The 13th Annual Drag Ball brought the Iowa City community together in a diverse setting on Oct. 20. The show was held at the Iowa Memorial Union, where local drag queens, including West High alumnus Jacob Heid ’16, came together to show off their talent and love for performing.

Spectrum UI invited drag performers to participate and share their passions on stage. To learn more about Spectrum UI’s organization, check out their website. Emceed by Gina Belle and Myling Belle, they announced queens to the stage and strung some comedy into the show as well. For example, the ‘gay snap’ was introduced to the audience by Myling Belle, “When you see the gay snap, that means someone’s turning up, and then you guys gotta scream,” Belle pumped their fist in the air while snapping simultaneously, showing the audience what exactly a ‘gay snap’ looked like.

Although the show seems all fun and games, Heid, whose stage name is Dr. Jenna Side, says the journey to making it where he is today was not so easy.

“I grew up in an environment that was very hetero normative, saying like ‘oh you need to act like a man, you need to be a man, blah blah blah,’” Heid said. “So I think breaking out of that and being like ‘no, I can actually be a woman if I want or I can be whatever gender I want’ is really cool because I was never that hetero normative to begin with.”

Drag is used as a source of empowerment for the queens that perform as well as the people watching the show. Audra Warren ’18, a student at West High, attended this event. “It makes you feel more confident because they have a ton of confidence on stage,” Warren said. People in the audience feel the power radiating from the queens on stage, even if their problems are different, they still feel as though they can accomplish anything and face their fears.

Honesty Valentino, another performer at this event, feels like a new person after entering the stage,”I like the transformation from boy to girl, the whole aspect of telling a story with lip syncing, and I love the ladies. I love how straight people come and they just want to see something different.”

On the other hand, not all queens have the same reason for loving drag, “I just think it’s very empowering being able to break down gender norms and kind of do your own thing,” Heid said.

Telling loved ones about becoming a drag queen can be very difficult, but in Heid’s case, his family and friends supported him completely with his decision. Last spring, Heid participated in an event called Drag U, where people who have never done drag before can have the opportunity to try it out. He made it to the finals, and when he let his family know about his accomplishment, it had been a last minute announcement.

“I hadn’t really told them I was doing drag and I kind of just like dropped it and was like ‘oh yeah I’m like performing’,” Heid said. “When I was performing in the finals the first people I saw when I walked out on stage and turned around were my parents. They were sitting at the front table cheering and screaming for me and that was really cool.”