Zackary Drucker and Marval Rex

One mild evening this summer, a dozen New York media, gossip and event reporters descended on SoHo for a premiere party in honor of the Hulu documentary, Queenmaker. Outside, tech bros in Teslas and a yellow Lamborghini full of Eurotrash crawled along in Broome Street traffic, but inside MarieBelle, a luxury chocolatier and café, the scene evoked a chic soirée in a French salon.

Waiters circled with trays of chilled prosecco and truffles as young women with clipboards checked the names of guests at the door. Finally, against an expectant hubbub, flashbulbs announced the arrival of the film’s director. Tall and with ice blue eyes, Zackary Drucker entered with her long blond hair swept forward over the right shoulder so that it tumbled like gold rope over her hot-pink sleeveless minidress. Clearly, this party was not her first rodeo.

In fact, Drucker has enjoyed success almost from the earliest years of her career. As a young fine artist, her work was exhibited in the Whitney and L.A. Biennials, the Hammer Museum, and in a 2012 solo show at MoMA PS1 in Queens. Later she became involved with professional filmmaking as a consultant on the Amazon series Transparent; received an Emmy nomination for producing the docuseries This is Me, and in 2021 directed the critically lauded HBO series about a forgotten ‘70s auto industry entrepreneur, The Lady and the Dale

In Queenmaker, however, she broached a subject as bold as Manhattan itself. For the first time she was examining a species of urban striver that Park readers will instantly recognize: the New York socialite

After the party photographers got their shots, Drucker, 40, granted interviews to the line of waiting reporters. “It’s the story of how these young women made it in high society in New York, but from a more current perspective,” she said. “And there is a big twist in it that maybe not everybody will see coming.” (Disclosure: This reporter was in the room because Queenmaker was inspired by a chapter in my memoir, Gatecrasher. I was invited by Emmet McDermott and Scott Kaplan of the production company CoverStory to help make the film, in which I also appear.)

Queenmaker takes as its starting point the popular obsession with young socialites in New York, roughly from 2000 until 2010. The media attention, social aspiration and support staff of designers, publicists and teacup chihuahua breeders they inspired became its own cottage industry. Queenmaker includes interviews with a dozen power players of the time, including queens-of-the-scene Tinsley Mortimer and Olivia Palermo; Bungalow 8 nightclub owner Amy Sacco; publicists Kelly Cutrone and Couri Hay; social photographer Patrick McMullan, and social writers Lola Ogunnaike (then of The New York Times), Emily Gould (Gawker), and Olga Rei and Valentine Uhovski (the blog Socialite Rank.)

But the “twist” to which Drucker alluded comes halfway through the film. (Watch the documentary on Hulu right now, if you haven’t already, because there are spoilers ahead.) Another young blogger, Morgan Olivia Rose, emerges as the central character in the film. She appears as both her modern-day self, a voluptuous Indian-American beauty living in Chicago, and also in her early 2000s teenage incarnation, when she presented as a male named James Kurisunkal.

It was by that name, while still an undergraduate living on campus in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, that she achieved a measure of fame as the author of Park Avenue Peerage, a blog covering New York’s socialite scene. After an initial period of anonymity, when her identity was finally revealed, Manhattan media delighted in the notion that a Midwestern college kid living several hundreds of miles away would be covering the Upper East Side like an insider.

So Morgan came to town (under her previous name and gender presentation), met her idol Tinsley Mortimer in a moment delightfully captured both in photography and prose by The New York Times, and worked for a time at New York Magazine. This child of Indian immigrants and onetime blogger personifies themes of ambition and self-transformation so often associated with the so-called “American dream,” but with a story that has not previously been told.

Queenmaker even manages to get Rose and Mortimer back in touch, and in the film’s denouement, they set out to meet again at a black-tie charity gala. “That’s an amazing story,” a rapt media reporter said to Drucker at the premiere party, titling his phone under her chin to record her every word. “So what happens at the gala?”

“Your readers will have to watch the film to find out,” she replied with a mischievous grin.

Just then, in another corner of the party, an exceptionally good-looking young man scampered over to a group of guests to introduce himself. He had thick, floppy, chestnut hair and the energy of a Labrador puppy. But even more noticeable was his outfit: lurid blue shorts and a matching mesh shirt, which showcased his muscled torso, rippling abs and geometric shoulder tattoo. He looked like what Bruce Weber must see when he closes his eyes at night.

