DALLAS — After months without much practice, Joe Hoselton was worried he wouldn’t get his mug on right.
Backstage at the Winspear Opera House, Hoselton was transforming into his stage persona, Jenna Skyy, for only his second live performance since the pandemic began.
Jenna’s makeup — the contoured cheekbones, the arched eyebrows, the mauve lipstick — are key to bringing her character to life on stage. After so long away from the spotlight, would that face be the same?
“I suddenly doubt myself,” Hoselton said, carefully applying more makeup. “Suddenly, it’s like you’ve never ridden a bike before.”
Jenna is a regular cast member at Oak Lawn’s Rose Room, billed as the largest drag venue in Dallas and the Southwest. There and at other gay bars and venues around North Texas, drag performers would normally be taking the stage several times a week.
But in 2020, with the pandemic putting all kinds of live performances on hold, drag performers have had to find new ways to stay afloat. Slowly — with clear plastic face shields, Venmo tips and virtual shows — drag is coming back to Dallas. But it’s been a difficult year for many drag queens who make their living on performing live.
For the first time in October, then again in early December, the cast of the Rose Room was invited to perform at the AT&T Performing Arts Center as part of TITAS/Unfiltered, a series of dance performances with adult themes.
“We need to support these local performers,” said Charles Santos, executive director of TITAS. “These people make a living doing this, and it’s just a good time.”
The TITAS show allowed Jenna and a handful of other local drag queens to perform in front of a live audience — and get paid doing it. But drag at the opera house isn’t the same as drag in the club.
For many LGBT people, gay bars — and especially drag shows — have historically been one of the few places where people can feel comfortable being themselves. The loss of those safe spaces during the pandemic has been particularly difficult for the LGBT community.
“We haven’t been able to connect,” Jenna said. “It’s evident in everything. People haven’t been able to get out and cope with the things that are weighing on them.”
Trying to make ends meet
Drag in Dallas is a big deal. The city has some of the largest venues regionally, and drag queens from Dallas regularly go on to do big things in the world of drag. Dallas’ drag families — groups of performers who mentor one another and share stage surnames — regularly produce nationally renowned talent like Mesquite’s Alyssa Edwards and Grand Prairie’s Asia O’Hara.
So while drag everywhere came to a screeching halt in March, the pandemic’s hit on local performers has been especially hard.
Just ask Dallas’ Kennedy Davenport, “the dancing diva of Texas” who appeared on two seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race and is the reigning Miss Gay USofA. She normally charges a high price for appearances, but she said that during the pandemic she has significantly reduced her fee and has been traveling farther for opportunities to perform.
“People fail to understand that we are in a pandemic,” Kennedy said. “It’s not as profitable.”
Like many drag performers, Kennedy makes her career out of performing. Some may have a side-job or other source of income, but many rely on the stage to make ends meet. Losing those opportunities to perform makes it hard to pay the bills.
“We thought this was going to be a couple months thing,” said Cassie Nova, emcee of the shows at the Rose Room. “Nobody’s making as much money as they were, so it’s a struggle.”
Just getting started in drag takes significant financial investment, and staying involved can rack up costs. Quality makeup and costumes are expensive. Add in long hours and late nights at weekend shows, and it’s a tough living. For many performers, it’s a full-time job.
With the pandemic, some of that overhead has gone up, Kennedy said. She had to transform her living room into a stage, complete with speakers, lighting, fabric backdrops and more for virtual shows. All that costs money, not to mention the makeup and costumes that come with performing regularly.
“It costs to be put in drag,” Kennedy said. “I love what I do. Drag is my passion. Regardless of if I get two or three dollars, I love to entertain and I’m going to do the show because I love what I do.”
Some of the top-level performers are paid by venues — which is why bar closures were so difficult — but audience tips make up a significant piece of a drag queen’s income. Plus, tips aren’t just part of the profits, it’s part of the fun of going to a show.
“They want to be seen tipping and they want to make a production out of it,” Cassie said.
But tipping up close can be risky during the pandemic, and you can’t hand a drag queen a few singles from 6 feet away.
When bars briefly reopened during the summer, Cassie said, cash tips were collected in big buckets that the performers would then take backstage and spray with Lysol. Others have relied on cash-transfer apps like Venmo to collect tips.
That’s one pandemic-era adaptation that some performers hope will stick around. Jenna said that often if fans don’t have cash, they’ll offer to buy the performer a shot of booze. That may work the first or second time, she said, but eventually drag queens have to work the stage — not get drunk.
If Venmo were an option, she said, more people may pull out their phones to tip instead.
“In the long run, that could benefit all of us,” Jenna said.
Like most other drag performers, Cassie turned to virtual shows when the pandemic began and the clubs closed. She hosts a weekly show on Facebook Live, where she can invite other performers to broadcast from their own homes.
Such virtual shows are a mixed bag, many drag performers agree. On one hand, you’re able to continue to develop relationships with fans online and potentially earn tips. On the other, it’s much more difficult to develop that connection through a camera — and the money is not nearly as good as it once was.
Kennedy tried doing virtual shows at first and said fans were quick to tune in and tip well. But as the pandemic continued, many drag queens say, the tipping slowed. Kennedy said she earned just $74 on a recent virtual broadcast with hundreds of viewers.
“I’m supposed to do things for free? No, thank you,” she said. “I could be saving this makeup.”
Connecting with an audience through the internet can be difficult as well, Kennedy said. She’s spent time performing on camera, but many drag queens say it was difficult to learn how to perform for a laptop in the living room after being used to seeing and reacting to a live audience.
“Being able to interact with them is what we lack with the virtual shows,” Kennedy said. “You have to be an entertainer to have that feeling through a lens.”
Back to new normal
After months of empty stages, live drag shows have started up again at some Dallas spots. Virgin Hotels Dallas has hosted a drag brunch with several local performers. The Rose Room cast started regular shows at JR’s Bar and Grill on Cedar Springs Road in December.
Pandemic-era protocols have affected those shows. For example, drag queens at JR’s wear plastic face shields or clear masks, so as not to cover their stage makeup or hide lips while lip syncing during their shows.
But despite some changes, the trappings of a regular drag show — the flawless makeup, the outrageous wigs, the high heels — are still there.
At a recent show at JR’s, fans on barstools with small stacks of dollar bills waited for their favorite performers to take the stage. One by one, the performers took the stage complete with face shields.
Although they were encouraged to tip on Venmo, lines of masked fans still lined up give their tips to their favorites by hand. Some drag queens stepped back, directing them to place dollar bills on a bar nearby. Others collected the cash by hand.
When Jenna performed, one man brought up a stack of dollar bills and handed each to her one at a time. She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek — through the face mask, of course.
At any other time, it’d be a common sight at the drag show. Getting back to those fans and that routine in the midst of the pandemic, Jenna said, has been important for the community.
“I’m worried people are going to forget about us,” Jenna said. “We’re ready to get back to our friends and our fans.”