Learning “She”: A Chat with Mykel Vaughn

Broadway actor Mykel Vaughn (he/him) has yet to introduce She to the public. Keeping her safely tucked away to the confines of his New York apartment, he is still being taught who She is, the dame he is creating, and the performer who is itching to be seen.

“She’s still brand-new, in a lot of ways, so I still don’t fully know who ‘She’ is,” Vaughn says. “I’m letting her just kind of develop as it happens.”

While She has made seldom and brief public appearances, Vaughn mostly keeps his time as her under the radar, developing his techniques and finding a feminine expression that feels grounded and authentic. Identifying as a gay man, he understands that in many ways, She is different from him, and is also him at the same time.

“I’m still learning how to manage her because I myself am a very bubbly, kind, warm person. I’ve learned that, when She is fully done up, people are a little intimidated by her,” he explains. “I realized that I have to kind of calm She down and allow people to go to her because She scares people off, otherwise.”

Vaughn got his start as an entertainer at the North Carolina School the Arts and formed his queer presentation around the need to “play straight” in order to get good roles in the acting community. He explains that he had acquired an outlook that performing hypermasculinity was the only way to be taken seriously. After moving to New York after college, he made friends with some of the local queens and eventually roomed with three performers who were in Kinky Boots on Broadway. 

“One thing led to another, and I did what pretty much every gay man does in New York, and I made myself a drag queen for Halloween. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I was like, ‘I look really pretty,’” he explains. “As time has gone on, every time I do drag, I get such an overwhelmingly positive response on the looks that I do.”

Exploring wig options, makeup styles, and costume design, Vaughn increasingly became more interested in the art of self-expression as he increased his capabilities of transformation. Unlocking creativity through discovering the ways in which She reveals herself to him has proven multifaceted and informative.

“The more I’ve embraced that femininity in my life, the stronger the masculine side of myself has become. It’s almost like a rubber band, being stretched in both directions,” he explains. “Drag is such a political statement in and of itself. I’ve gotten to understand toxic masculinity so much.”

Using the example of experiencing men hollering at him when he is dressed as She, donning a sexy dress and heels, he has been able to briefly step into a woman’s world. 

“As a drag queen, there is an element that, of course, I want the attention. I spent the past six hours making myself look like this, and the entire thing that you’re looking at is an illusion, but I’m thinking to myself, ‘Something’s got to change.’ It’s not appropriate to just say whatever the hell you want to a woman just because she looks beautiful,” Vaughn says. 

“Also, just my appreciation, there’s some women in the city that run around in these high heels, and I think to myself, ‘Oh my God, you are a superwoman.’ All of the pain that comes with the beauty, or the fashion, and just how strong these girls are that just rock it every day, and that’s just what they do. I think it’s amazing.”

In capturing the essence of She, Vaughn reached out to New York-based photographer Heather Huie (she/her) of Apollo Fields, and the two quickly began to brainstorm an interesting and unique way of telling his story. As part of the “Come As You Are” series, the pair landed on highlighting an area of drag which is rarely shown: de-dragging.

They decided they would allow us viewers to become voyeurs to the process of removing the charade, the unbecoming of the persona and the transferring back into the person. We see the removal of the heels, the stripping of the dress, sliding off the wig, wiping off the makeup, and the undoing of the tuck … areas of the body which emerge again only behind closed doors, now is performed before the unyielding truth of the camera.

“It’s an interesting concept because there’s so many shoots that you see from man to woman, but you see from the building of the woman, and we don’t really think about the relief that it is to take it off,” Vaughn shares. “Sure, we’re looking at the lens of particularly a drag queen, but you know that happens with any human. You have your mask, whatever you present yourself to the world as, and when you get home, you can shed that down to your bare self, and get to relax and breathe.”

As part of the photo essay that is posted on the Apollo Fields website, Vaughn exercises his creative writing muscle through an accompanying blog, personifying She and sharing a firsthand account of the process of de-dragging.

“We were talking about it, and reflected in his writing, is this idea of, ‘I never take off any article, any accessory, anything at all until I am behind my own closed doors again.’ You know, you can’t be half of a queen in the Uber,” Huie explains.

Vaughn’s experience of finding an evolving version of himself through She, and flaunting his unapologetic self in and out of drag, is a precise example of what Huie was hoping to unveil in the “Come As You Are” series. 

“I started to get into the boudoir industry a little bit, and I started realizing a lot of it didn’t totally align with my personal values,” Huie explains. “A lot of what I was seeing out there was actually not really that empowering. It was a lot of people getting into lingerie for the sake of getting into lingerie for somebody else’s purpose, and not really for themselves. So, I wanted to dial that back and put an emphasis on that we’re doing this for ourselves, first.”

Additionally, Huie was experiencing a lot of folks who wanted to wait before scheduling a boudoir session so they could hit the gym and tighten areas of their body, or generally lose weight in order to feel sexy. She would also receive requests from clients to Photoshop their bodies or digitally alter their photographs after the session, and that approach did not resonate with Huie in the slightest. So, the idea of “Come As You Are” was where Apollo Fields has truly found a beautiful space for their clients to explore all different concepts, ideas, and characteristics.

Every photoshoot comes with a backstory, a deeper look that what the eye sees, and to give space for that, Huie has added the benefit of a written blog post for more of that story to be told. Typically written by Huie, she asked Vaughn to write the narrative to his own “Come As You Are” session, giving She the platform to fully express herself as the woman in front of the lens.

“One of my favorite things from Mykel’s session was just like the simplest, lovely sentence of, ‘I love being gay.’ That’s not a complex sentence, but it is. It was just so genuine; it can be this wonderful, amazing part of somebody’s life. It’s not all struggle,” Huie says.

For Vaughn, de-dragging in front of the camera wasn’t a challenge. As a gay man, he has gone through his own process of learning to love his body, and similarly to many of Huie’s early boudoir clients, he has felt the pressure from gay culture to conform to expectations.

“The gay culture has a huge body dysmorphia problem; if you don’t have a six- or eight-pack, and you aren’t six-foot-two, you kind of just don’t matter,” Vaughn explains. “And then, on top of that, there is a lot of what we call ‘bottom shaming,’ the bottom is the lesser, or the bitch, or the female, which is just terrible. First of all, even in a straight relationship, I think a man should uplift his woman, and just because penetration is happening doesn’t mean that she can’t be empowered, or be dominant. Just as I think in a gay relationship, in a lesbian relationship, a pansexual relationship, or whatever it is.

“I think that for a lot of our older, gay males and mentors, they had to blend into society to not cause a ruckus and to get ahead in the business world. Therefore, they had to put on that toxic masculine suit, figuratively and literally, just to be respected. That, unfortunately, I think has brought itself into the gay community,” Vaughs says.

Experiencing a shift in attitudes, though, Vaughn does feel that those barriers are breaking down, as the younger generation has fewer hang-ups about gender expression and leans more into a fluid form of identity. From things as simple as gender-bending haircuts to seeing more accessibility when it comes to makeup, shoewear, and clothing options, he feels inspired and less inhibited in living out loud and letting She flourish. 

“It’s exciting, and it’s inspiring me; if I wanna wear a dress today, then I’m gonna wear a dress today. It is what it is,” he says.

She is many things. She is expression; She is creativity; She is feminine, and She is masculine. As Vaughn continues to learn She, he can proceed with passion, rather than with fear, and that is what most of us hope to grow into as we learn ourselves, and each other.