On the eve of her annual “Terror Vault” opening and leading up to her Election Night Commonwealth Club World Affairs appearance in San Francisco on November 4th, the drag horror icon discusses preserving queer history, building a multi-platform brand, and surviving in a world that wants us gone.
On a Wednesday afternoon in early October, just 24 hours before the opening of “Terror Vault” — San Francisco’s most ambitious immersive horror experience — Joshua Grannell doesn’t have a minute to spare. But when you’re Peaches Christ, the drag horror icon who’s been pushing boundaries since the 1990s, impossible schedules are just part of the gig.
“I don’t have a minute to spare these days until we get this goddamn show open,” Peaches tells me via Zoom, somehow looking camera-ready despite the chaos. It’s a fitting introduction to someone who’s built an empire on making the impossible look effortless — from launching “Midnight Mass” in 1998 to directing films, hosting sold-out shows with Tim Curry, and preparing to kick off a new LGBTQ+ cultural series at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs on Tuesday, November 4th.
The timing couldn’t be more deliberate. As California votes on Proposition 50 — a measure to counter Texas’s partisan gerrymandering — and the nation watches election returns, Peaches Christ will take the stage for “Camp, Chaos & Democracy: Peaches Christ on Making Queer Art When Politics Gets Ugly.”
The event brings together Peaches, local activists, and other queer icons at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs’ headquarters at 110 The Embarcadero along the San Francisco Bay.
Co-produced by Michelle Meow and the GAYGENCY division of MOUSA.I, the evening promises a VIP reception, a panel titled “When the Real World Gets Scarier Than Horror Movies,” and an intimate fireside chat with Peaches Christ herself — all while election results roll in.
But this isn’t just another drag show. It’s a deliberate act of cultural preservation and political resistance in a city that’s fighting for its queer legacy, on a night when democracy itself hangs in the balance.
“I feel like San Francisco has been forgotten when it comes to popular culture right now and what is seen as drag,” Christ (Grannell) said. “I have nothing against the TV shows at all, but I do think it’s important to let young queers know that there’s a lot of different ways to do this — not just what’s prescribed by a reality TV show. And when the real world gets scarier than horror movies — when politics gets truly ghoulish — that’s when we most need to make art, perform, and remind each other why joy is resistance.”
Election Night as Cultural Moment
Scheduling this event for November 4 on Election Night wasn’t an accident. As Californians vote on Proposition 50, a measure designed to counter Texas’s aggressive partisan gerrymandering under H.B. 4 (PlanC2333), and as the nation watches midterm returns that could reshape Congress, the event’s co-producers saw an opportunity to merge cultural celebration with political engagement.
“When democracy gets ghoulish, we sing, we perform, we make art,” said Michelle Meow, the event’s senior producer and co-host. “The Commonwealth Club has been a nonpartisan forum for public discourse since 1903. On Election Night 2025, we’re using that platform to remind people that LGBTQ+ voices, stories, and culture are not optional parts of democracy. We’re essential to it.”
The evening’s warm-up panel, “When the Real World Gets Scarier Than Horror Movies,” will feature three LGBTQ+ panelists discussing survival strategies when the political landscape turns hostile that will be moderated by Celso Dulay. That will be followed by Peaches Christ’s fireside chat — moderated by Meow — that will explore how 25 years of drag, horror, and camp have always been inherently political, even when they looked like “just” entertainment.
The Commonwealth Club building is an official voting location on November 4th. People will literally be voting in the same building where we’re celebrating queer art and resistance. That feels exactly right.
Building an Empire on Camp and Horror
Peaches Christ’s journey from Catholic school kid in Annapolis, Maryland, to San Francisco drag royalty reads like a John Waters fever dream — which is fitting, since Waters himself played a crucial role in the story.
“I really look at the three things that led me to becoming Peaches,” she explained. “The inspiration I got from watching Elvira as a kid, discovering Freddy Krueger and ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’ and then realizing that John Waters was this filmmaker working in Maryland, just up the street from where I was growing up.”
