Pecantown hosts sold out drag soiree

(Seguin) — Doing business sometimes means supporting all of its friends, and this past Sunday, that is exactly what happened at Pecantown Books & Brews. The downtown bookstore let its pride flag fly as it hosted a Drag Brunch Soiree featuring local performers. The store closed its doors for the private event, which was imagined and brought to life by Seguin native George Nickel, known as Georgia before his gender transition.

George began performing under the stage name Kupid Kopperhead as a way to embrace his gender identity and share a personal passion with the community.

“I came into my queer identity, openly, a few years ago,” he said. “I started getting back into the Seguin community. And I just was really like, I would love to share this part of myself with the world and with Seguin.”

Drag is a performance of exaggerated femininity or masculinity for entertainment performed by a drag queen or king. Outside of the queer community, RuPaul’s Drag Race is an accessible entry point to drag for most people, but the art form can be traced back to ancient Greece, where men would perform female roles in plays. Males playing female roles was also the standard during Shakespearean times when a man would have performed the role of Juliet, or even Lady Macbeth.

Drag performers like George embrace this concept and use it to work through the complexities of the human experience while having fun and expressing themselves.

“I think drag is taking the sort of societal expectations of gender and morphing them into your own creative process,” George said. “I know that a lot of people associate drag with like RuPaul’s Drag Race and cis gay men doing drag, which it absolutely is, but it also has a lot of nonbinary people, or lesbians who do drag. I know that I’m a transgender man and I do drag.”

Performers were a diverse group and ranged from males performing as females to women performing as flamboyant female archetypes fitting in the brunch’s theme of ‘Classics, Comics, & Camp, Oh My!’

Performer Jenna, who goes by her stage name Last the Stampede, uses drag to hyper-exaggerate her feminine traits as opposed to performing as a male character. This allows her to feel connected to her femininity through her artistic expression.

For the Drag Brunch Soiree, Jenna chose the literary classic ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ as her inspiration because it critically examines women’s mental and physical needs.

To embody the short story, Jenna styled her costume for the day in antique Victorian white, with a corset and exposed bustles, tear-stained yellow face paint, and, of course, a massive set of lashes to match her stage persona.

“One of my favorite short stories that we read in high school was ‘The Yellow Wall Paper,’” she said. “And so this look is very inspired by that story. I don’t know if I got the time period correct, but to me, just the story gives, like old Victorian vintage. And so that’s kind of what I went for. It is an exaggeration of gender identity. And so as early as someone knows that they’re transgender, I also early on knew that I was a woman and I was cisgender, and so I’ve always really loved the early side of things, and like not hyping it up, amplifying it in a way to where it’s like, ridiculous is definitely fun for me.”

Pecantown owner Tess Coody-Anders was excited about the sold-out show and is proud that her independent bookstore could host the event.

“Pecantown’s mission is to foster productive collusions in our community, and to find ways to help people bridge divides whether that’s through opening a book, breaking bread together, or holding events like this” Tess said. “George is one of our devoted customers who’s been with us since the beginning. When he came to us with the idea and asked if we would be a place where he could hold his inaugural show in Seguin, we felt like it was on mission to do that, and we wanted to support George. We are really happy to host and be a place where people feel allied and safe.”

Community member Julie Dickerson attended the event with family and left Pecantown following the show with a smile.

“I thought the show was fantastic,” she said. “It was spirited and enlightened and so celebratory of the LGBTQ+ community. It was a beautiful event. I loved Kupid Kopperhead, I thought he did an amazing job as a host and putting the show together. It was obviously a labor of love.”

George has plans to bring another drag show to Seguin sometime in the future. He hopes that until then, the Drag Brunch Soiree held at Pecantown will help spread a little love, tolerance, and positivity in the local community.