“Hi,” the apparition said, extending his hand for a firm shake. “I’m Marval, Zackary’s boyfriend.”

In Los Angeles, where he and Drucker share a home, Marval Angela Reichsteiner, 31, is known professionally as Marval A. Rex. He is the quintessential hustling young actor, a trained ceramicist who makes art in between auditioning for roles, surfing in Malibu and advertising his services as an astrologer, motivational speaker and spiritual coach.

“He is a psychic, a comedian, a performer and a maker, but most of all he is a light force with energies that cannot be contained by any label or any genre,” says Joey Soloway, the creator of “Transparent.” “We met at a breakfast for Yom Kippur and I was immediately electrified by his presence and his wild laugh. We bonded deeply and became family as we both went on the journey to get adult B’nai Mitzvahed at our temple in Los Angeles. We came of age together and it has been one of the biggest gifts of my life.”

“I always like to say that I was born my mother’s princess in Salt Lake City, Utah,” Rex said in an interview two months after the Queenmaker party, sitting alongside Drucker in their living room. “I was raised Catholic but I am Jewish, and I grew up in the Mormon mecca of the United States. It’s very complicated. My family are crypto-Jews, so they converted to Catholicism we’re not sure when, but it’s a very touchy subject.”

Something else that’s a touchy subject: Although his mother grew up in Barcelona, don’t say she’s from Spain. “There is an independentisme movement in Catalonia, and anytime I’ve said she’s Spanish, she’s a little bit like, “We’re not Spanish,” he said, replicating the distinctive regional lisp. In deference to la seva mare, then, professional bios usually identify Rex as “Catalan-American.”

In addition to a recent turn as a werewolf with great hair in Spookable, a horror-comedy series executive-produced by Drucker, Rex also has a burgeoning stand-up comedy career. In “Big Dad Energy,” “a transmasucline comedy showcase” he produced in June, he made a bit out of his appearance in an ad campaign for the gay dating app Scruff. “I’m like, imitation crab,” he joked, about being trans among the cis male models at the shoot. “They were talking about their $4,000-a-month apartments in WeHo,” the difference between shag and woven rugs, “like it’s a big existential question,” and how being with the same boyfriend for four weeks is soooo looong.

Here, stalking the stage in white socks and pink satin boxing shorts, Rex pauses for effect. “I was a lesbian for 23 years and I’m like ‘okay, wow!’ I date women believe it or not, and if you date a woman for four weeks she’s still trying to figure out if you’re a serial killer. In fact it’s four years for my current one and she’s still like, ‘You never know. He could kill me.’”

So, sitting with them together at home, I ask Drucker: Has she worked out yet whether he’s a serial killer?

“The test is always being taken,” she says, laughing. “It’s a daily thing.” The couple met at a birthday party in the home of noted performance artist Ron Athey in December, 2018. “I immediately fell in love with her,” Rex said. “As fate would have it we bumped into each other again shortly afterwards at a sex dungeon Christmas party. I was part of the performance, naked with ass-less chaps on, and Zackary walked in with Cathy Opie (the prominent photographer) while I’m getting whipped by a dominatrix. Also I was on mushrooms.”

Not long after that night, they became one of Hollywood’s most glamorous trans power couples. “It was very unexpected,” Drucker says. “We started dating in 2019 and we dove into living together in the pandemic.”

It’s the romantic comedy meet-cute that Rock Hudson and Doris Day could only ever have dreamed of (and Hudson probably did). This updated version of Pillow Talk even has a Hollywood ending: the couple is engaged and eyeing a summer 2024 date for the wedding. But are their families as excited about the upcoming nuptials as are the bride and groom?

“Oh yeah,” they both say in unison, and start completing each other’s sentences: “They love each other”; “our parents have met at this point”; “a lot”; “and her parents and my parents”; “like peas in a pod.” An engagement is the point where a rom-com often ends, but our leads are each still only in the first half of their lives. So the more interesting question is: what will they be doing next?

Drucker’s long path to professional and personal success is a thoroughly modern story. “I’m from Syracuse, New York, the most glamorous place in America,” she says with irony. “I grew up very close to my father’s Ashkenazi extended Jewish family and I was Bar Mitzvahed at the same synagogue that he went to as a child.”

