My second year of gonzo journalism at “Twinks vs. Dolls” brings some new obstacles. Last year, my ringside reportage of the annual wrestling competition organized by Brooklyn queer bar Singers had me caught in the spitting competition’s spray, shvitzing in the true LGBTQ sauna of that Clinton Hill warehouse and generally being overwhelmed by the spiritual intensity of seeing every queer Brooklynite I’ve ever met.
This year, all of that has basically held true, with some new quirks. This year’s warehouse is a bit more air conditioned but still hellishly hot. And instead of saliva that finds itself speckled across my face, it’s nacho cheese (which the final Twinks and Dolls wrestled in... why do I stay posted up in the splash zone?).
Oh, and then there is the location, a far away Sunset Park locale that I got to via a cross-Brooklyn CitiBike ride that made me feel like Zohran traversing Manhattan. To top it all off, the event’s new venue can hold up to 5,000 people. While I don’t have the final numbers, it certainly feels like this year’s affair nears that capacity, with everyone from NYC Council Member Chi Ossé to SNL star Bowen Yang to PAPER princess Ivy Wolk in attendance, alongside just about every hyper-online or generally heathenish member of NYC’s greater LGBTQ+ community.
It’s hard to know what exactly brings the Pride weekend hoi polloi out in droves for this bacchic ritual of twink-doll sacrifice. Maybe it's the momentum of tradition; it’s the fourth year of the competition, and each year scales up in scale and extremity.
Or maybe the high attendance is due to the fact this is the physicalization of the queer digital hyperbrain. Every year, Twinks vs. Dolls has produced viral posts and lore. The first viral moment was the infamous cigarette race. Last year, the bean wrestling created a splash as returning champ Marley Gotterer kept her crown in a flurry of legume-centric glory. And now, it's just a general understanding that Twinks vs. Dolls is the sick and twisted yearly convening for all the most annoying queers on the internet, myself included.
Some in attendance have a slightly more considered explanation for the event’s popularity, though.
“Twinks vs. Dolls encapsulates the very raw nature of what Pride is, or at least used to be. It’s messy. It's loud. It's raunchy,” councilmember Ossé says — himself an outspoken advocate for and member of New York’s LGBT+ community. “[It’s rare to see] moments like that these days, especially in a time where we're seeing corporations peel back from supporting pride to have this event that's made for us by us is amazing.”
That said, this year did have some corporate sponsors, though not necessarily the kinds that come from the Pete Buttigieg school of LGBT+ respectability; sponsors included queer cruising website Sniffies (who set up a full brand activation and sponsored Team Twink) and gay pornography studio, Say Uncle (who sponsored the VIP lounge). One twist to that story, though, is MAC cosmetics, who sponsored Team Doll, joining a panel of corporate sponsors few Fortune 500 companies would typically find themselves beside.
The general filth and scale of it all has a new resonance, even just one year after last year’s affair. Even then the national conversation regarding trans and queer people, “DEI” and public displays of Pride was markedly different. This year has seen the Trump administration’s all out assault on the trans community, with rolled-back rights, public demonization and a general commitment to politicize the most innocuous and intimate aspects of trans life. With that, calls for the community to not be silenced or erased have an increased urgency, and one can feel that in the general rush to lean in to what makes our wider community so fabulous, so fun, so filthy. Yes, if Fox News caught a glimpse of this warehouse of queer and trans folks all out booing the national anthem (which Clay Woman opened the event with) or semi-impromptu chanting “Zohran! Zohran! Zohran!” they’d probably have a conniption. But literally who cares?
“I got an email to judge this, and I was like, ‘I’d kill someone to do it,’” Kay Poyer, the Dallas-based TikTok icon and writer who’s judging this year’s competition, tells PAPER. “There's a twinge of irony to this concept, but I do think it's genuinely important for queer people and trans people to get together, have fun and do things that are unpalatable to straight people,” she shares. “Politically we're being asked to compromise so much and we're not getting anything for it. It feels good to lean into being dirty queer people.”
The competition was indeed just as dirty as always, but the scale of production was much more grand, which led to some complications. “It was a big show with a lot that could go wrong and some of it went wrong,” Mike Guisinger, co-owner of Singers and an organizer of the event, shares with PAPER the day after. “We had to cut a lot of the games and we certainly don’t want to do that.”
Everything was pushed back 45 minutes, which meant that the actual competition didn’t start until close to 5 PM, hours after doors opened at 12. And everyone was hot and frisky and eager to see the show after a long bout of headthrashing musical acts from Girldick, Lex Walton, Josephine Network, Contessa Stuto and Magda (who tore, but nonetheless... we are sweaty). Behind the scenes, a key member of the planning and production team had a medical emergency. It thus became all hands on deck to still pull off the show. And the team admits that pulling off a huge production with a DIY ethos is a tough hole to square. “We don’t have a rule that we always have to do it bigger. We want to do it better and we’re close to finding a happy medium where we can have a DIY aesthetic, but not a DIY production. We’re learning how to do it,” says Guisnger.
As 5 PM rolls around, the Dolls enter the warehouse in a conclave of motorcycles, which, due to safety concerns, morphs into a drip-drip entrance, rather than a grand tidal wave. It is, at times, hard to hear the feedback from the illustrious judges, Kay Poyer, playwright Jeremy O. Harris and local icon Linda Simpson. We don’t get to meet all the twinks and dolls one by one like we did last year. And some of this year’s challenges — like the “painting a dick with a lipstick thrust inside your butthole” (of course) or the popsicle suck-off — are difficult to fully consummate (finalist Spencer Claus hacked the system by swallowing the popsicle whole: points for gumption!).
MC Chiquitita holds it all down, though, in her singular style. When the entrance of the “bears and hags,” who wrestled in a full brawl as a sort of half-time show moment, is delayed, she looks to the crowd with a smile: “Where is this moment?” The nacho cheese wrestling is disgusting and treacherous, and at the end of the cheesy mess, we all get what we want: The dolls win. First place: TOMMY BOY. Second place: Chloe. Third place: (my good judy) Spencer Claus! And, of course, we still get the grand return of Twinks vs. Dolls two-time queen, Marley Gotterer, who performs her original song, “Beat A Bitch Up,” before coming back to the ring for a cig race final face-off with this year’s winner. TOMMY BOY wins that, too, finally dethroning Gotterer. (Rigged? We’ll never know.)
TOMMY BOY is elated as she talks to me post-win. “My hair is covered in spicy nacho cheese. Why did they have to use the spicy kind?” she yells with a glimmer. “There was no competition besides myself, eyes on the prize,” she beams.
Yes, eyes on the prize: Home. I need to get home. My phone is dead from the heat and the long hours, and I may as well be in Kansas. So I wipe the spicy queso from my palms and try my best to track down a portable charger. I really need a shower and a spiritual cleanse.
In all of this mayhem, I realize that the prophecy came true: All day, people told me they were here for queer mess. We got mess. Mission accomplished? Happy Pride, my beloved Brooklyn.
Photography: Morganne Boulden, Kelly McCarthy
