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In the early 1990s, the windows of the Jean Nicole store on Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee were impeccable. The mannequins were perfectly decked out in the latest fashions, beckoning to shoppers in the booming Grand Avenue Mall. They were the work of a young visual merchandiser named Shawn, who knew exactly when to dress them and how to capture the feel of the moment. But those mannequins held a secret.
Shawn was young, broke, and hungry for a life that didn’t yet fully exist. By day, she pinned fabrics and adjusted limbs. By night, she was transforming into a creature of the Milwaukee night, an emerging drag performer in a scene that demanded glamour even if your bank account screamed poverty.
“I was really poor back then, so I couldn’t really afford wigs,” Shawn recalled with a mischievous laugh. “So, I’d take the wigs off the mannequins. I’d wear them to the gigs on the weekends, and I’d put them back on the mannequins’ heads when I got back on Mondays.”
The plastic women of Jean Nicole didn’t mind spending Sunday night bald, or sporting a temporary pixie cut while Shawn took their long, flowing locks to a stage at Club 219. It was a hustle born of necessity, a small theft of identity to fuel the creation of a new one.
This was the era of “do or die,” a philosophy Shawn had carried with her from the brutal streets of her childhood to the glitter-strewn alleys of Milwaukee.
For Shawn Wandahsega, the distance between the mannequin in the window and the queen on the stage was measured in more than just miles. It was measured in a lifetime of silence, and in the complex, often painful navigation of being a white-passing, gay, Native American man in a world that wanted him to be none of those things.
The boy they called Vaseline
Long before the lights of Milwaukee, Shawn was a boy growing up in Gladstone, Michigan, a small town in the Upper Peninsula with a population of barely 3,000. It was a place where everyone knew your name, and for Shawn, that name was often a weapon.
“I was called Vaseline,” Shawn said. “Vaseline means lube. Vaseline means gay. If you think about it, you know what they meant by it.”
The cruelty of children is often dismissed as playground antics, but for Shawn, it was a never-ending source of stress. He was ostracized, labeled a “girly boy,” and physically assaulted with a frequency that still shocks him now. The abuse wasn’t limited to children. Even the adults who were supposed to protect him were guilty of bullying. He recalls a teacher beating him up after a conflict with a female student.
The bullying was as intersectional as it was intentional. He was targeted for his effeminacy, but also for his heritage. They called him the N-word and the F-word daily. They mocked his nose and his full lips.
“They bullied me because I was gay. They bullied me because I was Native. They bullied me because of my last name being so different from theirs. They bullied me because I didn’t look like them, dress like them, talk like them, bully other kids like them. I was bullied for anything and everything. It was gross.”
Shawn was a target on multiple fronts. The physical toll was severe. One afternoon, a group of twelve kids on bikes chased him down the street. He ran until his lungs burned, eventually falling hard on the pavement, tearing his knees open.
“I finally made it into the house,” he says. “I went to the bathroom, locked the door, and cleaned myself up. My knees were so bloody… I just took some rags and put them around my knees. Even though I could hardly walk, I just dealt with it.”
“Dealing with it” became his armor. He learned not to show emotion, not to seek help from adults, and not to expect justice. Experience had taught him that adult intervention rarely stopped the violence. It was a daily reality of being thrown down hallways and hunted in the streets.
“That’s just how my experience was. As a kid, you just learn to accept it.”
Two worlds, one soul
Shawn’s survival was complicated by the duality of his heritage. His father was half-Potawatomi, his grandfather a full-blooded chief of the Hannahville Indian Community. His mother was white. Shawn himself was “passing”—he looked white to the outside world, yet he carried the stigma of his surname and the hidden weight of his culture.
“When white kids found out that I was Native, they hated me even more,” said Shawn.
Weekends were spent on the Hannahville Indian Reservation, a safer place that provided refuge from the weekday hostilities of Gladstone.
“The white people in Escanaba and Gladstone treated me like hell,” Shawn said. “And then I would go up to the reservation, and my Native people had no issues with me at all. They never looked down upon me as a gay person.”
On the reservation, amidst the poverty and the struggles of a community underserved by healthcare and infrastructure, Shawn found a strange kind of peace. He wasn’t the “girly boy” or the “booga booga” there; he was just a grandson, a nephew, a member of a much larger history and heritage.
“My auntie accepted me completely because she was kind of crazy — like me,” Shawn recalls.
When she died, she was buried in the traditional tribal grounds. It was a muddy day, and Shawn, ever the fashion-conscious queen in the making, refused to ruin his shoes to trek to the gravesite.
“I didn’t go, but I was like, you know what? My auntie knew. She liked that I was different. I made sure for her funeral that I was decked all out… I knew she would like that, and she didn’t care about that other bullshit with the shoes.”
