Each time I told Ziona ‘This is it,’ that I’d found the one and everything was wonderful – until I told him I did drag, or he discovered that I did drag, and there it ended. Rimming: “Before I met my current partner, I looked good, I was thin, and there was no shortage of men who started up with me. Patriot: “The greatest drag phobia is within the community, even today.” People didn’t really want to go out with drag artists. Once, drag carried a very heavy price in the gay community. Gadi Sasson/Hazman Havarod Rama Rimming and Ziona Patriot during Wigstock in Tel Aviv, 1999. Rama Rimming and Ziona Patriot perform on stage during Wigstock in Tel Aviv, 1999.
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We wouldn’t have survived for 20 years had we not taken this seriously.” In my view, there should always be a story which accompanies the performance. It’s not, ‘I felt like appearing as a woman and performing.’ Every number we do involved a lot of thought. Today, there’s a kind of feeling that anyone who puts on a dress and a wig is a drag artist, but for us, drag is a profession. Patriot: “Drag at bachelorette parties is something Rama and I created. Today, you do bachelorette parties, which indicates a fairly high level of acceptance.
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When you began doing drag, it was much less popular. Something started on that stage, when we all sang together.” Rimming: “The feeling was that the protest began with the drag queens. And then the audience began dispersing into the streets.” Shelly Gray, a transgender woman who sung opera, sang “Hatikva” about six times in a row. Everyone got on the stage and refused to get off. But I do remember Eden yelling that we should go out into the streets, and Laila Carry” – one of the best-known drag queens of that era – “getting stuck on some ladder, because her dress was caught on it. Patriot: “Because I was miserable in that velvet dress, I fled home very quickly. What was less exciting was the moment when it all went topsy-turvy, and the joyous party turned into a ruckus. This was the first time I was supposed to appear on a stage of this size, and it was very exciting.” Rimming added, “Before Ziona and I became a duo, we were in our earliest infancy. We didn’t even manage to get on stage and perform, because the police arrived just then.” “Velvet and feathers, you get it? I wanted to die. “I recall that I wore a closed red velvet dress with black feathers and a wig and I sweated like an animal,” Patriot said of that formative evening 20 years ago. In addition to Patriot and Rimming, dozens of other drag queens were due to perform in Tel Aviv’s Meir Park on Wednesday, June 6 and try to charm the crowd with sequined dresses, exaggerated makeup and a lot of humor. Twenty years later, they were asked to be the emcees of Wigstock 2018, which will be part of a campaign by Bela Doeget, the Israel AIDS Task Force’s educational outreach arm for the LGBT community. The young drag queens who appeared on the first Wigstock stage included Ziona Patriot (Yuval Edelman), who has since become Israel’s most famous drag artist, and Rama Rimming (Rami Gotthelf). This event, which to this day is considered one of the milestones in the fight against LGBTphobia in Israel, occurred about a month before Tel Aviv’s first ever Gay Pride parade. Thousands attend central Israeli city of Kfar Sava's first Gay Pride Parade
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LGBT pride month in Israel: 'When a corrupt system accepts you, you forget that it’s still corrupt' Unsurprisingly, this was seen as a display of hatred for the LGBT community and attracted considerable media attention.įrom wearing a yarmulke to miniskirts and wigs: Avant-garde Israeli drag queen is making herstory
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The policemen, as if to pour fuel on the fire, used rubber gloves during the arrests. Some of the revelers who flooded the nearby streets were arrested by the police. Sebastian Scheiner/AP Ziona Patriot and Rama Rimming. Tel Aviv's Gay Pride Parade on June 9, 2017, attended by some 200,000 people. Lesbian activist Michal Eden got up on stage that evening and urged the revelers not to give in, but to flood the streets in protest.