One Night time Backstage at Texas’s Legendary Rose Room

feStanding within the again parking zone of Station 4, a sprawling LGBTQ dance membership in Dallas, I notice that is the primary time I’ve been right here whereas the solar continues to be out, regardless of numerous visits beginning in my late teenagers. At 8:45 p.m., tucked behind the membership, the parking zone is full however weirdly quiet, although I can nonetheless hear the bustling throng of individuals on the Strip, a bit of Cedar Springs Highway within the metropolis’s Oak Garden neighborhood that’s served as the center of Dallas’s LGBTQ nightlife scene for greater than 4 a long time. Then, Jenna Skyy seems behind me within the lot, rolling an enormous suitcase, and the night begins in earnest.

Jenna Skyy has been a drag performer in Dallas for the final 18 years, a lot of them on the Rose Room, the upstairs area at Station 4 that serves as the town’s most venerable drag venue. Open in its present iteration for 38 years, even individuals who’ve by no means visited Dallas have heard of it because of the legendary queens that this metropolis’s drag scene has birthed. A slew of RuPaul’s Drag Race stars, together with Shangela LaQuifa Wadley, Asia O’Hara, Kennedy Davenport, and Alyssa Edwards, have appeared on this stage, and it’s a must-stop tour vacation spot for most of the nation’s most outstanding queens. However tonight, the Rose Room’s everlasting forged of 5 queens are the celebs of the present.

By the sheer advantage of its existence, the Rose Room has turn into an unwitting battleground within the broader tradition wars enjoying out across the nation. Drag performances, right here and inside eating places all around the nation because of the recognition of drag brunch, have been focused by lawmakers in Texas and past. It’s by no means been unusual to see spiritual teams praying for the souls of all us sinning queers contained in the golf equipment on a typical Friday night time. However the Rose Room has at all times appeared like a secure area for its performers, who have been beneficiant sufficient to let me tag alongside for one night time to get a glimpse of what a night of their lives is de facto like throughout this weird political second.

Following Jenna Skyy into the membership, she leads me previous the bar, the place I’ve ordered numerous cherry vodka sours in my lifetime, and into the interior sanctum of the Rose Room. The backstage space is smaller than I’d’ve guessed, only a few make-up tables with mirrors, a variety of vibrant lights, and lockers full of wigs. Atop one of many lockers sits a bedazzled crown lined in black rhinestones, which belongs to point out director Cassie Nova. A 30-year veteran of the stage, Cassie Nova is buzzing across the principally empty locker room, pulling costume items, determining which songs everybody’s going to carry out in tonight’s present, and taking pictures the shit with Jenna Skyy because the latter arranges her in depth lineup of eyeshadows and foundations.

The dialog turns promptly to the current payments that intention to limit drag performances throughout the nation, together with in Texas. The week earlier than my go to to the Rose Room, Cassie Nova and Jenna Skyy have been amongst a contingency of queens from Dallas and past who’d traveled to Austin to testify earlier than the Texas Legislature towards a invoice that was meant to ban anybody beneath the age of 18 from attending a drag present. Initially, the laws particularly singled out drag performances, which made performers like Cassie Nova and Jenna Skyy concern for each their jobs and their security. “I can solely converse for myself, however I’ve at all times felt like this was a secure area. Our followers come right here as a result of they love us,” Jenna Skyy says. “But when the legislation modifications, all it takes is one telephone name, and there’s citations and arrests.”

The remaining model of the invoice, which handed the Texas Senate in Might, is now described as a “sexual conduct invoice” and prohibits “actual or simulated groping, actual or simulated arousal and show of a intercourse toy, if finished in a ‘prurient’ method in entrance of a minor or on public property.” That change gave the queens some sense of safety, however they’re nonetheless uneasy about what the long run seems like. “Despite the fact that they redid the invoice and took out all of the references to pull queens, that is nonetheless an assault on the LGBTQ group,” Cassie Nova says. “We’re not 100% okay with it, but it surely was the lesser of a complete bunch of evils.”

Jenna Skyy is incensed at the concept that drag queens and different LGBTQ individuals are being focused beneath the guise of defending youngsters. “It’s simply an effort to detract from the actual points, like gun management and what’s happening in our church buildings,” she says. “Why aren’t the children protected there? Why aren’t they protected at college?”

Now that we’ve disbursed with “the political shit,” as Cassie Nova calls it, the temper brightens and the gossip begins to circulation. I ask her how a lot issues have modified since she first began performing in 1993. Probably the most notable change, after all, is the meteoric rise of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the sequence that took drag out of the golf equipment and into the mainstream when it premiered in 2009. Not prepared to call anybody on the file, Cassie Nova talks about queens she’s seen make the leap from the Rose Room to RuPaul’s runway, a few of whom have been “about as enjoyable to observe as watching paint dry.”

