Don’t ask any of this year’s St. Pete Pride pageant winners to sing.
“There’s an old saying going around the drag community: I lip-sync for a reason,” says this year’s Mister St. Pete Pride, Rico Taylor (Kendra Hernandez). “When it comes to singing, I sound like a cat getting strangled.”
That’s more or less true for the other two standard-bearers for 2013, too — Scott Ryan’s Muffy VanBeaverhousen, selected as Miss St. Pete Pride, and Akylis (aka Jonathan), who won the Mr. St. Pete Pride title. But all three rock enough style, talent and all-around fabulosity to make any lack of singing ability irrelevant.
The drag personae of all three differ significantly from their everyday selves, and not just in gender.
Kendra Hernandez describes herself as a “boi,” dressing in men’s clothing for her day job installing sprinklers and irrigation, and hoping to make the transition someday from female to male. But Rico is a whole nother animal; he’s “the king of Latin,” says Hernandez, a flamboyant nightclub personality à la Rico Suave dressed in black vest and white pants studded with Swarovski crystals hand-sewn by Hernandez.
Off-stage, Scott Ryan is a gentle, diminutive, bookish-seeming soul; it makes sense that he’s a special ed teacher. You’d never guess that he and the big, blonde, flamboyant Muffy are one and the same.
“Some people are like, ‘Wow, you know you’re polar opposites,” says Ryan. “I say it’s all about there’s certain things that [drag] queens can do that aren’t necessarily appropriate for a guy to do. [As Muffy] I can go up to a guy and say. ‘Omigod you’re cute,’” whereas Ryan might not have made the same move out of costume.
Jonathan’s transformation into Akylis (pronounced “Achilles”) isn’t quite as big a leap as that of the other St. Pete Pride standard-bearers, since there’s no change in gender. But Akylis is definitely a character, a chance for Jonathan, a former go-go dancer, to do what he likes best — entertain — while wearing revealing costumes like his homemade “rainbow head to toe” outfit, crafted from wind chimes and a scarf he found at MC FilmFest.
All three competed for their titles in the usual beauty-pageant categories, including evening wear and talent. Rico, who is Hispanic, distinguished himself by lip-syncing both English and Spanish lyrics; Akylis did two minutes of lip-syncing followed by two minutes of “really hard-core dancing.” And Muffy did a virtuoso multi-media turn in which she played Dorothy and all the characters of The Wizard of Oz.
But Pride isn’t just about dressing up in big wigs and rainbow pants.
For Kendra, it’s a chance to reconnect with the town where she grew up; now living in New Port Richey, she went to St. Pete High and came out as a freshman the same year St. Pete Pride made its debut. The parade will pass “all the streets I grew up going to,” she says. “It’s nostalgic for me.”
Akylis/Jonathan says that, at first, he was just looking at the title as a platform, a way to get his name out as a performer. “Then I started to think about what Pride really means,” he says. “So many, so many people, not just gay people, who are united in accepting one another and being proud of that.”
“It’s all about community,” sums up Ryan. “We’re here to celebrate our uniqueness.”
This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 3, 2013.
