This week’s cover is the second in our ongoing series honoring the trans women and drag queens who, since the Stonewall Riots in 1969, have stood up and spoken out for our community when no one else could — or would.
The cover model for our Halloween 2018 issue is Joe Hoselton, aka Rose Room star Jenna Skyy, who also designed and applied his own horror makeup for the photo shoot.
Hoselton said it took him about two hours to apply the makeup, and that he took his inspiration in part from NikkieTutorials, the YouTube channel of Dutch makeup artist and beauty vlogger Nikkie de Jager, and in part from the imagery in the promos for American Horror Story: Apocalypse.
“I had been inspired by a lot of other makeups I had seen on NikkieTutorials, and I remembered seeing one she had done on how to do the demon with the pulled-up skin. So I went back and watched that video, to learn how to do that effect,” Hoselton explained.
The black hands/black fingers — that was inspired by the promotional campaign for the new season of American Horror Story: Apocalypse, he added.
In her version of the “pulled-up skin” makeup, de Jager painted on a red-and-black demon face “beneath” the pulled-up skin. But Hoselton decided to take a little bit of a different approach.
“I have seen all kinds of interpretations of what’s underneath the skin with this kind of makeup,” he said. “I have seen them with rainbows and glitter and sparkle and all that. And at first I thought I’d do something like that. But since it’s Halloween, I decided to go with something scarier. I decided to go with the skull.”
Hoselton said that teaching himself special-effects makeup skills was his way of doing something different for Halloween each year, since drag makeup is part of his everyday life as a female impersonator and cast member at The Rose Room.
“You know, drag is my job. I do it every weekend. Then Halloween comes, and everyone is doing drag. After I had been doing drag for seven or eight years, I just started losing interest in Halloween. So I started taking Halloween off.”
And then it occurred to him: If everyone else was going to do drag for Halloween, why didn’t he do some other kind of makeup?
“I thought, instead of painting Jenna, which I do every other weekend of the year, I’d paint a concept, a character,” Hoselton said.
So “about five or six years ago,” he said, he started “playing around” with some different special effects makeups, and ended up going with a “zipper face” effect — a makeup that makes it look like a person’s facial skin has come unzipped and is coming off, leaving raw meat beneath — for that first year. This year’s “pulled-up skin” look, which Hoselton created specifically for the Dallas Voice cover, harkens back to that first look.
Joe Hoselton performs as Jenna Skyy each Friday and Saturday night as a Rose Room cast member, and makes special appearances at other events on a regular basis — including a previous gig as a Resource Center Drag Bingo cast member and, more recently, Drag Queen Story Hour, with Rose Room castmate Cassie Nova (James Love, our 2018 Pride issue cover queen) at the Oak Lawn Branch of the Dallas Public Library.
Jenna Skyy is an award-winning female impersonator who won the titles of Miss Dallas, Miss Texas and Miss Gay USofA all in one season, a feat no drag entertainer had previously accomplished. And Joe Hoselton is an actor who has appeared in Israel Luna’s cult hits Kicking Zombie Ass for Jesus (2017), Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives (2010) and Fade to Drag (2007).
— Tammye Nash
