Today, Brady-Davis and her husband, the director of communications at Equality Illinois, are loving life as parents of a toddler. Homeless, queer, they make a way out of ‘no way.’” “It was those young people who gave me strength, those youth at the center are so resilient. “I came back the next day and started my transition,” said Brady-Davis. In her first postcollege job, at the Center on Halsted LGBTQ community center, she mentored transgender teens, many of them homeless and struggling.īrady-Davis, who began the job while still publicly male-identified, remembers one transgender teen in particular: She was 16, with long hair that she’d toss back and forth with flair.Īfter learning that the girl braved the halls of Chicago Public Schools as a female, Brady-Davis went back to her desk and said aloud, “I wish I could be sitting here as Precious.” She’d been struggling to come up with a drag name, and then, at the very last minute, she just knew: Precious Jewel.īrady-Davis came to Chicago to attend Columbia College, and started to make a name for herself in the local drag scene. “I felt she saw me as something rare.”īrady-Davis joked about the experience at first, greeting her friends with dramatic renditions of “Precious Jewel.”īut several years later, when she entered her first drag contest, the name popped into her head. “One morning she said, ‘Good morning, precious jewel,’ and it just stuck with me - that moment,” Brady-Davis said.
When she was 16, a greeter at her church delighted in regaling her with over-the-top endearments: gourd of the Lord, pumpernickel of Christ. But there was also the love, stability and spectacle that Brady-Davis craved. Inside a world of chaos, I was leaning into a performance.”Īt the conservative churches her family attended regularly, there were disapproving voices and, as she grew older, attempts by pastors to make Brady-Davis more masculine and heterosexual.
I think that speaks to the dream I have always had. “Who does that?” said Brady-Davis, laughing.
In her book, she recalls prancing on backyard picnic tables, while performing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” Brady-Davis knew she was female from a very young age, and enjoyed playing dress-up and belting out songs by larger-than-life pop divas.
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