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In commemorations and memorials after her death, the view was unanimous: Heklina had been a bitch. In the world of San Francisco’s drag scene, where she made her name, this wasn’t meant as an insult. Heklina had been a legendary performer whose stage persona was equal parts raunchy and abrasive, slinging insults known as “reads” in fine drag tradition. “Yeah, she was a bitch,” recalls her longtime collaborator Sister Roma, “but she was a bitch in the best possible way.”
Seven weeks after Heklina died, a memorial for her closed down San Francisco’s Castro Street, with crowds gathering to watch the event on giant screens. Among comedy routines and performances, the city’s queer community paid homage to Heklina not just as a drag queen, but also a shrewd promoter whose long-running event series Trannyshack created a platform for countless drag artists to cut their teeth, including those who went on to become stars on the hit show RuPaul’s Drag Race: Alaska, BenDeLaCreme and Jinkx Monsoon.
Monsoon says it was Heklina who gave her the drag gig that launched her career. She describes Heklina as part of the “old guard of drag”, who are “the queens who made it big before the TV shows began. To be a drag artist who was known within the community, before Drag Race – it was a special mantle held by only a handful of amazing performers.”
Alaska tells me it was a Heklina show that she attended on her 22nd birthday that originally inspired her to do drag. “I witnessed drag on stage that was raw and real and told a story. It was lawless and wild. I was hooked.”
Heklina was just 55 when she died in London, in circumstances that the Metropolitan police would label “unexpected”. It was her close friend and collaborator of 27 years, the film-maker and drag performer Peaches Christ, who discovered her body. She wrote on 3 April 2023: “I am shocked and horrified to bring this news to you. I am living in a real-life nightmare so forgive me if I don’t have all the answers right now.”
Peaches never expected that, close to three years later, she would still have very few answers to why and how Heklina died. The police investigation was so slow that it provoked demonstrations where queer protesters, drag queens and their allies marched outside Scotland Yard, holding photos of Heklina and placards with slogans such as “We deserve justice, not discrimination”. Why was the Met taking so long to provide answers? Peaches began to suspect it might be because drag queens who work in the “seedy” world of queer nightlife, whose sex lives might be unconventional, are not deemed worthy of the same level of care and attention by police as everyone else.
When she died, Heklina had been in London to showcase Mommie Queerest, a drag parody of the gloriously trashy 1981 Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest, which she had been performing with Peaches for more than two decades. The pair were staying in a flat on Soho Square while rehearsing for their shows at the nearby Soho theatre.
On a day off between rehearsals, Heklina wanted to arrange a hook-up. She liked to dress in drag and meet men who identified as “straight” for sex, a habit she often talked about on stage. Peaches didn’t want to be around for that, so they agreed that she would go and stay in a nearby hotel. They stayed in touch via text, then, on the morning of Monday 3 April, Peaches returned to the apartment to pick up Heklina for rehearsals.
When Peaches went to put her key in the front door, she found it was already open. The inside of the apartment was a mess: Heklina’s makeup was out on the table, her bedroom door was open. Peaches assumed that Heklina must have gone out to get coffees and forgotten to lock the door. She tidied the flat and prepared their lunches for the day before going into the darkened living room to draw the curtains. That’s when she found Heklina’s body.
“I found her on the floor, in drag, in a very unusual position,” she recalls. “It looked like yoga – she was on her knees with her face on the ground and both hands on either side of her head.” At first she thought it must be some kind of prank. “And then it’s, like: are you asleep? And I’m shaking her, and eventually I touched her hand and it was cold.” The memory of Heklina’s face still haunts Peaches today. “It’s the image I see at night when I lay down in bed to sleep. It’s the thing I think about when I wake up in the morning.”
The police were called to the flat at 9.47am, where Heklina was found unresponsive and later pronounced dead. The drugs GHB and methamphetamine were found in her body at levels that could be fatal.
Peaches was first treated as a potential suspect, but following interviews and a review of CCTV footage she was cleared and, as a close friend to Heklina, provided with a family liaison officer by the Met. At first the police seemed kind and helpful, promising to keep Peaches updated alongside Nancy French, another close friend who was designated next of kin.
While the fact that Heklina was meeting men for anonymous hook-ups, combined with the drugs found at the scene, probably indicated an accidental overdose during chemsex – a term used in the gay community for sex while consuming specific drugs – a cause of death has still not been confirmed, and an inquest has yet to take place. And when, almost two years after her death, police shared a previously unseen CCTV video showing three men walking away from Heklina’s flat, it only raised more questions. The men remain unidentified, and Heklina’s loved ones are still waiting for answers.
