After twelve years of serving as a touchstone in SF’s best queer nightlife scene, Hell’a Tight! held its final event this past weekend.
The first time I went to Hell’a Tight! — SF’s prominent, left-of-center drag show that’s dubbed itself as a “bubblegum pop” dance party since debuting twelve years ago — was in 2017 with two queerdos I was simultaneously dating at the time.
(Still somewhat fresh and bright-eyed to San Francisco by way of Austin, I decided entering a throuple with a doting, handsome, eccentric couple was an appropriate and novel manner to penetrate back into the dating space; I had been itching to see if my physical polyamorous proclivities had overlap with emotional intimacy; like a molting reptile, this city tends to help shed the otherwise constricting, narrow ideologies around time-honored intimacy that a southern upbringing instills.)
That night of us undulating our flesh bodies at Underground SF, the Lower Haight nightclub where Hell’a Tight! found its spiritual home and devoted audience, cemented my love affair with the monthly happening. Although I eventually exited that collaborative relationship — (phenomenal sex can cloud glaring irrationalities; matching libidos is one thing, but planning a dinner between three mentally unwell people, each of whom possessed different dietary restrictions at the time, is another thing… which proved exhaustively cumbersome) — I continued to find myself in a sea of warm bipeds at 424 Haight Street.
But, alas, all good things must come to an end. In an Instagram post published on September 3rd, Lindsay Slowhands, the “SF party gworl” who has served as Hell’a Tight!’s infallible host and matriarch since its inception, announced the monthly party would sunset after twelve years of “confetti, silly string, sweaty bodies and re-powdering.”
“I’m ready to focus on new opportunities that await us,” Slowhands writes on the Meta-owned social media platform, acknowledging the motley crew of humans who’ve helped put on the show for over a decade. “This is the end of an era!”
This past weekend, Slowhands, whose professional drag career began with the party, organized what later proved to be a glorious and aptly fitting send-off to the chaptered weekend drag show many have grown to love.
Steering yourself through the crowds at Underground SF is not something for the faint of heart or claustrophobic. It takes a certain balance of precision, intention, and sheer brute strength. You, too, must be comfortable with the idea that sweat serves as the prominent lubrication helping you glide through ostensibly immotile barricades of upright apes dancing to Kyle Minogue numbers from the aughts. Prepping for a Hell’a Tight! attendance is not the time to adopt natural deodorant. Embrace the industrial-grade stuff that may or may not boast a California Proposition 65 warning label for its use of carcinogenic chemicals.
Hell’a Tight!’s last show on Saturday, December 9th, was no different in the above regard. It might’ve been the most crowded I’d ever seen the show. Jubilee, the San Francisco-based drag queen who co-hosts Moby Dick’s new weekly drag show called Hooked and whose persona is a nod to Applacia and an ode to all things Dolly Parton, served as the door attendant. Come 11:30 p.m., Jubilee — her hair akin to festival cotton candy spun during a modest gust — was already enforcing a one-out, one-in policy.
By the time I found the gaggle of gays I’d agreed to meet up with prior, my sheer shirt mirrored the feel of a dampened paper towel, and the evening’s drag numbers were set to begin.
The “Bratz” (read: performers) for the night consisted of the ever-talented Benaddiction — a queen whose makeup artistry regularly makes jaws hit the floor — a stage-lit blessing from Black Opal Munro, and an appearance by SF’s multi-hyphenate gothic talent Mocha Fapalatte. Slowands was dressed as a reflective strawberry bon bon hard candy, levitating around the room, taking selfies, and ensuring her conviviality wasn’t lost in the overhead lighting.
For the evening’s — and, by proxy, Hell’a Tight!’s — final performance, all the participating talent joined Slowhands on stage for a cheeky, festive send-off. Organized around, say, a substance with similar visible properties as confectionary sugar, the quartet danced to early-2000s hits, all while whirling around a well-hung sugar cane (or well-endowed plastic straw, depending on your symbolic leaning).
Joy was palpable. Inhibitions were released. Nostalgia bounced off graffiti walls. Gratitude for the nightlife community Hell’a Tight! had built and fostered over the years occupied every nook and cranny.
With less than a half-hour on the clock before the venue was set to close, everyone, including those who’d been perched on the stairs during the earlier performances, inundated the dance floor for one last time.
(It’s curious how healing it can be putting your body up against someone you’ve grown fond of in a crowded room — an exercise in how to feel without a certain amount of headiness. Their hands traceable on your skin; the warmth of their body familiar in its fervency; the way your fingers hold the folds of their palms; how inextricably comforting and pleasurable their taste and scent have become over the past weeks and months; what it feels like to be reminded of the gentleness two people with overlapping Venn diagrams of life experiences, pleasures, interests, understandings can bestow on the other. It’s all a salient reminder that intimacy can exist outside the greater collective’s traditional understanding — not everything, including closeness, needs to exist as a binary. There’s a celebration in fractions. One could argue that this is where our most vibrant semblances of connection exist and can blossom from, unfurled outside the domains of expectation, obligation, and label making.)
Eventually, time people began spilling back onto the sidewalks shouldering Haigh Street; kissing goodbye on street-lit sidewalks; and the nippy December breeze gnawing at heat-soaked skin was welcomed by all.
It’s unclear what opportunities Slowhands will incorporate into her next era, but we’ll all be waiting with bated breath to see what they are. All I hope for is that they transpire inside a space friendlier to those of us with particularly active sweat glands.
Feature Image: Hell’a Tight! party hosted in November of 2022. (Courtesy of Photos By Gooch)
