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It’s Gay Pride Weekend: Dress the Part

The Queens of Dish

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Byron Smith for The New York Times

IS it O.K. to cry at a drag show? That’s what drag artists and their fans have been asking in the aftermath of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., this month. For the drag queen Sasha Velour, tears make drag about more than a funny man in a dress.

“Drag promises the queer community transformation, that we can turn pain and make it into something beautiful,” Ms. Velour said. “Drag can be a source of hope but also a way to process mourning.”

As the TV show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” drags drag outside of gay bars and onto Main Street, we seem to be in the midst of a golden age. Queens are using their powers as “shamans, witch doctors or court jesters,” as RuPaul recently put it, to make people laugh, question and, yes, sometimes cry.

The annual parade and the PrideFest street fair on Sunday are the main events for gay pride in New York, but here’s another way to celebrate: an all-drag weekend.

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Sasha Velour in “Nightgowns.”Credit...Marloes Haarmans

CATCH THE CABARET New York Pride’s big drag event is on Sunday, when “Night of 1000 Queens,” featuring Raja, Naomi Smalls and other popular performers from “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” takes over Stage 48. But you can start the weekend with Paige Turner, Sutton Lee Seymour, Jackie Cox and their “Big Gay Pride Show.” There will be drag staples like show tunes and a tribute to Judy Garland, and an educational “drag history lesson,” as Ms. Turner put it, about pioneers in the art form. Neema Bahrami, the manager at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, is scheduled to attend on Friday night.

All weekend expect the city’s drag scene to be awash in outrage and remembrance as well as wisecracks and dance breaks.

“It’s possible for a drag show to be beautiful and funny and politically charged,” said Ms. Velour, who delivers a “queer sermon” at the end of her own monthly show, “Nightgowns” (named after the garments she loved trying on as a boy experimenting with gender). “That’s a huge selling point.”

“Night of 1000 Queens” is on Sunday at Stage 48, 605 West 48th Street, Manhattan; vossevents.com.

“Big Gay Pride Show” is at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday at the Laurie Beechman Theater, 407 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; spincyclenyc.com.

“Nightgowns” is on July 7 at Bizarre Bushwick, 12 Jefferson Street, Brooklyn; bizarrebushwick.com.

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A scene from “Kinky Boots.” Credit...Matthew Murphy

SEE A BROADWAY MATINEE Most drag shows are off limits to children, because of racy content, liquor laws or late start times. But kids are everywhere in the audience at “Kinky Boots,” the Tony Award-winning musical about a drag queen turned footwear entrepreneur in a small British town. Now in its third year on Broadway, “Kinky Boots,” with music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper and book by Harvey Fierstein, is a family-friendly musical in the company of “The Lion King” and “Wicked,” thanks in part to a story about “finding your passion, overcoming prejudice and transcending stereotypes,” as Ben Brantley wrote in his review. And with chorus lines of splashy heels, it’s a dreamscape for aspiring young drag queens.

“Kinky Boots” is at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, 302 West 45th Street, Manhattan; kinkybootsthemusical.com, the Saturday matinee is at 2.

STREAM A MOVIE The hair is high and the insults are low in “The Queen,” an eye-opening time capsule of a documentary about the Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant at Town Hall in Manhattan, hosted by the drag queen Flawless Sabrina in 1967. (This was two years before riots at the Stonewall Inn helped usher in the modern gay rights movement.) Anyone thinking of crossing a drag queen is advised to pay attention to the last 10 minutes, when all hell breaks loose as Crystal LaBeija, a runner-up, reads the winner in a snarling tempest of shade. As Renata Adler said in her review in The New York Times, the film “shows us another America.”

Available on DVD at TheQueen1968Documentary.com or YouTube.

SPRINKLE SEQUINS ON YOUR BRUNCH Last year Pete Wells, the restaurant critic for The New York Times, wrote that he had more fun at Señor Frog’s “than at almost any other restaurant that has opened in the last few years.”

And that was before the drag queens moved in.

Since January, the Times Square outpost of that Mexican restaurant, known for its balloon hats and mega-margaritas, has hosted a popular Sunday drag brunch featuring unlimited cocktails and New York drag queens. Brandon Voss, an organizer of gay events hired by Señor Frog’s to help promote the show, said the raucous audience has expanded beyond the local gay crowd to include curious tourists and straight allies. “But there are men in wigs, so it’s still pretty gay,” Mr. Voss said.

Señor Frog’s Drag Brunch, 11 Times Square; two seatings, at 12:30 and 2:30 p.m.; $39.95 in advance or $49.95 at the door; vossevents.com

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Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

KICK OFF YOUR HEELS AND READ A BOOK Showgirl. Monster. Housefrau. Sexpot. Drag in these and many other personas is the subject of “Why Drag?,” a new coffee-table book of portraits by the photographer Magnus Hastings. The luxe portfolio, with a foreword by the gender provocateur Boy George, features over 200 drag queens from around the world. There are celebrity queens, like New York’s veteran night life hostess Lady Bunny, looking coy in rabbit ears and black opera gloves, but also under-the-radar gals like Nina West of Columbus, Ohio, dressed as a nutty Valkyrie. “To me drag is an art form with no rules,” Mr. Hastings writes in his introduction, “and my shots are a celebration of that.”

Available at magnushastings.com.

DO THE DRAG DISHES The monthly web series “Cooking With Drag Queens” is just that: the hosts (and husbands) Fausto Fernós and Marc Felion dishing and making dishes with drag queens in the kitchen of their Chicago home. Recent episodes featured African peanut curry from Bob the Drag Queen, the winner of this year’s season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” and the Korean dishes bibimbap and kimchi prepared by, well, Kim Chi, a runner-up. Also check out “Feast of Fun,” a daily podcast hosted by Mr. Fernós and Mr. Felion that regularly features interviews with drag performers from across the gender-bending spectrum.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s Gay Pride Weekend: Dress the Part. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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