“Both come from a certain minority experience in the United States, and they both represent a certain outsider viewpoint,” he said.
he sees parallels between drag and Jewish cultures. Keller, who stopped doing drag at the end of 2014 when he started rabbinical school, told J. (The group has performed at Ner Shalom in the past and is scheduled to appear there again in December.) Anastasia (center) with other drag queens at a recent show organized by Brock Uhl. Rabbi Irwin Keller, the spiritual leader of Congregation Ner Shalom in Sonoma County, performed for 21 years with the Kinsey Sicks, a celebrated drag a cappella quartet. Locally, San Francisco drag queen Miss Shugana makes her Jewishness part of her shtick.
Jewish gay pride shirt cracker#
(Monsoon is currently competing on season 7 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars,” which can be streamed on Paramount+.) New York’s Miz Cracker uses the catchphrase “Shabbat shablam!” Mama De La Smallah is a Mizrahi drag queen in Israel, which has a small scene in Tel Aviv.
The winner of season five of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Seattle’s Jinkx Monsoon, was explicitly Jewish. There are a handful of Jewish drag queens who have made a name for themselves in recent years. She would do Uhl’s makeup, and then they would go out on the town and film the reactions of passersby to Anastasia’s appearance for her YouTube channel. His cousin Jaymie was a fan of the televised reality competition “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which has aired since 2009 and helped bring drag into the mainstream. “I wanted to tell myself who I was.”Īs a freshman in high school, many years removed from his childhood dress-up days, Uhl began to dip his toe into drag. I hated everybody telling me that I was different and telling me who I was,” he recalled. “People would ask me all the time, ‘Are you gay?’ or tell me I was gay. In middle school, before he came out as gay, his peers would pester him about his sexuality. And it’s like reliving my childhood, of not caring what everybody thinks.”īorn and raised in Pleasanton, Uhl celebrated his bar mitzvah at Temple Beth Sholom in San Leandro. “It’s this whole new world where I feel like I can do anything and be anything.
“Drag gave me a space to let out this other side of myself,” Uhl said during a recent Zoom interview. (Pronouns change to “she” when referring to a drag queen’s persona.) Then on June 15, she will also host “Queens of Casa” at the Casa Orozco Mexican restaurant. On June 1, the first day of Pride Month, Anastasia will host “World of Drag” at the World of Beer tavern. And he recently started performing in his shows as the platinum blonde, faintly British-accented Anastasia. For almost a year, he has organized a monthly show featuring local drag queens in Dublin, far from the LGBTQ epicenter of San Francisco. Today, the 18-year-old Jewish senior at Amador Valley High School is fully immersed in drag culture. On summer days, his older sister and cousins would doll him up in dresses, wigs and boas, make up his face, and watch him strut around as “Carina.” The joke in Brock Uhl’s family is that he’s been doing drag since he was 4 years old.