Taiwan’s first Drag Queen Banquet brought together 10 drag queens, including event organizer Sandra Hoe, four go-go boys and a pole dancer, to perform for a sold-out 42-table banquet at Songshan Fengtian Temple (松山奉天宮) on Sunday.
Organizers Sandra Hoe and Heart Fang (方心), who run the drag event platform “Sunday Sisterhood,” said the banquet combined Taiwan’s traditional temple culture and communal banquet tradition with the creative, gender-defying art of drag.
While the temple agreed to rent out its banquet hall, it was not until Sandra visited in drag to pay her respects that temple officials realized it was a drag event.
Photo courtesy of Sunday Sisterhood
The temple approved the event without hesitation, graciously becoming the venue for this historic fusion of traditional culture and drag.
Each performance was named after a traditional banquet dish, making for a ten-course meal where each dish coincided with a performance.
The queens brought to life songs by famous Taiwanese pop stars including A-Mei (張惠妹), Coco Lee (李玟), Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) and Jeannie Hsieh (謝金燕).
Photo courtesy of Sunday Sisterhood
The show opened with all 10 queens performing Hsieh’s hit Great Together (一起棒), before Sandra Hoe introduced all 15 performers to Rihanna’s Diamonds.
The queens sashayed through the banquet hall each waving their own custom-designed flag, which were on display at the temple entrance prior to the event.
Two queens from the famous House of Wind, Aphrodirty and Makeila, took the stage next, performing Tsai’s We’re All Different, Yet the Same (不一樣又怎樣) and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way.
Photo courtesy of Sunday Sisterhood
Aphrodirty is a professor at the National Taiwan University of Arts, while Makeila is one of Taiwan’s youngest drag queens at only 18 years old.
Other notable performances included a moving medley of the late Coco Lee’s songs by Yugee Mesula and a mashup of A-Mei songs, including Three Days and Three Nights (三天三夜), by Marian Mesula, which brought the whole banquet hall to its feet.
Yugee and Marian, two of Taiwan’s long-standing and most famous drag queens, are both transgender and from the House of Mesula, known for its dancing prowess.
Sandra later took to the stage with her drag sisters C.E. Hoe and Golden Melody Award-winner Rafaela, who sang a rendition of Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club before the three queens performed a high-energy mashup of Britney Spears’ Circus and the Pussycat Dolls’ When I Grow Up.
Banquet attendees together donated NT$28,600 to a lucky draw, half of which was given to a lucky winner while the other half was donated to the Taiwan Tongzhi (LGBTQ+) Hotline Association.
“Belief in Taiwan’s diversity and shared prosperity is rooted in our blood; love and tolerance are in our DNA,” organizers Sandra and Heart said.
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