When local news covered Divine during the filming of “Hairspray,” young Joshua’s world cracked open. “Hollywood seemed a million miles away. Baltimore was a 20-minute drive. The idea that those films were being made in a place that I recognized showed me that there was a future for me.”
A fourth ingredient to her legacy came from a midnight screening of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
“Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter — that looked like liberation to me. I knew I wasn’t like other kids, and I knew it was more than just being gay. I was a freak. I wasn’t even a normal gay.”
At Penn State, Grannell brought John Waters to campus as a guest speaker—partly to prove his worth to faculty who “were disgusted by me,” but also to spend a weekend with his idol. Waters planted a seed about San Francisco and the Cockettes, the legendary hippie drag troupe. A week after graduation, Joshua flew west and became Peaches Christ on the airplane.
Midnight Mass and the San Francisco Legacy
In 1998, Peaches launched “Midnight Mass” at the Landmark Bridge Theater, creating elaborate pre-show drag spectacles before cult film screenings. The concept — inspired by what she thought The Cockettes did (though later corrected by The Cockettes themselves: “This is nothing like what we did… it looks like you rehearse”) — became a cultural phenomenon that ran for over a decade.
“Things that have been ‘normal’ in San Francisco’s underground queer scene — or really, the predominant queer scene, it’s not even underground — like bearded drag, cis women doing drag, bisexuality in the drag community, trans women, the interconnection between all these things,” Christ (Grannell) reflected. “I got to inherit that in the ’90s. When I started, I would go places and quickly learn how controversial some of this stuff was. But at that time, it was totally normal in San Francisco and not normal anywhere else in the world.”
The “Midnight Mass” legacy continues through her podcast with Michael Varrati, where they dissect cult films with the same passionate nerdiness that made the original shows legendary. “I’ll never tire of talking about cult movies. It’s my favorite thing,” Christ (Grannell) said. “The audience is bigger than I thought it would be, and what I’m realizing is—because we are so niche within a niche within a niche—the people who find us really love it. They are intense fans.”
Terror Vault: Where Horror Meets Queer Art
Since 2018, Christ has channeled her obsessions into “Terror Vault,” an immersive horror experience created with collaborator David Flower. This year’s production, “Hexed,” features a global coven of witches threatening humanity — a departure from last year’s explicitly political sci-fi show about shape-shifting reptilian aliens representing “the Zuckerbergs and the current administration.”
“After we did that show, we wanted to do something totally different,” Christ (Grannell) explained. “We just took the audience into the future with aliens. Let’s go classic. Let’s do something super Halloweeny and lean into folk horror. And obviously, that’s witches, which are so queer.”
The 60-minute experience includes mazes, jump scares, scripted scenes, and additional attractions like the Fang Bang vampire bar and the Triple HeXXXed Witch Strip Club. “I’d say this year’s show is maybe the most purely fun,” she noted. “These are cannibal witches who are eating children.”
Building “Terror Vault” requires tearing apart and rebuilding the entire show each year — “exhausting and insane,” but necessary. “David and I are obsessive nerds,” Christ (Grannell) said of their creative partnership. “He had production design experience I didn’t have, and I had writing and directing experience he didn’t. Together, we realized we could create something special.”
- Peaches Christ photographed on 12/18/24 by Jeremy Gable and Camillo Kearns.
Drag horror icon Peaches Christ will open a new LGBTQ+ cultural series on 11/04.
Preserving What We’re Losing: The Doris Fish Story
Perhaps Peaches’ most important current project is “Who Does That Bitch Think She Is?” — a film about the making of the 1991 cult classic “Vegas in Space” and its creative inspiration and star, the legendary drag performer Doris Fish.
“I actually pitched this movie before Craig Seligman’s biography of Doris came out,” Christ (Grannell) revealed. The project — co-written with Michael Varrati and modeled after Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” — tells the story of Doris Fish, Miss X, Tippie, and their Sluts-A-Go-Go troupe, who spent eight years making “Vegas in Space” while hustling (literally) to finance it.
