Under the knife/In front of the lens: Gigi Goode on her high-glam, mid-boob-job photoshoot
Check out the full feature with Gigi Goode, with photos by Max Bronner in the pages of WUSSY vol.12 — available now to order.
Gigi Goode wanted a little more jiggle. (I can relate). After two years on hormone-replacement therapy (HRT), she was loving her new breasts, but she couldn’t help feeling they were a little on the small side. “I could push them together with some duct-tape and socks,” she told me recently from her home in Los Angeles, “But I just knew I needed a little extra bump.”
That is how Goode, a model and drag performer, found herself on a steel surgical table at the clinic of Dr. David Rosenberg, a renowned Los Angeles plastic surgeon, undergoing a fat transfer breast augmentation. Dr. Rosenberg was well known for the procedure, which removes fat from other parts of the body and adds it to the breasts (“It’s basically an upside-down Brazilian butt lift,” Goode explained). What was novel, in this case, was that Goode was in a full face of makeup, and accompanied by a photographer and a videographer.
“They were glued to the wall in the back of the room,” she clarified with a laugh. “As much fun as we were having, like, it’s a full surgery.”
The photos, which Goode graciously gifted to WUSSY for this issue, are a thrilling aestheticization of gender as performance (the video footage will be released on “Avalon TV,” a lifestyle series from Goode’s creative family, the House of Avalon, coming out this month on Wow Presents+). Shot in dramatic blue light by Max Bronner, with creative direction by Grant Vanderbilt—“I wanted them to be dark and moody,” Goode said—they manage to be intimate and icy in equal measure. Lines of black ink scrawl across Goode’s body, marking where it will meet the surgeon’s knife, but as they are drawn over the fat deposits that will go to her breasts, they also denote the soft, rounded contours of a female torso. In one, facing a wall of mirrors, she could be a Degas ballerina, the lines on her back forming the corset of a tutu. Yet beneath the promise of fecundity runs an undercurrent of artifice. In another, a surgical technician kneels, holding a pair of silicone breasts up to her chest; the gesture of a supplicant, worshiping a false God.
It is alien to watch a woman’s body being constructed. It’s also electrifying. Gazing at the photos, I thought of Simone de Beauvoir’s famous assertion: here was the woman not born, but becoming.
It was an intuitive creative project for Goode, who’s been performing womanhood onstage since she was 15. “A lot of trans people who are drag performers prior to transitioning could probably agree that drag was a kind of outlet,” she told me. “The excuse to get to that state of feminine or masculine.” Femininity has held a fascination for her since she was young—“the female body is such a powerful thing, I almost worship it”—and through drag, she learned its gestures as a performance, from the arch of a foot to the toss of a head. Now, she told me, she’s re-learning herself as a drag artist, and as a woman, drawing new lines between self and performer.
Being onstage lately “feels more like being a showgirl than a drag queen,” she said. “It’s a bit less camp—more realness, just softer.” She’s been doing more modeling these days, walking the runway for Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty line and modeling with fellow Drag Race-star Symone for Moschino’s Fall 2021 campaign. “I don’t know that performing will ever leave my life, but I’m working towards a career that is more fashion-centric, more modeling,”
Goode shot to fame as a fan favorite on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 12, where at 21 she was the youngest cast-member. She earned top marks for her flawless makeup, signature wit and gorgeously tailored costumes, many of them made with her mom, Kristi, a costume designer; she went on to win second place, and emerged as a freshly minted celebrity.
Part of Goode’s Drag Race legacy is that she was the first nonbinary person to be on the show (other performers have come out as trans or GNC, but only afterwards); moreover, she came out as gender fluid on screen during filming, surprising herself as much as anyone.
“I’ve kind of always teetered between male and female my whole life,” she told her castmates in the werk room after her uncannily hilarious performance as Maria the Robot in Snatch Game. “I think I really always carry some female and male, even when I’m not in drag.” The moment earned Goode widespread praise and marked an important milestone in Drag Race history, opening the door for many more trans and gender-diverse performers on the show.
