At Taco Bell, the Drag Brunch Goes Corporate

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

However this was no customary 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 known as Kay Sedia (pronounced quesadilla) — was the M.C. at a Taco Bell Cantina down the block from Wrigley Area, carrying a frilly, skintight frock with the Taco Bell brand on the stomach.

Within the 45-minute present, Kay Sedia sassed the group (largely younger, largely white) and danced along 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 Onerous 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 rejoice her nineteenth birthday, was transfixed. Gripping a Taco Bell Drag Brunch-branded folding fan, she declared her first drag present “breathtaking.”

“I’m perplexed,” she mentioned.

There could also be gayer methods to spend a day at a Taco Bell, but it surely’s exhausting to think about how. The five-city, 10-show Taco Bell Drag Brunch tour, which has arrived in time for June’s Pleasure celebrations, is arguably essentially the most mainstream marriage of drag and eating but — a “phenomenal” step within the evolution of drag tradition, mentioned 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,” mentioned 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 newest effort by company fast-food chains to seize the eye of L.G.B.T.Q. shoppers. Final yr, Taco Bell named the out rapper Lil Nas X as its “chief affect officer,” and Burger King mentioned that in June, it might 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 in opposition to the so-called “Don’t Say Homosexual” invoice, which might restrict or forbid dialogue about sexual orientation and gender id in Florida public colleges.

The second is difficult firms to determine how finest to help a brand-loyal group of shoppers with out alienating conservative prospects or legislators. (Taco Bell is taking its drag brunch to Florida, however will not be amongst a number of firms which have voiced concern about current laws there and in different states.)

Many fast-food manufacturers are embracing this yr’s Pleasure 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 Venture to broaden work-force-readiness assets for L.G.B.T.Q. youth.

Gillian Oakenfull, a professor of promoting on the College of Miami in Ohio, mentioned the present political fights over homosexual and transgender points don’t essentially replicate what shoppers assume. Relating to queer acceptance, she mentioned, “Gen Z requires it.”

Internet hosting drag queens, Dr. Oakenfull mentioned, “is now not a danger,” and if firms are feeling warmth as a result of they use drag as a advertising and marketing instrument, “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 detrimental feedback. However to this point, complaints in regards to the reveals have been, like its breakfast salsa, delicate.

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 prospects ages 18 and older, are being held at Taco Bell Cantina areas as a result of they serve alcohol, in contrast to different Taco Bell eating places.

The entire 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 prospects, who had first dibs, in response to an organization spokesman.

Robert Fisher, a senior manufacturing designer at Taco Bell, mentioned the drag brunch concept surfaced a yr in the past inside Stay Más Pleasure, Taco Bell’s L.G.B.T.Q. worker useful resource group, and made its option to the corporate’s chief govt, Mark King, who greenlit it.

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

The corporate signed Oscar Quintero, who performs beneath the identify Kay Sedia and lives in Los Angeles, because the tour’s drag hostess, and employed native drag artists to carry out along 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 mentioned. “When individuals begin to get political, I simply say: ‘Enable 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 common.

At the moment, drag brunch is a necessary 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 providers 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 now squarely within the mainstream, mentioned Harry James Hanson, a co-author of “Legends of Drag,” a brand new e-book that includes photographic portraits of drag elders.

“Relating to working a company drag brunch, that’s squarely in drag queens’ wheelhouse,” Mr. Hanson mentioned. “They’re these cultural ambassadors.”

Maybe that’s what is occurring at Taco Bell. In spite of everything, the corporate is introducing drag to audiences who may not 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, mentioned he drove three hours from his dwelling in Dubuque, Iowa, to be first in line for the second of two Chicago reveals — no shock, contemplating that he runs a Taco Bell fan website, LivingMas.com, and eats at Taco Bell thrice every week “at a minimal.”

After the present, Mr. Hundley mentioned 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 mentioned.

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