“Doris financed this movie through being a sex worker,” Christ (Grannell) explained. “They were shooting it in an apartment in Hayes Valley for 18 months. It is bananas. And of course, it’s an AIDS movie — an AIDS movie we haven’t seen yet.”
The tragic operatic finale: Doris died two months before the film premiered at the Castro Theatre.
“I’m motivated to spread the story of Heklina or Doris Fish or the Cockettes because San Francisco has been forgotten,” Christ (Grannell) said. “Sharing the story of Doris doing drag in the late ’70s and early ’80s—painting their faces green, doing giant fright wigs—is a good reminder to young people that there’s a lot more out there that you should seek out and learn about.”
The Word We Don’t Say Anymore
Our conversation turns to language, specifically the word that defined a community and then became weaponized against it: “tranny.”
“Young people who don’t understand the historical context of that word have this idea that it was, and always has been, a pejorative,” Christ (Grannell) explained. “That’s just simply not true, certainly not in San Francisco. In the ’90s and early 2000s, there was literally a ‘Tranny Film Festival’ run by trans women at the Roxie Cinema. It was an umbrella term to describe all of us gender non-conforming people when we didn’t have another language for it.”
The shift came when straight people appropriated the term:
“Poor Christian Siriano went on Project Runway and flippantly used the word, which at that time was a term within our community. Then straight people started using it. Look up the Amy Poehler sketch of her being Christian Siriano going ‘you’re tranny, you’re tranny.’ Then the Wall Street Journal used it in a headline: ‘Tranny found dead at Hudson River.'”
“Once again, things that aren’t supposed to be for everyone become part of the bigger culture, and they get misused and ruined,” Christ (Grannell) reflected. “People thought Heklina and I were giving in to critics or activists when we changed the name of ‘Trannyshack.’ The reality is, we were bummed that the word had become a pejorative, but we also undeniably understood that it had.”
From Soaps to Symphony Shows
Peaches Christ’s entrepreneurial spirit extends beyond performance. With her husband Nihat’s company, NIST Collection, she launched Madame Peaches luxury soaps – gothic, hand-cut bars with names like “Funeral Rose,” “Witches’ Lavender,” and “Spectral Glow.”
“During the pandemic, we were frustrated we weren’t seeing each other more,” Christ (Grannell) explained. “We were having conversations about spending more time together in January of 2020. Then the shit hit the fan, and we got to be attached at the hip for three years.”
The new soap line emerged as a way to collaborate in Nihat’s world after he’d proven himself as a natural stage manager for Peaches’ tours. “It was easy figuring out ways for him to work with me. Figuring out how Peaches could work in his world was more challenging. We came up with this idea of the Gothic soap collection, and he designed a couple of the soaps specifically for this collection.”
She’s also pushing into new territory with symphony shows alongside conductor Edwin Outwater, plus more intimate rock events. “We started doing shows with a house rock band and drag performers doing live vocals,” Christ (Grannell) said. “We did one in June called Punk Pride — all punk music with drag queen singers. Our next one is called Smells Like Queen Spirit — an evening of gay grunge. I’m pushing myself and drag performers out of our comfort zones.”
Tim Curry and Cross-Generational Fandom
Earlier this year, Peaches hosted “An Evening with Tim Curry” at SF Sketchfest – a dream decades in the making.
“I have a very small wish list of guests I want to work with because I’ve been so fortunate,” she said. “I just didn’t think Tim Curry would happen. He had a severe stroke and was in rehabilitation. He doesn’t do this kind of show. So the fact that it happened, and that he was so generous and sweet — it’s a real kind of dream come true.”
The event revealed something unexpected: Tim Curry’s cross-generational appeal extends far beyond Rocky Horror. “I come from the Gen X generation of fans, but during the Tim Curry costume contest, I was like, ‘Who are you?’ And the whole young audience knew these animated characters from the last 20 years. He spans literally all the generations.”
Last month, Peaches was flown to Los Angeles to be interviewed for a major Tim Curry documentary. “When I tell you the names they were dropping of people they’d just interviewed, I could not believe I was being brought in for this thing.”
