Bold & Beautiful: Sky Faux

A pinch of extraterrestrial, a healthy amount of club slut and a dash of campiness — combine these things together and what do you get? Oh, that’s right, it’s the icon herself, Sky Faux! Skigh Copier, a self-described “alien bitch,” best known as Sky Faux, stands out from other drag performers thanks to their otherworldly Y2K aesthetic and playful personality. She’ll draw you in with an impish quality that leaves you utterly enchanted. As Wendy Williams once said, “She’s an icon, she’s a legend and she is the moment.”

Faux was first exposed to the art of drag at the age of 14, when a friend and fellow Salt Lake City drag artist, Hysteria, shared Tumblr posts about “random drag girls” such as Alaska Thunderfuck and Willam Belli. They said they “really fell in love” with drag after watching season seven of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It felt like a natural progression from her background in theatre, as she had been performing since she was six. “I feel like drag, as an art form, really encapsulated all of my interests in one, because it was like the theatre, the performing, the dancing, but then also fashion and the makeup and hair … which I also love. I always loved dress up.”

Spending several years as an “off and on bedroom queen,” Sky Faux made her debut in West Hollywood in 2021. “I was a Halloween queen … very, very poetic,” she says. Despite taking “too long to get ready,” and then being turned away from a Maxim party, she says the experience of going out in drag for the first time was “so freeing.” They felt like a star, even if they “probably looked busted.”

In March 2022, Faux began performing lip-sync battles at Why Kiki. Their first performance at the bar, a lip sync to “One Way or Another” by Blondie, was a liberating and freeing experience. “They really threw me in the deep end,” Faux says. Despite losing the battle to Post-Op Malone, Faux says they were approached by the showrunner Sally Cone Slopes and asked to perform at Why Kiki the following Friday, which is where they’ve been “literally every weekend since.” After only a month of performing drag, she began her Why Kiki residency in April 2022. She described it all as “right place, right time.”

Through performing at Why Kiki, they have seized many opportunities within Salt Lake City’s drag scene. “I think it is by being a Why Kiki girl that I’ve been able to come so far in a little amount of time,” she says. She’s found her “drag family” atop Why Kiki’s glitzy stage. “I feel like it’s really just a place where we can all really help build each other up and help each other with different aspects of drag.” Through Why Kiki, Faux has experimented with different numbers and styles of drag. They say they “would not be the same drag performer” without the bar.

While performing at Why Kiki, Faux founded AFAB-ulous, a community dedicated to celebrating and uplifting Salt Lake City’s AFAB (assigned female at birth) drag queens. What started as a singular performance at Utah Pride in 2022 has evolved into a monthly show at Why Kiki. Through AFAB-ulous, Faux showcases and gives AFAB drag queens “the flowers that they deserve.” She highlights the fierceness of the bar’s AFAB drag divas. “I go up on stage at the AFAB show, and I proudly announce that, first of all, everyone in the show has a vagina … We have a pussy, we’re going to serve pussy.”

Faux is spreading a message throughout Salt Lake City: “Drag is for everybody: drag kings, queens, things, no matter your gender, no matter what you were assigned at birth, who you identify as, there is a place for you in the drag scene to explore.” Catch her and her fellow AFAB drag artists performing in AFAB-ulous on the first Friday of each month at 10 p.m. at Why Kiki. 

Read more Bold & Beautiful stories:
Bold & Beautiful: M’Lady Wood
Bold & Beautiful: Kory Edgewood