Shane Jenek’s performance career may have begun in suburban Brisbane alongside The Veronicas, but the Queensland capital was also a closet that the Sandgate District High School graduate had to leave in order to find himself.

In so doing, the former waiter at Jimmy’s on the Mall also found Courtney Act; surprise star of Australian Idol, American reality-TV darling and one of the most beloved drag queens in the world.

“I went to Sydney when I was 18 to check out NIDA,” Jenek remembers. “Afterward, I was meant to go on to Perth and check out WAPA. But I’d just discovered the Stonewall Hotel, and realised that I liked boys, and so I lived a lifetime of gay in one week.

“Until I had to go back to Brisbane, and back into the closet. I thought my parents would disown me.”

As it turned out, Jenek’s parents didn’t bat an eyelid. In fact, they’d once worked in Kings Cross, and knew Carlotta of Les Girls, the ‘Queen of the Cross’. They’d been supporting his flair for diamantes and drama since before he was crowned Mr Tiny Tot at Dreamworld in 1987. They’d sent him off to year 12 in a senior jersey that read Spice Boy ’99. According to Jenek, his sexuality was only a surprise to him. A surprise that wasn’t entirely welcomed by a boy born during Queensland’s Bjelke-Peterson government, when police enforced anti-homosexuality laws and the AIDS epidemic cast a grim shadow.

“In retrospect, I’m not terribly sympathetic to people who are still in the closet, especially certain Australian celebrities who I know for a fact are gay,” he says. “I think, ‘you’re reinforcing a negative stereotype, and if you keep with that attitude that’s going to be what’s perpetuated’. I had listened to the stories of society, and so I was filled with fear.”

Jenek feels now he needn’t have been. To his parents, and to his friends, he says he was always the theatrical boy with a great gift for performance. Jenek says he was never really picked on or bullied at school, but that, on reflection, he was deliberately ignorant of schoolyard homophobia. It was a “survival strategy”. Yet Jenek did feel genuinely treasured by the other talented kids who also spent their Wednesday nights at the northside’s infamous Fame Talent Agency. They included twins Lisa and Jessica Origliasso, and their brother Julian, would sweat it out with Jenek in halls in Strathpine and Bowen Hills, rehearsing for their next big suburban shopping mall spectacular. Mum Colleen Origliasso would sometimes collect the kids for dinner at their place, not knowing the pre-teen triple-threats scoffing tacos or spaghetti bolognese in her kitchen would go on to be some of the biggest entertainment acts in Australia. Yet that’s where the Veronicas and Courtney Act were born.

“I think that Fame and theatre school was really my saving grace,” Jenek says. “It was a sanctuary that I could go after school, and enjoy a support network which gave me the confidence and strength to carry that back to regular school and sort of be like ‘hey, this is who I am, I wear costumes and I perform’.

“We’d perform pantomimes at Strathpine or Toombul, and I think we did Chermside once. In grade six, I was a mouse in a full-body grey leotard. My sports teacher – who was also my maths teacher and not someone I got on with particularly well – saw me prancing around at the shops. I remember thinking, ‘this is not going to go well,’ and then at parent-teacher night, my mum confessed to the man who taught me maths that I was really having problems with the sports teacher. She didn’t realise they were the same person.”

Jenek began school at Nashville primary in the bayside suburb of Brighton. But his parents wanted him to go to private school for his secondary studies, so he transferred to St Paul’s in Bald Hills a year early to “acclimatise”. It was a disaster, especially religious education. The teen loathed the sermonising, rigid instruction, and mass, though he did enjoy the musical value of some of the hymns. He moved to Sandgate two years later to discover all the sweet kids he remembered had turned “into bad boys smoking behind the toilets”. Still, by the time schoolies rolled around, there was a fight between the boys and girls because both sides wanted to claim Shane-o, or Shane-y, for their tribe.

“We went to the Gold Coast, and I remember that I didn’t do dairy, so I had a carton of soy milk and a bottle of Kaluha, and I was mixing white Russians that way which I now like to think puts me ahead of the dietary requirements curve,” Jenek laughs. “After school, I remember going clubbing with the girls – I would hang out with the girls in Brisbane – but we’d be going out to places like City Rowers or Mary Street. And even then I remember they’d drink rum and cokes and I just couldn’t do it; rum just wasn’t me.”

Despite finding fame in America via RuPaul’s Drag Race and performances with the likes of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Miley Cyrus, the Australian Idol starlet (he auditioned for season one as Jenek but missed out, so he tried again as Courtney and qualified for the semifinals), still spends time in his hometown. In addition to the Sydney Opera House, Courtney Act has played the Brisbane Powerhouse and is sometimes spotted at the Fluffy club nights held at Fortitude Valley’s Family nightclub. Plus, Mr and Mrs Jenek are still in town, and as is the case with many of the city’s expats, family always remains a reason to revisit Brisbane.

By Katherine Feeney of Sydney Morning Herald