It can take as long as six hours for a drag queen to get ready. For the experienced, it can take as little as a half hour.
There’s the ritualized scrubbing, brushing, waxing, and buffing to high shine, and the careful painting of the face. There’s tugging, plucking, and taping. With a little cellophane and elbow grease, a good drag queen can entomb themselves in a glistening corset as sturdy as any whalebone.
“Not a lot of people know how much goes into become a woman. To go back in those dressing rooms before the show while they’re getting ready is just incredible,” Tobe Daniels, a local drag king said.
But a group of local queens and kings showed that beauty isn’t just skin deep as they turned out in full force to help out at NIC’s Gay Straight Alliance’s HalloQueen fundraiser on October 25.
The group, which consisted of performers from local drag clubs, played to a packed room and raised over $500 by the end of the night.
The show featured risqué adult-themed humor, ranging from drag king Daniels performing as Justin Bieber, a piano ballad about a gay man’s dream to be a housewife, to a Taser-accented finale involving a nun, studded lingerie and a group of young men in their underwear.
What was perhaps the biggest crowd pleaser of the night took place shortly before the second set of performances.
In honor of the hit show RuPaul’s Drag Race, two audience members were selected to “Lip-sync for your life” to the Lady Gaga song Born That Way.
After being selected to compete, the two men, Tre Keough and Alex Palmer, made their way to the stage, but it quickly became apparent Trey was the clear winner after he performed a flawless and complicated dance routine to the song that brought the delighted audience to its feet and his opponent fleeing.
“It was fun, interesting, [and] a little embarrassing,” said Palmer, who had been selected from the audience due to his obvious heterosexuality.
As it turned out, Keough was neither a stranger to dance nor Lady Gaga, with his life’s dream involving a career as her backup dancer.
“I’ve been dancing for ten years, ballet, hip-hop, jazz, you name it,” “I felt a burst of energy was coming towards me up there. I felt like I could be myself, a shining star.”
