Life beyond the stage: Jesse Havea’s journey from drag to advocacy

Jesse Havea grew up in a deeply religious Mormon household. Much of his early life was shaped by going to church, but as he began figuring out who he was and what he wanted for himself, he found another kind of belonging in the theater, and the stage became both a refuge and a place where he could fully be himself.  

“I had that Broadway dream of doing like eight shows a night when I was a little kid,” Havea said.

It was a performance of The Phantom of the Opera in fifth grade where Havea found his calling. As he continued to grow into the theater, Havea felt a calling to play larger roles that offered a more diverse representation of who he was as a performer.

“I realized that I did not want to do these basic Caucasian musicals. As a brown person, I was kind of sick of them,” Havea said. “I wanted to create, you know, stories that spoke to me, and I wanted to create queer things, and I wanted to create my own art. So that's kind of how drag came up.”

While Havea found acceptance in the New York City drag scene, he experienced rejection from his family.    

“When I was…I would say 12 years old, I told my dad that I didn't want to go to church anymore because I knew that I was gay, and I knew that the Mormon church didn't accept gays, and he said, if I didn't want to go to church anymore, then I couldn't come to his house, so I stopped going to his house and just stayed with my mom, and so I didn't see my dad anymore,” Havea said. 

Havea and his father are in the process of rebuilding a relationship that has been fragmented since Havea’s adolescence.

“I didn't really come out to my dad, and we were never really close,” Havea said. “I came out to my mom, and the first question she asked was, 'Do you think it's because your dad was never really close to you?' which she later apologized for later in life,” Havea said.

Havea’s mother did not understand what a drag queen really was. She conflated it with being transgender. It took a lot of explaining and understanding until she was able to separate the two, and after watching Havea’s drag performances, she saw the passion and love behind the art form.  [caption id="attachment_65274" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Jesse Havea.Ella Jane Simmons[/caption]

As the years passed and Havea continued to perform around New York, he landed a spot on season 12 of "RuPaul’s Drag Race." While Havea did not win, he left his season with newfound visibility, but that visibility came at a cost: a growing mental health crisis.

Like most competition shows, fans are passionate about their favorite and least favorite contestants, and Havea found himself on the end of relentless online hate from the show’s fanbase. 

“I would go online and just see all these hateful comments about people in my DMs telling me, 'What you did was horrible; you should go kill yourself,'" Havea said. “It got to the point where people were sending emails like, 'If I see you on the 1 train platform, I'm going to push you in front of the train.'” 

But viewers did not know that Havea’s was battling far more than online hate.  

“I was also using a lot of drugs while I was at Drag Race, and I brought a lot of prescription drugs with me that I bought off the street and was using and ran out. And so, like, not only was I using drugs, but I was feigning for drugs while I was on Drag Race,” Havea said. “I was taking a lot of Adderall to get through it because I was so tired, and then when I ran out, I kind of was like, fucking crazy.”

After the season aired, Havea took medication and regularly saw a therapist, but the online harassment became too much and eventually led to a month-long stay in a psychiatric facility. 

“I was doing a lot, a lot of drugs to just cope with everything. And I tried to commit suicide twice. I ended up on my floor like passed out, vomit everywhere. I just took all the medication that I had, and it didn't work, and I didn't tell anyone,” Havea said.

Through a rehabilitation program, Havea pulled himself out of his addiction and forged a new path that was focused on sobriety and personal growth, but a new challenge emerged: a degenerative spine disease that Havea would not recover from. 

Havea’s spinal condition developed from years of performing unsafe stunts on stage that put extreme pressure on his spine. 

“The reason I started drag is that I wanted to perform my own art every single day, and that thing is essentially causing me the most pain and killing me from the inside out,” Havea said. “Performing is everything to me, and so it's kind of losing that shine and that luster, so it's time to move on from that.” 

Since March, Havea has undergone treatment for congenital spinal conditions that ultimately forced him to retire from performing in drag after 13 years. 

While recovering and adapting to the physical limitations caused by his spinal condition, Havea is transitioning his career from the stage toward political advocacy, public speaking, and digital political content creation.

“I want to be the modern-day Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson because they didn't wait for permission to fight for people who were being ignored, and I want to use everything I have to make sure that the LGBTQ+ community is protected and visible and never pushed to the margins ever again,” Havea said.