Meet Gemma Tolstoy, Chapel Hill’s “sweaty Siberian silly goose”
Gemma Tolstoy emerges from her shared dressing room at The Station in Carrboro, N.C., on Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023.
CARRBORO, N.C. — In a green room the size of a closet, five UNC students are getting ready for one of their largest shows yet.
They share airplane bottles of cinnamon whiskey while spraying wet glitter down their legs and hot-gluing fabric directly onto their skin.
One of them is Gemma Tolstoy, dressed tonight as Miss Piggy, wearing a pale pink gown over a skirt she wrapped in homemade rubber bacon.
She’s a young drag queen, delicately balancing her craft, her job and her classes. She uses her performance art to clarify her life experiences. Her passion for drag and constant support for her peers has made her a leader in the local queer community.
When she’s not in drag, her name is Jenna Gartland.
She was raised frolicking among guinea hens, foxes and siblings in an oceanfront state park on New York’s Fire Island, a few miles from the island’s historic haven of gay resorts.
Before this though, her life began about 5,000 miles away. She was born in Siberian Russia and was adopted to America when she was three. She knows little more about her birth mother than her first name.
Today, her mysterious beginnings inform her fantastical present.
“If I stayed there — what would have happened? It would have been Gemma. Gemma is a mafia boss's daughter and has a pet bear. It's definitely fantastical, but fantasy helps you cope with reality that’s so mundane,” she said.
Gartland defines her drag persona as a “sweaty Siberian silly goose.” To her, drag is a way of exploring and romanticizing a life she never had the chance to live.
Nathan Koch, who recently co-founded a production company with Gartland and performs alongside her as Alexis Carr, said drag is a ruleless art form, one that Gartland uses to its fullest, most detailed capacity.
The first time that Ella Valentino met Gartland, she was seated on campus, washed in a golden sunset, and Valentino stopped to tell her she looked gorgeous. The two have been inseparable ever since.
The first time that Valentino saw Gartland perform in drag, she was overcome with joy, and she felt as if she was watching a movie.
“She doesn’t see drag as singing and dancing,” she said. “What she’s really putting on is a show. She’s an actress.”
Gartland said drag is “advanced dress-up,” a limitless form of self-expression.
On stage, she’s been everything from a demon to a pop star.
“Society doesn't tell me what a gay man has to look like. Society doesn't tell me what a trans woman looks like. I create what I want,” she said. “I think it's freedom above all else.”
“Fantasy helps you cope with reality”
Gartland sleeps every night under shelves lined with high heels, a disco ball and a magazine with Dolly Parton on the cover.
She lives in a carefully curated world of queer iconography. Her makeup is neatly stacked in containers on her dorm’s desk. Her closets are laced with thrifted gowns and a particularly important pink coat from Forever 21.
When she bought it, it was January 2021, and her name was not yet Jenna.
Days after buying the coat, she wore it during a walk in the woods. A stranger she met asked her name. She suddenly found herself unable to say her deadname.
“I think I’m Jenna,” she said.
“What?”
“I think I’m Jenna.”
After years of what she described as clinical gender dysphoria, she came out publicly as transgender.
Now, a year into her transition, she is starting to see the effects of hormone treatments.
“Every time I look in the mirror, I feel like crying,” she said. “I'm so happy. It's incredible.”
She said her trans identity has influenced her drag.
Koch, Gartland’s close friend, is nonbinary and presents gender-non-descript in their daily life. But when Koch becomes Alexis Carr, they are glamorous and hyper-feminine, said Gartland.
“It's like ‘Alexis is here! Glamorati!’” Gartland said. “But, I am that in my daily life now, so it's no longer my goal (in drag) to be as feminine as possible. So, now my goal is ‘How do I flip the script? How do I do better than I did last time?’”
At their latest show together, Gartland pretended to eat rubber bacon while dressed as a pig — a metaphor for self-destruction.
“It was so highly conceptual. That's really what I admire about it, to be honest, because I love to just get on stage and get naked,” Koch said.
“Every time I look in the mirror, I feel like crying”
Despite a recent rise in anti-drag conservatism, drag is not underground nor is it an art that will subside anytime soon, Gartland said.
“To assume that drag is this new, perverted, Gen-Z creation is just objectively incorrect. Drag is here and drag will always be here. It goes back to Shakespeare,” she said.
During her freshman year, she co-founded “Chapel Heelz,” a drag interest group on UNC’s campus whose numbers have grown substantially since its inception, now boasting more than 600 followers on Instagram.
Last semester, the group raised over $1,300 for gender-affirming health care for local youth.
She was recently unanimously elected as the group’s producer.
Ali Andrews, a member of the club, said she admires Gartland’s leadership among the queens more than anything.
“Backstage, she generally is always helping other people, including makeup, hair, taking wigs off, everything else,” Andrews said. “Every time I’ve seen a problem, it’s been Jenna that gets there first and is ready to help.”
“Drag is here, and drag will always be here”
On a Saturday night, as a squeezed bar crowd settles in, the queens are crammed into a closet-sized green room. Fake nails are scattered across a chair, a hot glue gun dangles from an eye-level outlet and a can of hairspray sits in the sink.
This is the first “club gig” run by Gartland and Koch’s production company, Rock Hard Productions.
Moments before going on stage, the five queens ironically drop their voices and shout masculine piths you might hear in a football locker room. They then slowly emerge by the bar’s stage as Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” begins to roar through a sound system.
Gartland appears as Gemma Tolstoy, flanked by four of her friends in full finery, including Koch as Alexis Carr. A thunderous audience meets the troupe.
At the end of the show, the queens conclude their first self-hosted night with a bow, as a tote bag full of loose dollar bills sits on the green room floor backstage.
“I was just proud more than anything,” Gartland said later.
For her, these performances are more than just passion projects or entertainment. They are an act of preservation — preserving artistic individualism, preserving the physical representation of the queer community, preserving a glamorous counterculture.
“I was just proud more than anything”
Gemma Tolstoy greets her friends and fans after a show at The Station in Carrboro, N.C., on Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023.