Drag Racing – Dupont Style: The Slideshow
“Oh honey, you look absolutely gorgeous! You’ve got no tits, though,” the burly drag queen in front of me says with an air of disappointment as she pulls out my dress and examines my chest.
It’s not the first time that night that I curse my lack of foresight in failing to enhance my chest by wadding up a lump of toilet paper and stuffing it down the front of my dress. But hindsight is 20/20 and all I can do now is shrug my shoulders, flip my pink wig of hair and clip-clop down the road in my painfully-small heels to the next group of drag queens and curious spectators.
It’s the annual D.C. Halloween High Heel Race, a local tradition where drag queens of all sizes, shapes and sexual orientations gather in an orgy of ostentatious faux-femininity and feathered, bejeweled theatrics. This year’s race, held this past Tuesday, featured over 100 drag queens assembled for the balls-to-the-wall carnival atmosphere that, for one night, inverts the stereotype of “professional” D.C., turning notions of gender and propriety inside out before tying them discreetly between their legs.
Of course, entering the race and watching from the sidelines are two entirely different experiences. Since it’s the only way to avoid having to worry about fighting for a good view or getting lost in the crowds that come to watch, a fellow Voice staffer and I decided to experience the event in all our drag glory. The instant celebrity status foisted on anyone with a pronounced Adam’s apple and poorly-fitting dress is almost worth the uncomfortable bus ride over. Unfortunately, since you have to be in drag to participate, the event is closed to women, who will just have to take consolation in the fact that they can be objectified anytime they put on a miniskirt and heels. Sorry ladies, but tonight it’s our turn.
“I think the best part about being in the event is getting to meet all of the other participants,” said Max Coffman (CAS ‘05), a Georgetown student who entered the race decked out in his best 1920’s flapper finery. “There are some interesting people out here.”
The High Heel Race began 18 years ago on Halloween night when two customers at JRs Bar and Grill (who fortuitously happened to be in drag), struck upon the idea of having a race in a moment of besotted brilliance. After gathering a number of friends to cheer them on, the small contingent of queens took off down 17th Street towards Annie’s Paramount Steak House where they ran to the upstairs bar, pounded a shot and raced back to the finish line in front of JRs. The event was an instant success and has been repeated each year, quickly snowballing into the glamorous farce that it is today.
Over the years the demographics of the participants and spectators have changed along with the event itself.
“It went from kind of a gay event to a huge community event,” said David Peruzza, General Manager at JRs and one of the main organizers of the event. “Now, everyone in Dupont Circle comes out for it. It just rages. Fifteen years ago drag queens were getting beat by the police and now the police are watching them and clapping. It’s pretty amazing that people are so accepting nowadays.”
City Council Member Adrian Fenty (D-Ward 4), the official starter for this year’s event, agreed.
“We often come together with the gay and lesbian community to work on very serious issues in the community-it’s good to come together for such a fun event.” Fenty said. His explanation as to why he wasn’t running in the race himself? “My wife’s heels wouldn’t fit.”
Whatever initial undertones of openness and acceptance the race might once have harbored have been subsumed by the element of spectacle and theater inherent in the event.
“People come here from the suburbs, and it’s the one time when they can come and see gay men in drag, and you really wonder what their image of the gay community is,” one particularly reflective queen said, interrupting herself to shout “Go work your thing honey!” to a passing friend.
But it soon becomes apparent that questions as to whether the High Heel Race is a gay or a straight event miss the point entirely. It’s a fun event first and foremost.
The event drew a crowd of thousands Tuesday, both from the gay community, a pool of curious onlookers and fans of over-the-top camp who come for the spectacle of hundreds of drag queens getting their respective thangs on.
The queens start parading up and down 17th St. around 7, trying hard to wrap their softer side around their body hair and protruding beer guts. The race itself begins promptly at 9, and is over by 9:02 at the latest. By this point even the slowest runners have covered the three-block course and are ready to get their swerve on at the surrounding bars, if only to forget the pain of running in heels.
When we arrived at around 7:30 the sidewalks were already crowded with onlookers, but the two of us in drag were instantly spotted by an emcee in the middle of the street. “Uh-uh, down here honey!” he calls to us playfully, parting the crowd and pulling us onto the nearly-empty street in front of everyone. “What are your names?” he asks. “Scott,” I say eliciting a “Ooh, doll, you can do better than Scott.” “Um, Peppermint,” I say, thinking quickly, and we are introduced to the cheering crowd lining the sidewalks. After registering and being issued our official event water bottles, condoms and lube (no, really) we are sent out to traipse up and down the street to the curious onlookers who hoot, holler and cheer us on our way, stopping us only to tell us how fabulous we are or to take our picture.
“If you look at the contestants, a lot of them don’t even shave their goatees, some of them just put on lipstick and a dress and run the race,” said Peruzza. “A lot of the people that do it usually aren’t drag queens.”
