The 2023 Out100: D'Arcy Drollinger

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In 2023 drag performer D’Arcy Drollinger made history when she became the first drag laureate of San Francisco and began serving as an ambassador for the city’s LGBTQ+, arts, nightlife, and entertainment communities. But Drollinger didn’t just make history in California; she is also the first drag laureate in the world.

The significance of this honor is not lost on Drollinger, who owns San Francisco’s Oasis, the largest drag-owned club in the United States. “It has become increasingly dangerous to do drag,” says Drollinger. “You now not only have to work your ass off as a performer, but all the while you find yourself looking over your shoulder.”

Aside from safety, one of the biggest obstacles Drollinger faces is being taken seriously as a drag artist. “Once people realize that drag is at the center of what you are creating, it is most often immediately regarded as disposable entertainment and not taken seriously,” says Drollinger. “It has taken me years of hard work, and even needing to create our own space to do the work, for people to appreciate what we are doing as real art and a legitimate means of entertainment.”

When Drollinger is not performing her duties as drag laureate, you can find her involved in a number of creative endeavors. This year she opened a film production studio in San Francisco focused on LGBTQ+ independent filmmaking. In 2023 she also finished principal photography for her second feature film, Lady Champagne, which features over 60 drag performers.

“If we can walk through the world on a daily basis just a little more fabulously, we inspire others to be more fabulous,” says Drollinger. “And when everyone is a little more fabulous, there is that much less room in their hearts and minds for anger, violence, and prejudice.” @darcydrollinger

Maeve DuVally

Courtesy of Maeve DuVally

Maeve DuVally

Meet one of the artists, disruptors, educators, groundbreakers, innovators, and storytellers who all helped make the world a better place for LGBTQ+ people.

Courtesy of Maeve DuVally

For 18 years, Maeve DuVally worked at Goldman Sachs as the managing director of communications. But it wasn’t until 15 years into her role that DuVally was able to enter the workplace as herself: a “transgender woman who had thought herself a man for the first 56 years of her life.”

It was 2019 when she first introduced herself to her colleagues as Maeve DuVally. The decision to come out at work had been sparked by a panel sponsored by Goldman Sachs’s LGBTQ+ affinity network on how to make the workplace more comfortable for transgender people. DuVally first realized she was trans in October 2018, after becoming sober in January of the same year.

“Getting sober in 2018 was the most harrowing and difficult accomplishment of my life so far. I believe I would be dead if I hadn’t succeeded or at the very least, I would not have realized who I am and there would be no Maeve,” says DuVally. “I had to go to the brink and look into the abyss of death before making a decision to live sober.”

A few months after coming out at Goldman, DuVally was the subject of a New York Times article, which profiled her first few days of being out at work. In 2022 she left Goldman to consult for corporations and other organizations on communications strategy and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In 2023 she published a memoir called Maeve Rising, which chronicles her struggles with alcohol and her very public coming-out.