For Joel Filmore, his entire identity as a therapist is about authenticity and congruence.
“Therapy at it’s foundation is about relationships, and you can’t have relationship with someone you don’t know,” he said.
That’s why he is upfront with clients about his past and on stage drag queen persona, Moana Lotte.
“For me Moana is all about bringing love and joy, but also changing people’s hearts and minds about what it means to be a professional, because I am a professional despite what people might think,” he said.
Moana will perform along with other drag queens from throughout the region for two shows to celebrate the arrival of 2022. The Martini Room in Elgin will present “New Year’s Eve is a Drag with Moana Lotte” for two shows on Dec. 31.
An early bird show runs from 8-10 p.m., followed by a later show from 11 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. Jan. 1, 2022. The late show only includes appetizers/tapas. Both shows are for adult audiences only, with each show unique with no repeat outfits or numbers. Audience members are encouraged to get their tickets early, as the shows are expected to sell out.
It takes about four hours for Filmore to transform into Moana, with him taking time so he is not stressed “because I know as soon as I get in drag I’m going to be in pain all night because it’s not comfortable at all,” he said of the elaborate costumes, padding and makeup worn. If pressed for time, Moana can be ready in an hour and a half.
As Moana, she loves to make audiences smile and laugh.
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“The moment I start performing until the end is my favorite moment in time,” Filmore said. “Because I have a pretty traumatic past and when I’m entertaining a crowd, it’s the only time the negative voices in my head stop.”
To say 51-year-old Filmore has been through a lot would be an understatement. Growing up biracial in a rural Michigan town that wasn’t very accepting of people of color, he never really understood his place in the world, he said.
“And then coming into puberty and realizing I wasn’t like all the other little boys, that was also another piece of challenge,” he said.
As a boy, he was always very effeminate and very non-gender conforming, he said. At the time though, “being queer and trans or bi or any of the letters of the queer alphabet” was not something that was talked about.
Then, as a young teenager, he had a moment of realization, he said.
“When I was 13, I put on some makeup. My grandma used to sell Avon and she was gone and I was home alone and I was bored. And I was playing with this big box of makeup she had around the house and I put on makeup and I looked in the mirror and I was like, “wow, I’m really pretty. I think God made a mistake. Maybe I was supposed to be born a girl.’ And so from that point on, from the age of 13, I started dressing up like a girl in secret. Mostly with makeup, but then I taught myself to sew and I would make little outfits.
“I’ve always been drawn to feminine things. I tell folks I identify as a trans female, and I always have,” he said. “I just never transitioned because when I grew up, where I grew up and how I grew up, it just wasn’t an option for me.”
Because of the abuse he experienced, Filmore, who uses he/him pronouns in his daily life but she/her when Moana, left home when he was young.
“I was a wreck of a teenager because of he way I grew up and I was a hellacious adult,” he said.
In 1991 at the age of 21, he moved to Chicago’s South Side where he lived with his father while going to college. Eventually, he left home and started living as a woman.
“Nobody knew that I was not a female when I was 21. I was taking hormones and growing out my breasts,” he said.
In addition to being on his own, he was also very naive, he said.
“I ended up getting caught up in sex trafficking,” Filmore said. “I became a victim of a pimp who forced me out onto the streets and I was forced into prostitution and homeless for 10 years. And I was addicted to crack and heroin.
“That’s how the pimp controlled me, he got me hooked on drugs and forced me out onto the streets. So for those 10 years, I was being arrested and going in and out of jail for prostitution.”
Eventually, he was able to get away from his pimp.
“But my addiction was my pimp after I got away from my actual pimp,” he said. “For 10 years I was a homeless, drug addicted prostitute and then in December of 2001, I was arrested for a robbery. I stole a purse and ended up getting sentenced to three years in prison.
“Because it was nonviolent crime, I only had to serve 18 months, so half the time,” he said. “But that 18 months changed my life, because it gave me 18 months of stability.”
