Mona Real on Fruit Bowl

Interview by Avishai Micaiah

Make it stand out

Avishai Micaiah: Fruit Bowl is a queer fashion competition that, like a ripe tomato thrown at someone in the town stocks, really leaves its mark. How did it come to be?

Mona Real: Fruit Bowl has come to be a farmer’s almanac for the disparate queer creative navigating production / productivity following the lockdown of nightlife & many working industries. Fruit Bowl observes an arena that holds queer artists across disciplines, each in a gameplay for bounty. Its spectacle is its rumination and appraisal of time & season; where fashion, art & performance are but veiled fruits; offering a range of crafts and prompts to discern interpretation. 

As a trans-woman artist and drag performer, I, like so many I know, struggle with finding consistent work & opportunity that does not downplay or exploit our talents. I often face a perplexing compliment that my art should always be somewhere loftier than it is, and yet when I find platforms out of dive, club or nightlife spaces I find myself framed more by innuendo. My apparent sex/sexuality, whether deviant or validated, becomes my genre or pigeonhole and I see contemporary queer & trans artists being appraised with less nuance; our worth seated in entertainment or politicized talking points when leveraged outside of our own roofs or contextualization.   

I have been inspired by longstanding queer performance / installative showcases from my time in the scene; Critterbarn, Cathedral, Art Haus, Rapture; all of which radicalized the variety show from assuming seated theater, to unhinged ephemeral spectacle. These were the steps, and as for Fruit Bowl it is but a glass slipper forged after the strike of midnight; calling any who attend the party to step forth and break their molds. 

Mona Real poses candidly for a photo on the Fruit Bowl white carpet.

AM: So you’ve been producing Fruit Bowl for years now. What’s it been like to watch it grow — or dare I say, ripen? 

MR: I produced a fashion showcase called Thriftease prior to lockdown with BeautyBoiz coming on to jointly style a spring runway entitled “Dandyland” in 2019. Dandyism as formative to black identity & experience was a lens to represent sartorial style within the 2025 Met Gala. Though a lockdown in March halted us, I returned to BeautyBoiz as collaborators two years later to discuss sowing the seeds of what we now know to be Fruit Bowl. 

There is something about men helping with the heavy lifting that always seems morally correct, but in all seriousness as producers reaching & pooling across communities, resources & venues we have had many drawingboard conversations about what Fruit Bowl is within the possibility of what it must be. Over three years within a post-lockdown landscape we have experienced our production pinballed across venues, places, opportunities & contexts; intimate to massive audiences, smaller or bigger stages, lack of space or amenities, or even accommodation requiring more intensive communication when relaying information from additional support systems or staff. All of this is not atypical for the working nightlife creative, but in this constant resituating and unpacking of what Fruit Bowl is every season it has afforded us with new sightlines each time to illustrate our contests’ playbook.

Season 1 runner-up Lucciani shows off her juciest couture at Fruit Bowls first Grand Finale

AM: Themes are such a big part of Fruit Bowl and I love the way they engage the audience. Which one surprised you the most?

MR: After seeing what was probably several seasons of Drag Race queens reproducing wonky to refined nude illusion bodysuits, I retorted with “Nude Allusion” as a prompt for our first season’s, second month’s theme “Forbidden Fruits” 

“Contestants are on a creative streak and it doesn’t stop there! Contestants must serve a look that captures an iconic reference to nudity throughout pop culture, myth or history.”

From Nirvana’s cover of a waterlogged baby, to pipe-cleaner constructed pubes, seeing Iris, our first season’s winner, hatch from goop as Neo then strut into a black trench coat as some born-again flasher truly embodies what Fruit Bowl is and asks of its contenders. 

Season 1 Winner Iris serves fresh out of the matrix realness for Fruit Bowls Nude Allusion category (S1E1)

AM: Last question— if we were visited by extra terrestrial beings on a fruit tour of the universe, what fruit would you present to them first?

MR: A pomegranate, as a declaration of original sin as our form of divine knowledge to bypass any divine intervention.