He remembers those funerals vividly, specifically the traditional customs observed when his grandfather and aunt passed away. The mirrors were covered to prevent the wandering spirit from becoming trapped or frightened. Drums beat a rhythm that connected the living to the dead. Tobacco was burned to release the spirit.
This culture was as haunting to Shawn as it was enchanting. In his heart, he felt something he hadn’t felt in the outside world: an emotional (if not spiritual) connection.
This perspective sometimes put him in conflict with his mother’s negative views of Native culture.
“It was always frowned upon from her… it was always like, ‘those damn Indians’ or ‘those damn rednecks.’”
Shawn lived in the friction between these worlds. He identifies deeply with the film Imitation of Life, seeing his own story reflected in the character who passes for white to escape the systemic oppression of her Black identity.
“I was always kind of trying to hide that I was Native American when I was growing up because it was so frowned upon by white people,” he admits. “I’m passing, so it kind of comes and goes, but you never, ever, really can forget who you are.”
The great escape
By the time Shawn was eighteen, the writing was on the wall. The bullying had escalated to a point where he feared for his life.
“I think I would have ended up in a Matthew Shepard situation,” he says somberly. “I seriously think I may have been killed. It was that hostile. And if I wasn’t harmed by others, I would have done a lot of harm to myself.”
The exit strategy was art school. Shawn applied to the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD), not out of a burning passion for academia, but because it was a ticket out. The Potawatomi Tribe paid for his first month’s rent and art supplies. But he dropped out of MIAD almost immediately, taking a job at a Juneau Village pharmacy, and then eventually finding his way to the windows of Jean Nicole.
But the trauma of the UP still haunted him, with what he now recognizes as PTSD. For the first few years in Milwaukee, Shawn continued to walk through alleys rather than on the main streets.
“I had police officers questioning me, ‘What exactly are you doing back here?’” But I would go through alleys because it’s what I knew. Taking alleys prevented me from being seen.”
It took time to realize that in Milwaukee, he didn’t have to hide. He didn’t have to be the shadow in the alleyway. He could be the mannequin in the window. He could be the star on the stage.
The Golden Age of Milwaukee Drag
The Milwaukee of the early 90s was a playground of grit and glamour. It was the era of Club 219, La Cage, and intense, sweaty dance floors. Shawn’s entry into the drag world was sparked by a vision: BJ Daniels, a local legend, performing Annie Lennox in a purple ball gown encrusted with multicolored stones.
“I looked up at her, on this Club 219 stage soaring overhead, and I said, OK, that seals the deal. I want to do drag,” Shawn said. “I need to be part of this world. Now.”
This was a time before RuPaul’s Drag Race, before YouTube make-up tutorials, and before “social media queens” like Trixie Mattel. To be a drag queen in 90s Milwaukee was to join an elite sisterhood. You had to earn the right to perform. You had to be willing to perform for tips – and hope the audience was feeling generous that night. You had to find a “mother” to show you the ways. You had to bring not just a look, but talent and presentation. You had to charm all the right people. And you had to do this over and over and over until you were accepted.
“If you weren’t willing to do all these things, and more, well, there’s the door, girl,” said Shawna. “See ya!”
Shawn found his family in queens like Lady Miranda. Shawn recounts a night at C’est La Vie, ready to perform in a tangled red wig. Lady Miranda took a hairbrush to the wig while it was still on Shawn’s head, brushing with such ferocity that the bristles scraped Shawn’s back bloody.
“It was tough love,” Shawn said. “It taught me not to show up looking like fucking mess. That’s how I learned and how I got to be who I am as an entertainer.”
It was a rougher, tougher, more hands-on era. There were no ring lights, only stage lights. The music wasn’t a digital file; it was a cassette tape that Shawn had to splice together himself, recording off the radio and TV to create custom mixes.
“Sometimes the tapes broke and guess what? Your number got cancelled. Moving on to the next girl.”
As “Shawna Love,” he brought creative, colorful, and even terrifying looks to the stages of Milwaukee. He recalls his “Hellraiser” performance at Club 219 as one his finest moments. The aesthetic — dark, leather-bound, masochistic — spoke to the underground queer scene. Shawn crafted a costume, mixed the audio of Hell is for Children with Annie Lennox’s Missionary Man, and hoped he wouldn’t be booed off the stage.
“I said, ‘give me some f*cking smoke!!’”
When the curtains parted, revealing him in full Pinhead regalia, the crowd erupted in cheers.
“Just one of many moments where I knew I’d found my audience!”
He wasn’t just a performer; he was a chameleon. Whether he was channeling the dark energy of Hellraiser or the ethereal pop of the Eurythmics on a ladder, Shawna Love was building a legacy brick by brick, show by show.
“I realized that I could say and do things on the stage that I couldn’t do as a kid,” said Shawn. “I kept pushing the limits to see what I could get away with. Shawn would get his ass beat for the things Shawna does in the average show.”
