When roasts are and aren't a drag
04 Feb 2019.

Have you ever been roasted? I was, for my 54th birthday. I was expecting fat jokes, but instead the barbs were about the choices I’ve made in both my career and personal life. I felt bad for my boyfriend and my ex, both seated in the audience. A roast roasts not just the roastee, but pretty much everyone else in the room. The weirdest thing was, sitting there and listening to all these put-downs actually filled me with a feeling of love. 

I was thinking about this when I watched The Drag Roast of Heklina, taped at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. Roasters included Peaches Christ, Jinkx Monsoon, Alaska Thunderfuck, Sister Roma, Bob the Drag Queen (out of drag, oddly), MTV’s Julie Brown (not a drag queen, oddly), and hosted by Jackie Beat (who also wrote for The Comedy Central Roast of Roseanne).

Drag queens can get away with anything. How is that? Do wigs and dresses give someone that much authority? If so, why doesn’t it work for real women? And isn’t everything a drag queen says a ‘roast’? Gay men will watch a drag queen read a phone book, conduct traffic, or eviscerate a carcass. But would anyone watch aging overweight gay men do anything at all? 

Luckily these philosophical musings are best left in the dust, because these queens have something more important to do - make us laugh. And laugh we do. The Drag Roast of Heklina is great fun. So what was it like for Heklina to sit there and be insulted? “I think a lot of people have thin skin,” she told me. “‘But it doesn’t bother me, and everyone else was fair game.”

Here’s just a few of my favourite zingers:

My doctor told me to stay away from trans fats, so I called Jackie Beat and cancelled our dinner plans. - Alaska 

If Jackie had been Patient Zero, the AIDS outbreak never would have happened. Who is going to fuck that? - Jinkx

Peaches is most famous for her thankles. Those of course are the thighs that go right down into your shoes. - Jackie

Heklina, also known as Stefan Grygelko, is a San Francisco-based businessman and a drag legend. “I’ve been doing Heklina for 25 years. I started out promoting a club night called Trannyshack,” which she wisely changed to ‘Mother,’ as it is a good bet that mothers won’t be shitbombing her on social media for it. Heklina also runs a bar called Oasis, and just bought a house in Palm Springs. “You have to work hard at drag, be your own producer and produce your own events, otherwise you can’t make any money.”

So how did she get roped into a roast? “I did one in Seattle for this queen named Mama Tits, and it was so much fun the producer of that roast talked me into doing this one. Now I’m touring film festivals.” Let’s hope it is successful. For some reason, the concepts of ‘roasts’ and ‘drag’ mesh perfectly together. I want to see more in the future.