Heklina was born Steven Grygelko in 1967 near Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father, of Native American and Polish heritage, had been stationed with the US Navy in Iceland, where he met Grygelko’s mother at a local dance. The two got married against the Icelandic grandparents’ wishes, and moved to America to start a family. They had a daughter, and then they had Steven.
He would later describe his childhood as unhappy. His parents divorced. Both struggled with alcoholism. He recalled once attending a family dinner where he realised that he was the only member of his immediate family who had never been to prison.
Through his childhood, Grygelko moved around a lot. First to upstate New York and then Iceland for a few years in his teens with his mother, before she started finding him too difficult and sent him to live with his father back in the US. It wasn’t long before he left his father’s home, which he would describe as “repressively heterosexual”.
At 18 years old, he joined the navy to escape from home, but was kicked out for failing a drug test while stationed in San Diego. By 20 he was in rehab back in Iceland, where he lived for another four years. “There was a lot of chaos in my childhood and teen years,” he said in a 2022 episode of the LGBTQ+ history podcast You Make Me Real. “I was able to kind of rise above all that. And I really credit the gay thing for that, because I just knew there was a more fabulous life waiting in the big city.”
For decades, San Francisco has been a city where misfits from all over the world flock to find their tribe. “For many of us it’s the American version of Oz,” says Peaches. “If you’re weird, queer or an outsider, it’s been a place to run away to to reinvent yourself.” Grygelko moved there in 1991 and instantly felt at home.
His first time on stage in drag was at the Miss Uranus pageant in 1992. He had to come up with a name, and spontaneously devised Heklina, derived from the Icelandic volcano Hekla. While he didn’t win the pageant, he began to hungrily explore the city’s drag scene.
By 1996, Heklina was working at a gay bar called The Stud in the city’s South of Market district, where she was offered the opportunity to put on an event in the traditionally slow Tuesday night slot. Trannyshack was born, a weekly party where drag shows began at midnight. In the early days, the stage was made from wooden planks stacked on top of beer crates, which were liable to collapse during particularly energetic performances. Back then, drag was still underground. Nobody expected it to lead to a career, much less celebrity.
One of the distinctive features of San Francisco’s drag scene that Heklina championed is the idea that everyone is welcome to perform. You didn’t have to be a man dressed as a woman; you could be a bearded queen, a drag king, trans or a cisgender woman who might be excluded from conventional drag spaces. One example of the latter was Scissor Sisters’ Ana Matronic, who performed at Trannyshack almost every week over three years. “Heklina’s policy was very open,” she recalls. “As long as you were a good performer, you had a place on the stage.” The band’s 2004 song Filthy/Gorgeous is inspired by this period and Heklina appears briefly in its music video.
While there were a few old-school drag shows around the city, Trannyshack was more transgressive. “It wasn’t your standard boa and sequins style of drag,” says Matronic. “It was new drag, alternative drag, inspired more by John Waters than old Hollywood.” Following in the footsteps of New York’s Club Kid scene and earlier San Francisco parties such as Klubstitute, Heklina helped expand the envelope of drag – it was more about art, experimentation and provocation than female impersonation.
There were lip-syncs and DJ sets at Trannyshack, but that was just the start. “Numbers would involve blood and vomit and faeces,” says Sister Roma. “You never knew what you were going to get. It was wild, and if you went there, you had to be prepared for that.”
“San Francisco drag at that time had no rules,” Alaska, a former winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, recalls. “I love Drag Race and it has changed my life, but it has always existed within certain parameters and strict guidelines. Trannyshack was anti-rules. It was representative of the truth of our community in a way that something on television could never be, still to this day. And I think that’s why the community loved it and needed it so much.”
The shows provided an important outlet for the queer community, who were facing the devastation of the Aids epidemic. In the early 1990s, Heklina would check the obituary pages of the local newspaper each week to see who had died. “It was a very surreal time of intense grief,” she later recalled, “and everybody was dealing with it and walking through this constant sea of death.”
Trannyshack rose from these ashes. “People had just stopped dying of Aids because new medications came out,” Heklina said in 2008. “It felt like a celebration after all that mourning … I’d planned to go to some people’s funerals and there they were on stage with me.”
