scene is better for having Nicki in it. Even as the city’s diversity has been in decline, Nicki has thrived.
“My niece was always driven and determined to do it her way,” says Juanita MORE!, the pioneering drag queen and hostess who is Nicki’s drag aunt, wrote in an email. “There is no sign of her stopping any time soon.”
