Dyke Night at the Gallatin Labor Temple turns contentious

For her birthday, Montana drag queen Beau Dacious wanted to throw a party. She did so at the Gallatin Labor Temple with an event called Dyke Night complete with vendors, live music and a Jell-O wrestling contest. 

According to attendees, the event went very sideways — very quickly. 

Since that night there has been discourse on Instagram and in the Bozeman queer scene following allegations of inappropriate behavior by an attendee and misconduct in the Jell-O pit. 

According to Beau Dacious — the organizer of the event who only referred to herself by her drag name — the night started smoothly with an eccentric performance. “It was like a drag-burlesque variety show. We had a singer there as well,” she said.

As the night went on, some event-goers said the show was overshadowed by a series of alleged inappropriate behaviors by Cory Skinner, an attendee at the event. 

A few days before, Beau Dacious said she got a call from the Manager of the Labor Temple, Starkey — who declined to share his full name with the Exponent. Beau Dacious said he asked if he and his friend — Skinner — could participate in the Jell-O wrestling contest. 

“[I told him] ‘Yeah absolutely as long as you're respectful about it,’” she said. According to her, she figured it would be fun.

On the day of the event, Beau Dacious said while she and other performers were putting on drag makeup, they assisted Starkey and Skinner with their makeup. The two men had bought dresses and wigs for the event earlier that week. 

Event-goers said Skinner presented himself as the assistant manager of the temple. 

“He [was] already kind of drunk, and he [was] being loud, and he says he's the manager of the building,” Beau Dacious said. “There wasn't really an issue until the Jell-O wrestling started.”

According to Starkey, Skinner attended the event and helped to promote it. Skinner echoed this, and told the Exponent that he never directly referred to himself as the manager.

“When [Starkey is] not around, if he needs me to be an assistant, that's it,” Skinner said. “But I don't own the place.”

According to vendor and Jell-O wrestler Briana Virella, Skinner — who was calling himself “Big Sexy” during the event — did say he was the assistant manager and Starkey did not correct him. Starkey also confirmed this and said Skinner referred to himself as his assistant manager on stage. However, he said he didn't want to correct him in front of everybody.

In an email statement to the Exponent, a spokesperson for the Labor Temple also confirmed that Skinner is not, and has never been, an employee. 

Skinner said Starkey invited him. “I’m a straight man, so I don’t do that sh-t, you know what I’m saying? But I did it for the sense of — I’m a content creator,” Skinner said. “This is more for content for me. All this did was boost up my followers and stuff on social media platforms.”

According to Beau Dacious, Starkey and Skinner wrestled first. She had wanted it to be an example, and Starkey said they were doing it “for laughs.” At the end, right before the winners were assessed, Skinner and one of the girls who had wrestled in another match asked to go again, this time against each other. 

“I was like, ‘No,’ and they were like, ‘Please? We really really want to.’ And I was like, ‘You're the manager of the building, sure,’” Beau Dacious said.

Beau Dacious said Skinner was awarded second place for Jell-O wrestling based on applause. “While we were passing out the prizes, [Skinner] and the girl he Jell-O wrestled were like, dry humping — in front of everybody,” Beau Dacious said. “They were both very much on board for all of it. She had her legs wrapped around him, it was a whole thing.”

Beau Dacious said she considered the event an overall success. She said she now has a few new rules for running an event like this — but all in all it was a good birthday celebration.

Virella did not feel the same. 

Virella said that Skinner should never have been allowed to wrestle, as it went against the purpose of the advertised event. 

“He overpowers [the girl] in seconds — he's a very big, stocky dude — and then proceeds to lift her out of the Jell-O pool and dry hump her on the stage,” Virella said. “It was just horrible, it made a lot of us feel very unsafe. This was supposed to be a femme event and then, now there's a straight couple on stage like, f--king. It just — it was very rude.”

“That was also just an insane thing to happen. That somebody who's not queer, was very adamantly like, ‘I don’t look like this, I'm usually a straight man’ —  and he told me this —  ‘and I get bitches.’ That's not the type of person I want at this event,” Virella said. “Just the fact that he genuinely almost won.”

While she was watching the rest of the show, Virella said she took her first real look at the people around her.

“When I was wrestling earlier I was just so nervous, I wasn’t looking at the crowd,” she said. “I take a look at the crowd and I realize that there are so many very obvious not queer people in the crowd. It looks like if you took a stereotypical frat dude and plopped him in. Half the audience was just not queer and it was men, and I, at that time, realized how uncomfortable I was. I did not feel safe. I felt kinda violated.”

Further, Virella said that the comments Skinner made during the event shocked her, and made the space unsafe for the queer audience. 

“They were still wearing the dresses and still wearing wigs. The rest of the night, they kept making comments like, ‘I feel so sexy,’ and ‘Wow you guys are so lucky you get to wear dresses.’ It just was very demoralizing to be told that by two straight men that think that this is a joke,” Virella said. 

In an interview with the Exponent on Oct. 13, Skinner said he never made anyone uncomfortable. According to him, the performers invited him to the dressing room, which no one objected to at the time. 

“I have no problems with nobody,” he said. “I respect the whole community. So I don’t understand who they are, coming with all this sh-t about all this stuff. Nobody did nothing wrong. Nobody threw anyone under pressure. They were happy, they did their show. All I did was liven it up.”

Further, Virella alleged that Skinner and his photographer — who he brought along — were taking photos of event-goers without their consent. Skinner denied this allegation. 

“The people that I asked to take the pictures with, they was like, ‘Okay, no problem,’” he said. “One girl, she was like, ‘You took a picture of me and my girlfriend and she was like, can you delete that?’ And I was like, ‘You ain't gotta act like that.’ I went and showed them my phone,” he said. Virella confirmed in an interview with the Exponent that she made the complaint to Skinner and the photo was deleted.

Further, Virella alleged that Skinner grabbed her friend by her leather collar. Skinner also denies this claim.  

“I never grabbed nobody’s collar,” he said. “I’m not like a skinny dude. I'm a muscular dude. So, yeah, I intimidate people when they just see me just walking.”

“If sh-t was that bad, why [weren’t the] police called or anything?” he said.  

The next day, Beau Dacious said that Virella blocked her on Instagram and posted a series of Instagram stories. The posts called out the temple and Beau Dacious. “It made me feel like my queer-ness was a gimmick to get people through the door to drive ticket sales,” one story from Virella read.  

Beau Dacious said that, as the event's emcee, she should have stopped it. 

“I was like, ‘Woah, woah, woah.’ This is not supposed to happen,” she said. “The last thing I want to do is hurt the community that I represent and am a part of.”

Following the posts from Virella and other community members, Gallatin Labor Temple and Beau Dacious both issued apologies on their Instagram accounts. 

In the apology, the Labor Temple did not clarify that Skinner was not an employee of the temple. In an interview with the Exponent, Starkey said that publicly clarifying Skinner’s employment would shift blame to Skinner, which was unnecessary. Starkey maintained that he would rather take full responsibility. 

According to Skinner, no one told him that they were uncomfortable. 

“Everybody was cool,” he said. “They was mad cool. They was like, ‘Oh, you’re a f-cking cool-ass dude.’ Like, ‘We’ve never met a black person, you know, a black person from New York.’” 

For Virella, she said she doesn’t want an apology from Beau Dacious or the Labor Temple. 

“I don’t want an apology from Beau, I really don’t,” Virella said. “The point of my post wasn’t to get an apology from people, the point of my posts was that people could feel seen, and people could know that this is not the safe space that we should be building in Bozeman.”