Embracing a diversity of nightlife
Shawn found a unique acceptance in Milwaukee’s Black gay clubs. Venues like Rene-Z’s and Emeralds introduced him to Black queens like Dominique Mahan and Basia Bazaar. While Milwaukee remains one of the most segregated cities in America, the drag scene offered strong and connective bridges.
“I was probably honestly one of the only white girls that would go to these black clubs at the time,” Shawn notes. Even though he was white-passing, his internal compass still pointed to “other.”
“I was looked upon differently from the white man, so it gave me the courage to go to these Black venues,” he explains.
When he was nervous in the basement of a Black club, it was Dominique Mahan who grabbed his hand and told him, “Girl, it’s OK… just go out there and give them Shawna.”
It was a solidarity of the most unexpected kind. In the white world of his hometown, he was too Native. In the Native world, he was too white. In the straight world, he was too gay.
But in the dimly lit basements of Milwaukee’s queer nightlife, all those fragments came together to create a drag superstar.
Aging in a youth-obsessed world
Three decades later, everything about drag has changed. Those mentorships forged in fleeting, meaningful dressing room moments have been replaced by the glow of TikTok, CapCut and YouTube. The gay audiences that used to treat queens like local celebrities have been replaced by bachelorette parties, straight suburban couples, and mom/daughter brunches.
“The gay audience is not really there anymore for the queens,” Shawn laments. “It’s a lot of young straight girls from West Allis and Mequon.”
He sees a generation of younger queens who have it “easier” with Instagram fame, dozens of Wisconsin drag venues to choose from, bookings now based on demand and not talent, freedom from the old-school pageant system that used to make and break a girl’s worth. But he’s also mourning a loss of community. The fierce sisterhood of his youth has been replaced by an “every girl for themselves” mindset.
“And there’s so much infighting,” he said. “There’s a new drama every other day. It hurts us all.”
Yet, Shawn refuses to be a relic. At 55, he is still reinventing, still pushing, still pulling stunts. He knows that in a youth-obsessed culture, an older queen must fight twice as hard to remain relevant.
This fight culminated in a recent performance at PrideFest that Shawn counts among his top three moments of all time. He walked out onto the stage to perform Gloria Gaynor’s anthem “I Will Survive,” but with a twist. He made it a political statement: “F*ck Trump.”
“For me to be able to do what I did at PrideFest this year… I cried in the dressing room afterwards,” he said.
The performance went viral, racking up over 100,000 views. It wasn’t just about the applause; it was about proof of life.
“I proved something, not just mentally to myself… to say, hey, just because you’re older doesn’t mean that you’re not relevant anymore. Age is just a number.”
It was a vindication for a career that has spanned 35 years. It was a message to the industry that discards its elders, and perhaps, a message to that scared boy running through the alleys of Gladstone:
“You survived.”
Full circle
Shawn never severed ties with the place that once rejected him. In recent years, he has taken his drag show back to Escanaba. It is a complicated homecoming. The political climate in the Upper Peninsula has hardened; the rhetoric around “groomers” and anti-LGBTQ sentiment has made the environment hostile once again.
“I think they used to embrace drag up there a lot more than they do now — because of our political climate,” he said.
He goes to represent. He goes because he knows there might be another “Vaseline,” another “girly boy,” another kid hiding their heritage and their heart, who needs to see that survival is possible. Someone who needs to see that success as your best self is possible.
“I always make it a point to do a pride show,” he says. “We can never give up the fight.”
It is a brave act, returning to the scene of the crime not as a victim, but as a queen. It is the ultimate triumph over the bullies on bikes.
Honoring the empty chairs
As Shawn looks back, the triumph is tinged with the melancholia of a survivor. The golden age of Milwaukee drag was also the age of the plague. He lists the names of the dead like a rosary: Kimberly Ann, Basia Bazaar, Dominique Mahan, Tracy Shane.
“Sometimes I’ll be at a club… and a certain song will come on, and I’m instantly connected to all the people that passed away of AIDS,” he says.
He misses the era when life felt dangerous and free, while recognizing it was an era that not everyone survived. The stages, performers, mannequins and wigs of yesteryear are long gone. Even the clubs are gone: Club 219 has now been closed for 20 years. Two full decades.
“Club 219 has been gone so long, some of the younger queens have never even heard of it,” said Shawn. “It’s like, how do you not know about this place?”
But Shawn is still here.
He has built a rich life out of the scraps he was given in Gladstone. From the reservation to the runway, Shawn Wandahsega has walked a path paved with broken glass and sequins. Shawna Love is still booking shows, still gluing down wigs (now bought, not stolen), still demanding all the smoke and all the spotlight, and still causing a commotion.
And he’s nowhere near the end of his story.
Shawna Love is nominated as a Legend of Drag in the 2026 Wisconsin Drag Awards.
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