In early life, Drucker was influenced by the work of trailblazing transgender theorist, Kate Bornstein–even shoplifting a copy of her 1995 book, Gender Outlaw. “I don’t know what possessed me,” she admitted to the academic during an interview years later, “[but I] discovered the word transgender, and found myself in your words and in your experience in a way that I had never felt reflected before.” Bornstein responded: “When we first met, you stole my heart, and it’s lovely to hear that you also stole my fucking book.”

Drucker is among a growing number of trans women who opt not to change their first name following gender transition. “At the time, I felt as though I had already created a persona as Zackary,” she says, and therefore made the decision “just to let the world change around me, rather than capitulating to a world that didn’t have a place for me.”

She moved to New York City in June 2001, the day after graduating high school. “I just packed up my grandmother’s Saab that I had borrowed and drove to Brooklyn. And I went to the School of Visual Arts to study photography.” That was followed by a master’s degree at the California Institute of the Arts (a.k.a. CalArts) just outside Los Angeles.

And in 2005, at age 22, she appeared as a performance artist on the one-season reality show Artstar, a sort of artworld take on Project Runway fronted by the gallerist Jeffrey Deitch.

“That was my first moment of being a public person,” she recalls. “It’s in all the years since that I’ve navigated being a presence in the media in addition to a human being. And the apex of my career as an artist, I would say, was [having my work exhibited as part of] the Whitney Biennial in 2014.”

That work, in collaboration with her then-boyfriend, the artist Rhys Ernst, documented their relationship through photography, film and performance. As Drucker explained at the time: “This is just one story of an opposite-oriented transgender couple living in Los Angeles, the land of industrialized fantasy.”

Drucker’s six-year relationship with Ernst ended that same year, but by then she was also consulting on a quirky trans family dramady for the nascent Amazon Studios. “When Transparent hit, that created a bridge for me to work in mainstream television and film. I’ve had ten years in that world producing, and now directing,” she says.

But even making work for the rough-and-tumble marketplace of streaming services, Drucker’s long history of art practice sets her documentaries apart. And it’s a quality that has been noticed by her more established peers. “She’s a real artist,” said Jay Duplass—who, with his sibling Mark, is one half of the well-known Duplass brothers filmmaking duo. They first worked with Drucker on Transparent, and then executive produced The Lady and the Dale, her HBO docu-series about the trans auto executive Liz Carmichael.

“I love Zackary and her work because she always operates from a primal artistic core. It doesn’t matter whether she’s making fine art, an independent short film or a high budget studio television series,” Duplass said. “Her creative and personal integrity in making art and living life is a touchstone and inspiration for me and so many who know and work with her.”

That message seems to have gotten around Hollywood, because since Queenmaker, she has been busy. She scored another critical hit this summer with The Stroll, a documentary about the history of trans sex-workers in New York’s gentrified Meatpacking District, co-directed with Kristen Lovell.

The New York Times (which also loved Queenmaker) called The Stroll “a remarkable document of the self-determination of the women and workers who learned, in the face of the worst odds, to fend for themselves and each other,” and the director thinks of the two films as “twins.”

“I also just directed my first episode of episodic television for a Norman Lear production, ‘Clean Slate,’ with Laverne Cox and the comedian George Wallace. And it was a big episode, the finale,” Drucker said, before adding almost nonchalantly: “And then two short films and one feature might be going into the film festival circuit as well.”

Anything else? Actually there is, and it’s big: Ten years after exhibiting in it herself, Drucker will be curating a program of other filmmakers’ work for the 2024 Whitney Biennial. “It’s primarily new narrative short films, with one or two archival pieces,” she says.

Rex is also climbing the professional ladder. He recently filmed his biggest part yet in House of Abraham, an upcoming feature thriller starring Natasha Henstridge. And he brought that romantic-lead energy to set, even if he had to manifest it himself in the script. “I believe there’s a romance between them,” he said about their respective characters in the film. “Natasha has sons my age, so she was like, ‘it’s not a romance.’ But I believe there’s some romantic energy between them.”

Soloway says he predicts big things from Rex, whom he describes as “a spirit guide from a future dimension who flew into the LA art scene like a hummingbird.” He adds, “I am in awe of his process and can’t wait to see what’s next in his magnanimous career.” “Watch out world, Marval is here to transform our understandings of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a free spirit.”

With a wedding to organize, a biennial to help curate and a film festival circuit to attend, next year will be busy for the Drucker-Rex household. “We love each other deeply,” said Rex. “The way I like to describe us is that I am an unstoppable force, meeting an immovable object.” And the result, fortunately for the rest of us, is art.