Heklina herself had been living with HIV for many years. In early Trannyshack performances, the presence of blood and horror-filled imagery echoed the community’s recent experiences. Heklina’s friends remember her wicked sense of humour, her gravelly laugh and her ability to make light of even the darkest situations. With an enormous boxy wig and her famous beauty spot, she had a commanding stage presence and impeccable comic timing, able to volley a brutal comeback but also to get humour out of being very, very stupid. In a clip of her drag version of The Golden Girls TV show, which became an annual tradition in San Francisco, she milks the simple word “no” into a virtuosic comic sequence that goes on for over a minute and a half, to such hysterical effect that her co-stars can’t help but break character and laugh.
Trannyshack continued to grow, running weekly for 12 years, spawning a popular pageant competition and satellite editions in Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, London, New Orleans and Honolulu. Celebrities turned up, including Sofia Coppola, Gwen Stefani and Pink. Lady Gaga did a performance there just before she became famous, and then stayed to dance all night.
By 2015, however, the name Trannyshack had become controversial among younger members of the community, due to the term being increasingly viewed as a slur word. Heklina accepted that culture evolves and words change their meanings. Her new regular show would be called Mother. And mother was what Heklina was to many younger queens –perhaps an intimidating one, but still a supportive figure who gave a lot of aspiring drag performers their first break. “There’s a Heklina archetype in many drag communities,” says Peaches, “the cold, calculated businesswoman who’s running the gig. The Mama Rose who’s in the trenches and building this amazing stage for you but is also going to hold you to a standard.”
While she was known for her frosty persona, after her death many friends commented on Heklina’s generosity. She helped one pay their rent, hired another when they were struggling for cash, and supported performers struggling with substance abuse. Heklina herself battled with substance addiction throughout her adult life. “She did not want to be known for being kind,” says Peaches. “Behind the scenes she helped many people out, but would never publicise it.”
In 2014, Heklina opened a theatre and nightclub called Oasis with three business partners, intending to create a space run by drag queens, for drag queens. “It was refreshing to see someone who actually does drag in charge of the business end of things, rather than some guy who had never put a wig on in his life,” says Alaska. The club was a success, but by 2020 Heklina was tired of managing a venue. She started a podcast, toured a one-woman show (Heklina’s Grand Opening), and in 2020 moved out of San Francisco to a house she had bought near Palm Springs, in southern California, a few doors down from her friend Nancy. They planned to grow old there together.
For a while after Heklina’s death, friends and family were busy dealing with her estate and organising memorial events. After a few months, Peaches and Nancy realised that London’s Metropolitan police had gone silent. Emails to officers went unanswered for months. This information vacuum allowed conspiracy theories to take hold – some people believed Peaches and Nancy were hiding the truth, while others told Peaches they felt sure it was a covered-up murder.
It was only when Peaches put this theory to the Met that they finally responded, leading to a call with an officer in February 2024. According to a lawyer’s notes from the meeting, the officer emphatically denied a cover-up but did apologise for how the investigation had been handled. He said the main investigator on the case had been replaced, implying their failure to properly handle this matter may have been the result of “conscious or unconscious bias”.
Just a year earlier, the Baroness Casey Review, a report commissioned after the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens, had raised urgent questions about bias in the police. The 363-page report, published in March 2023, determined the Met was institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic. In the LGBTQ+ section, the text chronicles homophobia experienced by queer officers within the Met, as well as reporting a 20% fall in LGBTQ+ Londoners’ trust in the Met between 2015 and 2016 and 2021 and 2022, compared with a 12% fall among the non-LGBTQ+ community.
Homophobia within an institution such as the Met is not just exhibited in active acts of hatred, but also in the assumptions officers make during investigations. Between 2014 and 2015, the serial killer Stephen Port murdered four young men by administering fatal doses of the drug GHB and dumping their bodies near his flat in Barking, east London. A series of fundamental failings in the Met’s investigation were judged by an inquest jury to have potentially contributed to three of those deaths, as a more thorough investigation could have caught Port before he killed again. The families of the victims accused the Met of homophobic bias in its dealing with the case.
When asked about improvements they had made following the Casey Review, a Met spokesperson said: “We understand more work needs to be done for us to build trust with the LGBT+ community in London,” but pointed to the implementation of full-time LGBT+ community liaison officers across all boroughs of London, who act as a single point of contact for LGBT+ people and organisations.
