My Night at Jerusalem's First Public Drag Show
“Did you see the drag show?” I asked a friend at last night’s Winter Noise Festival. “Yeah,” he responded, “did you see the racist a**holes?”
Last night, in the hippest corner of Jerusalem’s city center, young Jerusalemites made history. They held the city’s first-ever public and municipally sponsored drag show.
For four years running, the Winter Noise Festival has held public events every Monday night in February, pushing the city’s religious-conservative limits. Last night’s drag show took place amidst well-quaffed street musicians (including a klezmer marching band) and cave-bar dance parties (heavy on beards and vintage outfits), and was advertised discreetly as the “Shushan Run.” The only descriptor of the event on the municipality-sponsored website referred slyly to “the wildest race in the city” — a “race in heels” — for Jerusalem’s queens.
And what fun that “race in heels” was! One queen I interviewed was wearing a miniskirt, fishnets and six-inch platform heels in the chilly Jerusalem night. Imagine running a race in those! Her makeup was caked to her face and I had the thought that gobs of her mascara might soon begin falling from her eyelashes by the sheer force of gravity. Her yellow jacket made her look like a six-foot-six queen bee. Her name was “Mama Off” and she told me that the best thing about the drag show was the protest happening next door.
Mama Off was referring to the angry noises of Benzion Gopstein and his Kahanist cronies in LEAVA, a racist, xenophobic, violent organization just outside the event grounds. Last year I wrote about LEAVA’s protest against another Winter Noise Festival event in which Jews and Arabs joined together in song; their activities have only gotten more angry and violent since then.
Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/214968/my-night-at-jerusalems-first-public-drag-show/?picks_feed=true&picks_feed=true&picks_feed=true#ixzz3SGlYedzS
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Must have been quite the party!