Some of the more elaborate and flashy costumes were the results of teams who began planning their costumes months in advance, sometimes even spending hundreds of dollars in their quest for the flashiest, most attention-grabbing dress or costume. A yearly staple of the High Heel Race are the Results Gym Cheerleaders, a squadron of suspiciously muscular cheerleaders who perform their hilarious, poorly choreographed routine in front of a rolling soundsystem that follows them up and down the street. The Ho’s with Hoses contingent features a number of queens with firemen’s hats and jackets upstairs, and short skirts, stockings and rollerskates downstairs. Perhaps the most ostentatious group of queens come dressed as their favorite restaurants. Representing such traditionally heterosexual eateries as McDonald’s, Popeye’s and Krispy Kreme, each one wears take-out boxes, placemats, even stolen trays, over top of costumes consisting of spandex, jewels, feathers and sequins color-coordinated to their particular restaurant.
Talking to some of the queens gives you an idea of how truly varied the field of entrants is, and not just in a fashion sense. One queen going by the name of Prima Vera dressed in a self-described “you know, kind of a man-girl thing” outfit (a see-through, leopard-print dress barely waist-long with a curly wig and a goatee) talked about what it was like to be openly gay at the State Department, frequently interrupting herself to issue imperatives such as, “Look at the bitch in the red hair.” When I ask one very tall queen in a jester costume covered with cute plush, stuffed animals from head to toe when where she got the inspiration for her costume, she paused for a second before responding in her best southern-belle accent; “Well, I hate children.”
One of the scarier queens is dressed in a red, fat suit covered with a thong, and a decidedly creepy-looking mask framed by a stringy wig. “You look absolutely marvelous!” she said, looking me over in the middle of the street. “Oh and look, you even shaved your legs!” as she bent down and started running her hand over one of my hastily-shorn calves. While I’m standing there uncomfortably looking for an avenue of escape, the queen suddenly jerks her hand up and grabs my crotch, sending me stumbling backwards, while nearly tripping over my own heels as I try to recover my equilibrium and suppress my shock. “Call me sometime!” she calls out to me as I clomp away as fast as I can.
Aside from the occasional over-aggressive queen, every year the event goes off smoothly. There have never been any reported injuries, surprising in an event where it would seem like falls and shattered ankles would be fairly common.
“Well, last year someone did get hit in the eye with a piece of candy thrown by a drag queen, but that’s the worst injury we’ve had,” said Peruzza.
“There have never been any crowd-control issues,” Metropolitan Police Department officer Schoonover said, as he stood blocking traffic to the block for the night. “It’s actually a very good detail to have.”
Neither have there been problems with local residents. Aside from the occasional complaint about spectators spilling over onto lawns, the event has always run smoothly with the minimal support of a small corps of volunteers organized by JRs.
The organizers narrowly dodged a problem this year, as the city considered charging a fee of $4,000 (down from their initial prospected fee of $9,000) as an event fee.
“The city’s trying to make money off of the event now which, if they do, JR’s probably won’t be responsible for it this year,” Peruzza said. “They think this is a big money-maker for 17th St. but it’s not. It’s just a little thing that got big and now we take care of it.”
Fortunately, the city decided not to press the issue of an event fee, proving once again that you can’t put a price tag on fabulousness.
But of course, the participants didn’t just come to look good. We came to run. The field of drag queens started to slowly gather at the starting line in front of J.R.’s around 8:45. Despite trying to stay close to the front of the line and therefore competitive, my friend and I slowly got pushed back by the queens taking a final sashay up and down the street. Heels clicked and clacked nervously on the pavement and wigs were adjusted for a final time as the 9 p.m. start time drew closer. The apprehension that any finely-tuned athlete feels at a mass-start event was alleviated only slightly by the fact
that we all looked some shade of ridiculous in our lacy clothing. My biggest fear, and one that I found to be a commonly-shared sentiment among the other contestants, was the frightening prospect of falling during the race and being impaled under a stream of swiftly-moving spiked heels. There was a countdown from 10, and then we were off and running.
The course that had seemed so long when we were parading up and down seemed to fly by as I tried to concentrate on the toe-heel dynamic for running in heels that had been hastily imparted to me as we were leaving campus. The staccato rhythm of heels reverberated off the pavement at a machine-gun pace. It was every queen for herself as we furiously raced past the rows of bars and cheering crowds towards victory. While I was able to stay close to the front of the pack and move at a pretty good pace, there were still some runners who passed me as if I were standing still, breezing by me with steady, fluid strides that betrayed their familiarity with the ergonomics of running in pumps. I was, however, able to claim a minor personal victory by passing a dominatrix at the end due to an ill-timed garter malfunction on her part.
While walking around after the race, my pronounced limp, caused by the all-out sprint in constricting heels, invited a number of sarcastic comments from several women. “So now you know how it feels, don’t you?” they would ask smugly as I hobbled by them, panting and carrying my torturous shoes. After hearing the same question repeated a number of times, I was soon ready for it, shooting back “So, is this your first year in the race?” to one frumpy-looking woman causing her expression to sour instantly. God, sometimes I can be such a bitch.
Additional drag racing by
Marco Asencao
