Nashom Wooden, downtown denizen, is dead at 50

NEW YORK >> The messages began pinging around Instagram around noon Monday.

Nashom Wooden, an omnipresence on New York’s gay bar and club scene, was dead at 50 after a short illness that he had suspected but not confirmed was COVID-19.

It came as a shock, first because Wooden looked barely different from he had at 35, but also because among people in nightlife, there was about him a survivalist quality rivaled only by Susanne Bartsch, the drag queen empress whose parties he sometimes appeared at, and Lady Bunny, his drag queen comrade and former roommate.

Over the years, Wooden performed in heels as Mona Foot; appeared with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert DeNiro in the 1999 movie “Flawless”; co-wrote and performed a song that became a top 10 hit all around Europe; bartended at the

Cock, a longtime gay dive in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood; and showed up at countless movie premieres and fashion shows, usually in his fitted Maison Margiela leather jacket, dark jeans and Rick Owens boots.

Wooden grew up in Brooklyn but came of age at Boy Bar, the not-quite-bar not-quite-nightclub where many an early 1990s drag queen was hatched.

The original idea (it’s not exactly clear whose) was to turn him into what Lady Bunny described as a “a sassy mammy character,” with Aretha Franklin wigs and floral print 1950s dresses.

But Mona had glamour running through her veins, down past her bulging calves. So off went that look and on came the glittery, Barbarella- and Wonder Woman-inspired duds.

At night, Wooden hosted Mona Foot’s “Star Search,” a weekly competition at Barracuda that preceded RuPaul’s “Drag Race” by more than 15 years and probably served as one of its inspirations.

During the day, Wooden ran the men’s department at the Patricia Field boutique, working alongside Candis Cayne, another of the scene’s best-known personalities.

In heels onstage, he was a terrifying presence. “He could really cut a bitch,” Cayne said. Out of heels, he was a mensch.

By the end of the ’90s, Wooden had been cast as one of a gaggle of drag queens in “Flawless,” where he serves as one of Hoffman’s sidekicks and performs Cher’s “Half Breed” in a drag club.

He and his sisters of the cloth, JoJo Americo and Paul Alexander (performing as the trio the Ones), recorded a song with the movie’s title. It went to No. 4 on the Billboard Club Play chart, No. 7 in the United Kingdom and No. 2 in Belgium.

George Michael added a few lyrics and rerecorded it a few years later as “Flawless (Go to the City).” It became his last big hit.