Surviving Dark Times: Advice for Young Queers
When I ask about advice for young LGBTQ+ artists navigating today’s political climate, Grannell doesn’t sugarcoat the reality.
“I grew up coming to terms with my queer identity in the ’80s and equating it with a sure death sentence,” he began. “As a kid, I thought I wouldn’t live to see 30. I watched friends pass away. The good news is that things did change. A cocktail of medication came along that changed everything.”
He paused before continuing: “Right now, young people and older people are in a really horrible time period. It is bleak. It’s really scary. I’ve never lived through having an actual dictator in charge. Let’s just face facts — that’s where we’re at. We have a dictator. This is fascism. This is clearly about getting rid of us. I hate to dance around it because at this point, why bother?”
But then comes the turn: “The only thing I can equate it to as a queer person is thinking that maybe AIDS would take us all out. Luckily for a lot of us, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and there was joy and amazing experiences that came from surviving those really awful, ugly years.”
“Joy is resistance,” Christ (Grannell) insists. “We need to hang on to that concept while also doing the work to make as much change as we can. Because sometimes it feels so hopeless, and we feel so powerless. Leaning into finding joy where you can, spending time with friends, continuing to build community, not living in fear — as hard as it sounds — is about the best we can do right now.”
What’s Left on the Bucket List?
After building a career spanning drag performance, film directing, immersive theater, podcasting, beauty products, and major film projects, what’s left?
“I tend not to think about things like my impact or the political side,” Christ (Grannell) admitted. “I just am what I am. When you’re in it and doing it, you’re not thinking ‘I’m changing the course of drag.’ You’re having fun with your friends and raising the bar for each other and creating art.”
She continued: “It wasn’t until later, when people started writing about this in books — I’m in a book, and I read this chapter about ‘All About Evil‘ in this queer slasher book, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, he makes me sound so smart and groundbreaking and innovative.’ I wasn’t thinking that way at all. So for me, I’m like, I don’t know — you tell me what the legacy is.”
Perhaps that’s the point. Peaches Christ has spent 25+ years simply doing the work: preserving queer history, creating spaces for community, pushing artistic boundaries, and proving that there are infinite ways to exist as a queer artist — all while making it look like pure, joyful chaos.
“I still love Halloween. I love scary stuff. I love horror movies,” she said. “The older I’ve gotten, the more research people have done on what makes us horror freaks, the more I’ve understood it has a lot to do with not being able to deal with the real world. We process the real horrors of the world through our love of spooky stuff. The serial killers are usually normal-looking people. The Goths and the spooky kids — we’re the ones who can’t deal with war or what’s happening in the world, so we use these things to escape or live in a fantasy world.”
In a world that increasingly feels like a horror show, maybe that’s exactly what we need.
An Evening with Peaches Christ
“Camp, Chaos & Democracy: Peaches Christ on Making Queer Art When Politics Gets Ugly”
When: Tuesday, November 4, 2025 (Election Night)
- 4:00-5:15 PM: VIP Reception with Peaches Christ
- 5:15-6:00 PM: General doors open, drinks + networking
- 6:05-6:50 PM: “When the Real World Gets Scarier Than Horror Movies” panel discussion
- 7:05-7:55 PM: Featured fireside chat with Peaches Christ & Audience Q&A
- 8:00-9:00 PM: Rooftop after-party overlooking the Bay Bridge and San Francisco Bay
Where: Commonwealth Club World Affairs, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco
Tickets go on sale this Friday, 10/17. Please visit the Club’s website for all the details.
This event marks the launch of the Commonwealth Club World Affairs’ new LGBTQ+ Cultural Series, co-produced by Michelle Meow and the GAYGENCY division of MOUSA.I. The evening will be livestreamed and archived for future viewing.
“Terror Vault: Hexed” continues through November 1 at The Mint in San Francisco (just blocks from the Commonwealth Club World Affairs event). Visit terrorvault.com for tickets.