In addition to stability, it also gave him time to reflect. While talking with other prisoners and learning their stories, he found for many of them the prison had a revolving door.
“That scared the hell out of me because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison, but I knew that everything that I was doing, the way I was living my life, was exactly the recipe for spending the rest of your life in prison,” said Filmore, who at that point was 32.
He thought about what his life could look like, and began working with a counselor. He was released to a halfway house and enrolled in school.
“Started college in August of 2004 and then I just kept going year-round out of fear that if I stopped I would relapse on drugs,” he said.
As he continued his education, he “started thinking that maybe those stories my family told me growing up, that I was stupid, that I would never amount to anything, that maybe those stories weren’t true,” he said.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in psychology, he went on to earn a master’s in clinical psychology and then a doctorate in counselor education
Through education and therapy, he became Dr. Joel Filmore with a successful career as a therapist and professor and happily married and living in DeKalb.
But he still felt like something was missing, and it took a while to figure out why he wasn’t completely fulfilled.
“Three years ago I realized that I was not giving any voice to a part of myself that was really important to me, part of myself that saved my life. And that was my feminine persona,” he said. “I wouldn’t have survived my childhood without her.”
He had given up dressing as a woman while getting his education and then starting his career.
“I figured nobody would respect me as a professional if I was a drag queen,” but once he finished his degrees and had a successful practice, he felt like he could embrace that part of himself as well.
“It was rough because I hadn’t done it in almost 20 years. And I looked terrible, because the way they do drag now is so different from when I did it in the ’80s and ’90s,” he said. “But I picked up the skills very, very quickly in terms of my makeup and everything. Fast forward three years and I have this incredible drag career at 51 years of age that I never would have imagined in a million years.”
After winning the title of Ms. Rainbow at Open Door Health Center’s drag show in 2019, part of Moana’s prize included performing during the Elgin Fringe Festival. When Filmore’s busy work schedule didn’t allow for Moana to take part in Fringe, The Martini Room provided a venue on another date.
The show was such a success; it has become a regular event. Now, Moana performs a monthly show at The Martini Room on the first Saturday of the month to sold-out audiences.
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“It’s primarily a cisgender heterosexual crowd that comes. And that’s one of the things I love about it, it’s a show where everybody from the community comes,” Filmore said. “This is not a gay bar and it’s not a queer show. It’s just a drag show that’s at the Martini Room.”
Moana also performs regular shows in DeKalb and Rockford, and will be heading to national Miss Continental Elite competition after recently winning Miss Wisconsin Elite 2022.
Filmore said he doesn’t worry about people who think it’s unprofessional for a doctor to perform in drag.
“Those people don’t matter to me, because I have found since I brought Moana back to life that I have been able to impact people’s lives on an even greater scale than I have been just as a therapist or just as a professor.”
Not only is he a drag queen, but more importantly he’s a professor, doctor and therapist, he said.
“The reality is that people have preconceived notions of who they think drag queens are or where they come from of what they’re about. Growing up my life would have been so much better if I had seen people that represented me. People that lived their lives in way that were meaningful to me.
“So I try to be that — sometimes at great risk to myself — but I try to be that for other people because what I’ve been through and what I survived in my life, I have very little fear. I would say I’m a pretty fearless person. I recognize that not everybody has that ability or that luxury to be fearless, because in order to be fearless, you have to have been through some s–t. And not everyone has been through some stuff so they don’t know what they’re capable of surviving.”
New Year’s Eve is a Drag with Moana Lotte
When: Dec. 31 — early bird show: 8-10 p.m.; late show 11 p.m.-1:30 a.m. Jan. 1, 2022
Where: The Martini Room, 161 E. Chicago St., Elgin
Tickets: $30 for early bird show; $50 for late show
Information: martiniroomelgin.com/new-years-eve.html
Kathy Cichon is a freelance reporter for the Courier-News.