In Closest Thing to Heaven: A Memoir, Michael DaQueen opens the curtain on the messy, magnificent, and utterly magnetic first three years of her life in New York City. This is not a polished fairy tale of instant stardom but a confessional scrapbook of heartbreaks, drag shows, and late-night subway rides, written with the rhythm of a queen who’s equal parts performer and poet. DaQueen, a self-proclaimed hopeless romantic and proud West Coast transplant, invites readers to walk beside her through the glitter-streaked chaos of becoming an artist in a city that both seduces and devours. It’s a book that doesn’t just tell a story, it dances, lip-syncs, and sometimes limps through one.
From her earliest memories of sitting beside her mother as Sex and the City played on television, little Michael dreamed of Manhattan’s magic. The skyline was her fairy godmother; the flashing lights of Broadway were her birthright. Yet before she ever set foot on those fabled streets, she was cutting her teeth in the suburbs of Los Angeles, hosting drag shows in neighborhood bars where regulars cheered from barstools and queens borrowed wigs from one another. The pandemic shut that world down, but it also cracked open the possibility of something new. When her local bar announced it wasn’t reopening, she felt a tug, part grief, part destiny. She packed up her life, said goodbye to California, and landed in New York in the spring of 2021, with a suitcase full of sequins and a heart still healing from a breakup.
DaQueen writes about those first months in the city with candor and humor. There’s a kind of hunger in her prose, a mix of artistic yearning and emotional need. She admits she wasn’t chasing fame so much as completion, that ineffable feeling of being where you’re meant to be. Her drag, she explains, is a love letter to the women who shaped her imagination: pop divas, Broadway legends, and the untouchable icons of queer culture. Onstage, she’s larger than life, her performances fuse dance, theatre, and glamour in the style of a superstar’s world tour. Offstage, she’s reflective, funny, and stubbornly hopeful, the kind of queen who finds beauty in chaos and keeps dancing even when the music stops.
One of the most charming threads in the memoir is the accidental birth of her name. “DaQueen” wasn’t crafted in some dramatic epiphany, it was a spontaneous answer at a drag competition. Her real surname, Davila, simply lost a few letters and gained a crown. What began as a joke soon became a destiny. The name stuck, and now it’s both her stage identity and her badge of resilience. As she puts it, “It’s very silly, but everyone uses it, even out of drag.” There’s something profoundly fitting about that, because DaQueen’s art, and this book, is all about embracing the silly, the sincere, and the spectacular without apology.
DaQueen doesn’t shy away from acknowledging her mentors and idols. The pages sparkle with names like Morgan McMichaels, Mayhem Miller, Raja, and Raven, the last of whom hosted the competition where she first performed. These queens are not distant celebrities in her telling, they are colleagues, teachers, even family. Yet she resists the pull of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame, at least for now. Her focus remains on the craft, on the joy of creating shows that electrify audiences without the filter of television editing. She loves what the show has done for queer visibility but insists that drag, for her, is a personal communion between performer and crowd.
One of the book’s most exhilarating scenes recounts her performance at “Night of 1000 Britneys” at 3 Dollar Bill. The energy, she writes, was “insane,” a communal outpouring of devotion to the pop princess who defined her generation. In another chapter, she prepares to channel Mariah Carey, her favorite vocalist of all time, for another themed night. The devotion she brings to her idols isn’t blind adoration; it’s gratitude. Each diva she impersonates or tributes has taught her something about survival, femininity, and spectacle. In paying homage to them, she’s really writing her own love letter to queer resilience.
Yet Closest Thing to Heaven isn’t just about performances and glitter. It’s about the quiet aftermath of a show, when the makeup comes off and the loneliness creeps in. It’s about the politics that sometimes poison the drag community and the exhaustion of constantly performing in a world that still judges difference. DaQueen confesses that her least favorite part of drag is “the politics within the community,” and you can feel the fatigue in her words. Still, she never turns bitter. Her story radiates gratitude for the freedom drag gives her, for the way it allows her to become “something otherworldly.”
The memoir ends not with a grand finale but with a kind of emotional exhale. DaQueen, the performer who thrives on stage lights and applause, learns that heaven isn’t always a destination. Sometimes it’s a fleeting moment, a packed club, a perfect song, a friend’s laughter echoing down a city street at 3 a.m. In New York, she finds not perfection but presence, and that’s the heart of this book. Closest Thing to Heaven is more than a drag memoir; it’s a testament to creative endurance, to the way queer artists transform heartbreak into art and exhaustion into celebration. It’s about surviving a city that never slows down, while still making time for pumpkin spice candles and Mariah Carey playlists. Long live DaQueen, indeed.
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