“You can see me having this realization in the moment,” Goode recalled of that onscreen coming-out. “It’s so bizarre to have that while you’re surrounded by cameras on national television!”
“I’ve always held women on a very high pedestal. And now, going through the world as a woman, that pedestal just gets higher and higher.”
Season 12, which aired Spring 2020, was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic; the finale and reunion were both filmed on Zoom. That year, Goode stayed busy from home, mostly within the bubble of a few good friends who live across the street, a group that has since evolved into House of Avalon. In the quiet, Goode’s understanding of her gender identity shifted. On New Year’s Eve, with everyone dressed to the nines, she shared an update: she was a woman. “They were the first people I told, and the next day I called my mom,” said Goode. “And then I didn’t tell anyone else until I had gotten my facial feminization surgery months after. I just knew I was not ready for other people’s voices and opinions.”
As a public figure—Goode has 1.3 Instagram followers—one’s personal life and one’s audience are enmeshed in a complicated duet; mediating the boundary between the two is itself a kind of performance. When she did come out to the world, in an Instagram video from August 2021, she did so with the glam stripped away entirely, appearing makeup-less in a sweatshirt, her head still wrapped in the bandage from her surgery. The response was overwhelmingly positive, but Goode said she was glad she kept her circle small for as long as she did. “As soon as I opened the floodgates and everyone came in, I already was secure about who I was,” she said. “None of that really had any weight on how I was feeling.”
Women performing drag--whether trans or cis—has historically been a fraught subject in the drag community. In 2018, RuPaul caused an uproar when he said trans women would “probably not” be eligible to compete on the show, later likening it to an athlete’s use of steroids to confer an unfair advantage. He apologized, and has since welcomed trans women contestants on the show. But Goode said she’s felt “nothing but warmth” from the drag community after coming out, and noted that there’s been a shift in the way people understand trans women’s role in the history of drag.
“People are starting to realize that trans women have been at the forefront of everything in our queer universe,” she explained. “Drag was spearheaded by trans women and then welcomed other people into it.”
And while the shifting morays around trans inclusivity are often framed by terms like visibility and representation, that wasn’t really the motivation behind Goode’s decision to document her breast augmentation surgery. Honestly, it just seemed like a fucking cool idea.
“As soon as the doctor told me I was going to be awake for the surgery, my light bulb went off,” she told me, laughing. “I asked him on the spot if we could do a photoshoot.” Dr. Rosenberg was game, if cautious. “Obviously it has to be super sanitary,” she said. “I was like, ‘Yes yes, we’ll follow all the rules!’”
When the surgery was over, Goode’s camera crew followed her outside to catch a bit of après-clinic. Dressed in a high-gloss latex gown, lace-up gold stilettos and sunglasses, Goode exits a discreet, well-heeled office, pushed in a wheelchair by her friend and mentor, LA-based spiritualist Harriet Wien. “Going through this transition, I’ve learned a lot about femininity from her, how to carry yourself,” Goode explained. “Harriet pushing me out in a wheelchair after I’ve just had my breasts done—she would hate this, but it feels like such a mother-daughter moment, which is really special to me.” The photos have the harried, flash-photo feel of a paparazzi chase, calling to mind the media bonanza that greeted Christine Jorgensen when she returned to the U.S. after her sex reassignment surgery. Here is the woman not born, but become.
Goode and I spoke about three months after her surgery; recovery had gone smoothly, she reported, and she was more in love with her body than ever before. “I look at myself naked in the mirror and I’m just like, wow,” she told me.
“I’ve always held women on a very high pedestal,” she added. “And now, going through the world as a woman, that pedestal just gets higher and higher.”
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Photo: Max Bronner @maxbronner
Creative Direction: Grant Vanderbilt @grantvanderbilt
Styling: Gigi Goode @thegigigoode
HMU: Gigi Goode @thegigigoode
Assisted By: Harriet Wien