Kai O’Doherty, director of policy and research for Galop, an LGBT+ anti-abuse charity, was critical, noting the Casey Review recommended “a complete overhaul” of the Met, “yet we have seen no meaningful action from the Met to address its institutional anti-LGBT+ prejudice. In order for LGBT+ victims and survivors of abuse to have meaningful access to safety and justice, a comprehensive strategy to combat homophobia and transphobia in the Met is urgently needed.”
How might homophobic bias have affected the Met’s dealing with Heklina’s death? In the assumptions made by officers when they came upon a drag queen who has died following a drug-fuelled sexual encounter, “I think that police see that tableau and go: OK, case closed, it’s not really worth looking into. That’s just what you get if you’re that kind of gay,” says the London-based Canadian drag queen Crystal, who attended the Scotland Yard protest.
Bias might also explain why the investigation was deprioritised, taking so long and leaving Heklina’s loved ones in the dark. “If that had been a young white girl found dead in an Airbnb with men coming and going, regardless of what drugs were in her system and regardless of whether she liked to have hook-ups, I guarantee you that investigation would have gone forward at full pelt. That’s homophobia manifest,” says Cheddar Gorgeous, another drag queen who was at the London protest.
Despite promising to be more communicative, after the apologetic call the Met went dark once more. There followed a series of bungling moves that annoyed Peaches, such as the police failing to access Heklina’s phone, which might contain valuable information about who she met on the night of her death, then accidentally sending it to California, and subsequently needing to get it back. Then in January 2025, the police released CCTV footage showing three men who had been in Heklina’s flat on the night she died, with a public call for information. Peaches pointed out that the chances of anybody recognising these men would have significantly diminished over nearly two years.
“I’m still livid that it took almost two years and me going to the press and blasting the police for there to be any movement,” says Peaches.
Peaches organised two protests in London and San Francisco on 31 March 2025 to raise awareness of Heklina’s case, apply pressure on the police, and to draw attention to the LGBTQ+ community’s unfair treatment by police more broadly. In a statement afterwards, DCI Christina Jessah, who leads policing in the local area, said, “We know that many feel deep distress following Steven’s death and some feel frustration with the pace of the police investigation. We are also aware of the concerns of Steven’s next of kin and have apologised to them directly.”
She added that a review of the Heklina investigation was under way to establish any missed opportunities. The police have now assigned a new investigator – the fifth on this case so far. “The detectives and the people they’ve assigned to us now are lovely,” says Peaches. “They’re doing damage control and they’re very effective at it. They’re gentle, they’re communicating. But, for me, the damage has already been done.”
While the Met won’t comment on an active investigation, based on off-the-record conversations with people familiar with the case, it seems likely that they will conclude that Heklina’s death was caused by an accidental overdose after the three men left her apartment, and that there was no evidence of foul play. If this is the conclusion, wonders Peaches, why did it take so long to get answers? “Why not just say earlier she overdosed on drugs, no foul play, and be done with it? We would have thought it was sad and awful, but it never would have escalated into all this.”
In the absence of closure, what would justice for Heklina mean? For Peaches, it would be “shining a light on the Met police’s longstanding institutional homophobia”, a cause in which she never expected to become entangled. She asks, “Can we move the dial so that the police feel pressure to do better with future cases involving people from our community?”
Today in California, Heklina’s loved ones are sorting through what she left behind. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle details Nancy ’s process of distributing Heklina’s wardrobe to the wider drag community. A benefit at Oasis nightclub raised $10,000 to digitise Heklina’s video collection, which contains more than 300 hours of footage from the 1990s and 2000s. Nancy and Peaches are in discussions to make a documentary about Heklina’s life.
After her death, Heklina was cremated in London. A cousin on her father’s side followed a Native American tradition by cutting off her own long braid and offering it to be burned alongside the body.
At a memorial in Palm Springs, Nancy explained how Heklina’s ashes had been divided in four (“so she’s skinny now”) and distributed among her family and loved ones. She keeps her portion in a chic black clutch, which Heklina had taken with her on the trip to London. It is a fitting resting place for a figure who, in life, always refused to be bound by convention.
The way Heklina’s community has banded together in the wake of this tragedy is testament to her influence as a performer and organiser. Beyond her bitchy demeanour, they pay tribute to the genuine love and care she poured into her queer family and her lifelong dedication to pushing forward drag as an art form.
“Heklina will be remembered for helping create more drag in the world – drag of all styles and representations and backgrounds and messages,” says Jinkx Monsoon. “She lifted others up in a world where we are used to being pushed down.”