In the end, she has blended emotions in regards to the reputation of Drag Race. She’s supportive of her pals who’ve discovered success on the present, however views its broader impression on the group as a double-edged sword. “It’s made some issues higher, some issues worse,” she says. “Drag is a lot extra accessible to so many individuals now, however the downfall is that among the best issues about doing drag within the early days was that it felt scandalous. It felt a little bit fringe. We have been performing for our group, and now we’re performing for the world.”

That shift has been particularly difficult for what Cassie Nova and lots of drag followers describe as “native queens” like herself, who principally follow their house bases and customarily haven’t appeared on nationwide tv. In an period when Instagram followers and clout are extra vital than ever, she worries newer followers are lacking out on drag’s historical past — and being disrespectful to queens holding it down of their cities. “There’s this entire new technology the place in case you’re not on tv, then you definitely’re nothing,” Cassie Nova says. “They only don’t know. I’ve been carrying orange and yellow hair for 20-something years, and now some queen that was on Drag Race wears it and I get accused of copying her. No, bitch, that is the hair that I’ve been carrying for 100 years.”

About an hour earlier than the present begins, I discover that there’s not a crumb of meals on this locker room. No snacks; not one dinner scarfed down in entrance of a make-up mirror. Drag is an endurance sport, so I ask Jenna Skyy and Cassie Nova what they ate beforehand to get them by means of the night time. Jenna Skyy says she downed a can of soup, as a result of a lettuce dilemma stored her from grilling a burger. “My lettuce was new, and I didn’t wish to open the lettuce,” she says. “That was actually my logic.” Cassie Nova ready a breakfast-for-dinner feast of bacon, egg, and cheese tacos that may each please her notoriously choosy partner and propel her by means of the following a number of hours of dancing, singing, and preserving the gang engaged.

A couple of minutes later, as if from the heavens, a scantily clad angel seems backstage with a spherical of sugar-rimmed lemon drop photographs. On the Rose Room, that’s simply enterprise as ordinary. We every throw one again, and Jenna Skyy turns promptly again to her make-up, sculpting a dramatic cat’s eye with black and orange shadow. “It is a job, and we’ve got it right down to a science,” Cassie Nova chimes in. “It’s identical to you on the brink of go to work. I bathe, I shave, I come right here and get every part on. I do my present, then I take every part off right here, wash my face, and go house.”

As these lemon drops begin to kick in, Kylie Minogue’s new single performs over the audio system as the remainder of the night’s performers — Kelexis Davenport, Krystal Summers, Layla Larue, and Sasha Andrews, all members of the Rose Room’s everlasting forged — arrive and begin curling wigs and making use of lashes. Krystal Summers is sipping a glass of J. Roget American Champagne, and it’s time for me to depart as all of them enter varied phases of undress to don their costumes for the primary quantity, so I discover my technique to a seat close to the entrance of the stage.

The room is full of bachelorette events in matching T-shirts, {couples} and throuples of all types, and a leather-clad particular person in a pup masks. The present begins solely a little bit after 11 p.m., with your entire forged hitting the stage in studded velvet attire to carry out a lip-synced model of “Ex-Wives,” a music from the musical Six in regards to the wives of Henry VIII. The actual magic begins, although, when Cassie Nova takes the stage to start her internet hosting duties. “Sandy, might I’ve only a small shot of vodka? Simply the smallest quantity so I don’t should really feel issues,” she asks the bartender as she kicks off the present. However she shortly tells him, “by no means thoughts,” as an adoring fan approaches the stage with an ice-cold shot of Tito’s.

After a few whirlwind hours beneath the lights, I stumble out of the Rose Room and onto Cedar Springs Highway filled with renewed hope. Even within the face of a really actual existential menace, these self-described “robust bitches” are dedicated to preserving Dallas drag alive for the following technology of queens. And it’s encouraging to see so many screaming followers clenching fistfuls of greenback payments, absolutely immersing themselves within the second. Nonetheless, I’m caught eager about the battles but to return. “Roughly each 80 years or so, there’s some form of upheaval” on this nation, Jenna Skyy stated to me simply earlier than going out onstage. “We’re due, and I fear that there’s going to be a collapse of some sort. However that signifies that there will likely be a rejuvenation and a rebirth and perhaps, lastly, progress.”

Kathy Tran is a Dallas-based photographer, photojournalist, and multimedia enterprise proprietor. Along with her personal studio and a ardour for capturing compelling visuals, she travels the world, immersing herself in numerous initiatives and tales.