Dressed as their drag queen characters at the existing divider in Brownsville, they had one message: There is no crisis at the border. Several drag queens from the Rio Grande Valley hosted a No Border Wall Protest Drag Show on Saturday to disprove what President Donald Trump has said about the border and to raise money for LGBTQ asylum seekers. Led by Beatrix Lestrange – aka Joe Uvalles – several queens, including Michelangele De Vinci and Arina Heys, performed something beautiful in front of a symbol that is anything but.
“The vision was to perform in front of this wall and project our beauty and our glamour and our empowerment against this symbol that stands for hate, racism, and xenophobia,” Lestrange told NBC News. “All of these things that aren’t really happening in our community.”
They performed to upbeat songs like Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and Green Day’s “American Idiot.”
While they all had different reasons for performing – some have undocumented family members and others want to defy stereotypes about their communities – all of them were there to show solidarity with the immigrant community.
Lestrange, who typically fuses drag and activism, hopes that this demonstration will inspire other members of the LGBTQ community to do something similar.