SHOOTING STAR

Christine and the Queens’ restless self-inventions.

- HANIF ABDURRAQIB

 The origin story of Christine and the Queens involves the loneliness inflicted by a double cleaving. In 2010, Héloïse Letissier, a twenty-two-year-old from Nantes, was expelled from a theatre conservatory in Paris on the heels of a disorienting breakup. He made his way to London and stumbled one night into the legendary Soho club Madame Jojo’s. The exhilarating drag shows he saw there inspired him to create a stage persona—Christine—to free himself from the collision of uncertainties that defined his real life. For Héloïse, anguish may have been an inflexible, immovable object, but Christine could mold it into whatever form felt useful. This kind of generative shape-shifting would become the engine for Letissier’s musical career.