At Taco Bell, the Drag Brunch Goes Company

CHICAGO — As drag brunch got here to a detailed at a Mexican restaurant right here final Sunday, the performers conga-lined their approach by means of the group of about 40 occasion individuals who had been simply this aspect of tipsy on Brunch Punch.

However this was no commonplace drag brunch; it was a Taco Bell Drag Brunch. And that wasn’t a microphone within the lead queen’s hand; it was a Grande Toasted Breakfast Burrito. That queen — a Mexican American performer referred to as Kay Sedia (pronounced quesadilla) — was the M.C. at a Taco Bell Cantina down the block from Wrigley Subject, sporting a frilly, skintight frock with the Taco Bell emblem on the stomach.

Within the 45-minute present, Kay Sedia sassed the group (largely younger, largely white) and danced together with her fellow performers: the drag king Tenderoni and the queens Miss Toto and Aunty Chan, who tore it up as a hard-pressed Taco Bell cashier in a lip-synced mash-up of “She Works Exhausting for the Cash” and “9 to five.” On diners’ tables, a shimmering field held a burrito (sausage, bacon or veggie), a hash brown and Cinnabon Delights doughnut holes. The sound of Taco Bell’s signature “bong” punctuated a consuming sport.

Skyler Chmielewski, there to have a good time her nineteenth birthday, was transfixed. Gripping a Taco Bell Drag Brunch-branded folding fan, she declared her first drag present “breathtaking.”

“I’m confused,” she stated.

There could also be gayer methods to spend a day at a Taco Bell, however it’s onerous to think about how. The five-city, 10-show Taco Bell Drag Brunch tour, which has arrived in time for June’s Satisfaction celebrations, is arguably probably the most mainstream marriage of drag and eating but — a “phenomenal” step within the evolution of drag tradition, stated Joe E. Jeffreys, a drag historian.

“It’s taken drag over a border that it hasn’t been earlier than, to an thrilling new place of accessibility,” stated Mr. Jeffreys, who teaches theater research at N.Y.U. and the New College. (He had not been to one of many chain’s brunches.)

Taco Bell Drag Brunch is simply the most recent effort by company fast-food chains to seize the eye of L.G.B.T.Q. shoppers. Final 12 months, Taco Bell named the out rapper Lil Nas X as its “chief impression officer,” and Burger King stated that in June, it will donate 40 cents from each order of its Ch’King sandwich to the Human Rights Marketing campaign, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group.

The political panorama could also be altering, although. The creation of “drag queen story hours” for youngsters at public libraries throughout the nation has stirred protests and a few cancellations. In April, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a invoice revoking Disney World’s particular tax standing, after the corporate spoke out towards the so-called “Don’t Say Homosexual” invoice, which might restrict or forbid dialogue about sexual orientation and gender id in Florida public faculties.

The second is difficult companies to determine how greatest to help a brand-loyal group of shoppers with out alienating conservative clients or legislators. (Taco Bell is taking its drag brunch to Florida, however just isn’t amongst a number of firms which have voiced concern about latest laws there and in different states.)

Many fast-food manufacturers are embracing this 12 months’s Satisfaction season. Chipotle and Shake Shack plan to donate percentages of their proceeds throughout June to L.G.B.T.Q. organizations, and the Taco Bell Basis is giving a grant to the It Will get Higher Mission to increase work-force-readiness sources for L.G.B.T.Q. youth.

Gillian Oakenfull, a professor of selling at Miami College of Ohio, stated the present political fights over homosexual and transgender points don’t essentially replicate what shoppers assume. On the subject of queer acceptance, she stated, “Gen Z requires it.”

Internet hosting drag queens, Dr. Oakenfull stated, “is not a danger,” and if companies are feeling warmth as a result of they use drag as a advertising and marketing device, “it’s not coming from the individuals they care about.”

When Taco Bell posted a photograph from the Las Vegas brunch on Instagram, it generated some unfavorable feedback. However to this point, complaints in regards to the exhibits have been, like its breakfast salsa, gentle.

The tour kicked off in Las Vegas on Could 1 earlier than hitting Chicago and Nashville, and can seem in New York Metropolis on June 12 and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on June 26. The occasions, that are free and restricted to clients ages 18 and older, are being held at Taco Bell Cantina areas as a result of they serve alcohol, not like different Taco Bell eating places.

All the reservations — greater than 550 — had been scooped up shortly in April by members of Taco Bell’s “Fireplace Tier” rewards program, the model’s most loyal clients, who had first dibs, in line with an organization spokesman.

Robert Fisher, a senior manufacturing designer at Taco Bell, stated the drag brunch concept surfaced a 12 months in the past inside Reside Más Satisfaction, Taco Bell’s L.G.B.T.Q. worker useful resource group, and made its approach to the corporate’s chief government, Mark King, who greenlit it.

Mr. Fisher, who based Reside Más Satisfaction, stated his managers understood that if a Taco Bell-hosted drag brunch was going to really feel respectable, the corporate needed to act as if it had been invited to be a part of the L.G.B.T. Q. neighborhood, “not as if Taco Bell was appropriating drag for the sake of tacos.”

The corporate signed Oscar Quintero, who performs below the title Kay Sedia and lives in Los Angeles, because the tour’s drag hostess, and employed native drag artists to carry out together with her in every metropolis. (Taco Bell declined to say how a lot the tour value and the way a lot the expertise was paid.) The performers have taken care to maintain their language and materials pretty clear and nonpolitical.

“I’ve a ton of individuals on social media who’re throughout the political and non secular spectrum, and but they discover it of their hearts to take pleasure in my work,” Mr. Quintero stated. “When individuals begin to get political, I simply say: ‘Permit me to be an escape.’ ”

Drag’s relationship with eating goes again to the mid-Twentieth century, when drag revues in bars and eating places catered to predominantly straight audiences. Mr. Jeffreys, the historian, estimates that drag brunches started within the early Nineties, in the course of the second decade of the AIDS disaster. Perry’s, a restaurant within the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., has hosted a drag brunch since 1991, and it stays widespread.

In the present day, drag brunch is an important weekend outing in lots of cities, a draw for bachelorette and birthday events. Meals and drag proceed to intersect in new methods, from meal-delivery companies to sausage-making events.

To some keepers of drag historical past, Taco Bell’s brunch is the business torpedo that lastly sinks a subversive artwork kind.

However others really feel that ship has lengthy sailed. Drag is the mainstream, stated Harry James Hanson, a co-author of “Legends of Drag,” a brand new e-book that includes photographic portraits of drag elders.

“On the subject of working a company drag brunch, that’s squarely in drag queens’ wheelhouse,” Mr. Hanson stated. “They’re these cultural ambassadors.”

Maybe that’s what is going on at Taco Bell. In spite of everything, the corporate is introducing drag to audiences who won’t in any other case go to a drag present if the invitation weren’t from Taco Bell.

Blake Hundley, a 25-year-old straight father, stated he drove three hours from his house in Dubuque, Iowa, to be first in line for the second of two Chicago exhibits — no shock, contemplating that he runs a Taco Bell fan web site, LivingMas.com, and eats at Taco Bell 3 times every week “at a minimal.”

After the present, Mr. Hundley stated that his first drag brunch was a blast, and that he’d return if the fast-food chain hosted one other. “My life is about Taco Bell,” he stated.

If not everyone seems to be as thrilled about its exhibits, the corporate is okay with that. Drag brunch “just isn’t about politics or worrying about backlash,” stated Sean Tresvant, Taco Bell’s world chief model officer. “It’s about being genuine.”