The first Miss Gay USofA happened at the Dallas Grand Hotel, which is now the Statler, and Natasha Richards was crowned. On the more traditional drag front, in 1996 one of the nation’s most iconic drag pageants, Miss Gay USofA, moved its national pageant permanently to Dallas. It now calls Deja Vu, formerly Tekilas, its home. The Miss Wanda show ran for 10 years at Caven before moving to other Dallas clubs. Then in 1995 Miss Wanda, aka Jasper Lightsey, birthed his Miss Wanda Show, which became JR’s Bar and Grill’s first and only drag show. And it really was the birth of women performing drag in the Dallas scene.” The show was a big hit.Īs Dallas drag historian Richard Curtin recalls, “It was what I called Femme la Drag. Two under-represented and marginalized groups, lesbian women and the black gay community, soon found themselves front and center on the stage.Īll-girl drag shows were already popular at bars like High Country and Buddies, when in 1990, Kathy Jack brought The Strip’s first all-female show cast to Sue Ellen’s with her Thursdayĭrag Extravaganza, later dubbed The New Sue Review. The ’90s would prove to be a big pivot point for Dallas drag as well. What Dragging Up Dallas History, a 2015 article by Tammye Nash, also pointed out was that even within the queens themselves there was a divide, a “huge gap between the pageant girls and the charity girls.” In 1995 a charity queen named Patti La Plae Safe became the first to bridge that gap by winning the Miss Gay America title. That’s when it started, the mantra of charity drag.” “When AIDS started to really become an issue here,” he said in the article, “drag shows became a way to fight back…. But that focus shifted with the onset of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s - something that Michael Doughman reflected upon in a 2015 interview with Dallas Voice. Camina Facebook: Edna Jean Robinson and her drag daughter Emma Jean Robinson above, and left, Something Fabulous arrangement by Jenna Skyy.ĭrag in Dallas in its early years was about entertainment.
But that shift didn’t come easy, and it definitely didn’t happen over night.ĭrag Queen mud wrestling photo via Robert L. Dallas drag has evolved from its roots of being a queens-only city to being a drag artist one. We can credit (or blame) RuPaul’s Drag Race all we want, but the fact of the matter is drag - like any other art - is evolving.Īnd with drag’s current all-inclusive evolution, it’s far too easy for drag newbies to see the diversity of shows happening on any given night in the DFW Metroplex and believe that it was always so. The Rose Room inside S4, established in 1986 when it was Village Station, has undergone three remodels, including a major expansion in 2004.Īlong with the places in Dallas that house drag, drag itself - and the faces of those who perform it - have changed, to the applause of some and the disdain of others. The Old Plantation of the ’80s became the Village Station of the ’80s and ’90s and the S4 of the 2000s. Drag queens and trans women always made sure to have men’s underwear on under their dresses.ĭrag (and Dallas) has changed A LOT since then.īars like The Landing, the Blue Parrot, Illusions, Buddies, Anchor Inn and Hartfords - the place for comedy drag and boy strippers in the 1980s - that featured drag shows have come and gone. Tammye Nash, the managing editor of the Dallas Voice, recounts a story from her friend Joe Elliot: Every man had to wear some item of “male” clothing. The laws in Dallas back then prohibited cross-dressing but that didn’t stop Dallas queens. Performers pictured are, bac krow from left, Dion Martel, Donna Day, Jerry Harper, Trudy Tyler, Tasha Kohl, and front row from left, Sabrina DeLorean, Naomi Sims, Stacey Renee, and Cocoīrandi Amara Skyy | Contributing Fontana, Dallas’ first gay bar, opened in the 1950s. Photo courtesy of Donna Day Remembered Facebook via Sweet Savage.