Javier el Jugador ended last Pride Union Drag show with a crown, and a ring
Emily Steinberger | Photography Editor
Rachel Ayala, who goes by the drag stage name Javier el Jugador, has performed in four of Pride Union’s Annual Drag Shows, but this year she won for the first time.
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For four years, Rachel Ayala has taken to the stage in Pride Union’s Annual Drag Show and become drag king Javier el Jugador. This year, she dazzled the audience with her black joggers, cheetah print jacket and zebra print mask. At the night’s end, Ayala won the show. And, as if the night couldn’t get any better, she popped the question to her partner, Cheyenne Gentle.
“We ended up hugging for so long at the end,” Ayala said. “I was going to try to see if I can get her to do another little dance with me, but we were both just shaking so much that I was like let’s just hug.”
Her final Pride Union Drag Show performance took place Saturday, where five finalists from the preliminaries performed for famous drag queens Roxxxy Andrews and Alaska — who were both on RuPaul’s Drag Race — as well as an in-person and Zoom audience. The show featured student performances, as well as performances by the hosts and judges.
The show ended with Ayala’s proposal, which she had been thinking about doing since last year’s show. For Gentle, going out onto the stage at the end of Ayala’s performance was nerve-wracking because she knew something big was going to happen but didn’t know exactly what.
Although they didn’t meet in person and start dating until later on, Gentle saw Ayala for the first time on the drag show stage their freshman year. That, Gentle said, was the first time she admired Ayala as a person and thinks it’s cool how everything came full circle.
“All I could really think was just that it was going to be an amazing experience and that it’s something really, really surreal that I can think about for the rest of my life,” Gentle said.
Hunter Gorick, the vice president of Pride Union, knew a bit about each performance before the show but didn’t know about the proposal.
“I was completely shook,” Gorick said.
Like the rest of the audience, judges and hosts, he wasn’t sure if the proposal was part of the performance or real and had to go backstage to confirm that it was in fact real.
Ayala said that despite everyone saying she “won by a mile” before the winner was announced, she didn’t believe them because she thought the other performances were so good. She described winning as feeling like a dream.
She plans to place the crown she received on Saturday night on top of the hat rack where she stores her snapbacks. Being part of Pride Union and the drag community has helped her find her place on campus. When she first got to SU, Ayala mostly hung out with straight girls. But she felt alienated because she couldn’t relate to them.
One night in Shaw Hall, those girls convinced Ayala to watch Magic Mike with them. She thought the movie was terrible, but she genuinely enjoyed watching it and went on to Google Channing Tatum. In the process, she came across a video of his ex-wife Jenna Dewan in drag. That, for Ayala, was a moment of clarity — women can do drag, too.
Ayala first got into drag as a freshman in 2018 after seeing Pride Union’s flyer for the drag show that emphasized the idea that drag isn’t about a specific gender expression.
“I remember looking at it and knowing that it wasn’t just about drag queens, and that if I showed up as a drag king, even if I didn’t make it pass preliminaries, I would still have fun and people would still be supportive,” Ayala said.
The inspiration behind the name Javier el Jugador comes from Ayala’s Puerto Rican culture, which she fell out of touch with while going to a predominantly white high school in Cornwall, New York, and living in an area with few Puerto Ricans.
The name Javier el Jugador comes from Ayala’s Puerto Rican culture, which she fell out of touch with while going to a predominantly white high school in Cornwall, New York. Gavi Azoff | Asst Culture Digital
From Ayala’s first performance as Javier el Jugador in 2018 to this year, Gentle has watched Ayala grow more comfortable on stage as a performer. In that first performance as Javier, it was telling that Ayala was a freshman and new to drag. But Gentle said that Ayala is now much more confident in the Javier persona.
“I really just felt like Rachel and Javier are fully one person now, even though technically Javier is still a persona, and it feels like she fully came through with her drag,” Gentle said.
Similar to the preliminaries, Javier’s performance was a hybrid of prerecorded and live dancing. The first part was the video, which featured Ayala as Javier el Jugador and Gentle as her own drag persona, Steve the Twink, dancing together.
Ayala said she incorporated the polyamorous flag into the video and onstage performance as a way to bring attention to polyamory, which involves having more than one partner. That is one way that performing in drag allows her to openly express her gender and sexuality.
Gorick said that Javier’s specialty is engaging with the audience, which is challenging to do with COVID-19 restrictions.
“It was interesting to see how they were able to then take their super engaging and pretty sexualized aesthetic and then transfer that to a hybrid performance of it starting on Zoom, a virtual performance, and then transferring that to the in-person but obviously restricted stage performance,” he said.
Though this year’s Pride Union Drag Show was different than in past years, it was still a success, with over 100 people attending on Zoom and more in the Goldstein Auditorium. Gorick said that every year, the turnout grows.
Looking back on Saturday night, Ayala’s performance as Javier el Jugador is one everyone is going to remember. And for Ayala and Gentle, they will have an amazing engagement story to tell.
“I could not get over the idea of like 20 years from now I’ll be able to tell people that I have professional footage and pictures of my engagement and that there were famous drag queens there who congratulated me,” Ayala said. “That’s just absolutely ridiculous and I had to take the opportunity.”
Published on March 31, 2021 at 10:44 pm
Contact Gavi: gavi@dailyorange.com | @gavi_azoff
