2024-01-07 18:14:09
“Is anyone planning a performance where we should issue a trigger warning?” Giselle Hipps asks the participants shortly before the show begins. Everyone says no, apparently not this time. “We’ve had that before,” says Giselle Hipps and laughs. For the fifth year in a row, the drag queen will host the “Drag Slam” together with Jessica Walker. As before every show, Giselle Hipps as the “mother of the ‘Drag Slam’ family” goes through the process again with the participants backstage at the Frankfurt club “Orange Peel”.
This primarily affects the six performing artists, but also former “Drag Slam” participants, supporters from the community and relatives. Most of them know each other: kisses on the left, kisses on the right. Loud laughter, conversations back and forth. While some comb their wigs and stick on the last eyelashes, others help each other into their dazzling costumes. The atmosphere is exuberant, the first champagne corks are popping and the bass from the stage is already coming through the walls.
Organizer Jan Schmidt came up with the idea of organizing a “Drag Slam” five years ago. He saw the need for community and wanted to create a format with the queer contest “that doesn’t yet exist in this form”. An evening full of singing, dancing, acrobatics and comedy, where there are no limits to creativity – just like there are no limits in drag. “It’s an event that the queer scene needed,” says Giselle Hipps, who has been there since the “Drag Slam” was born. However, this only really became clear to Jan Schmidt and Giselle Hipps when there were almost three times as many visitors as expected at the opening evening in 2018.
“The homely, safe feeling”
Since then, the monthly competition has almost always sold out. This is primarily due to the “diverse, open art,” says Giselle Hipps, who came to drag more than ten years ago through Christopher Street Day. Nobody is excluded, everyone is allowed to take part. “Nobody here is pilloried because of their clothing size, their sexuality, their skin color or their origins. Everyone can be whatever they want.” It is a safe space that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
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Slam in Frankfurt: An event that the queer community needs
“You would think that you should feel safe at any queer event, but unfortunately that’s not always the case,” says drag queen Robin D’Show. There are also many within the LGBTQ community who are affected by body shaming or kinks shaming. They want to combat this with the “Drag Slam”. “It’s the homely, safe feeling that many people come here for,” says Robin D’Show, who provides musical accompaniment to the evening as a DJ. Sugar van Shock also agrees. “It’s the family atmosphere that makes the ‘Drag Slam’ so special,” says the drag queen as she puts on her glittering outfit. As the winner of the last “Drag Slam All Stars”, Sugar van Shock opens today’s show.
#evening #full #queerness