Good news. New York City can still blow your mind, GLBT pride is not intangible and love is not dead. I was smacked in the face with all of this last night inside the Zipper Factory, at the 8th Annual Miss Lez Pageant, hosted by the legendary New York City downtown icon who created it, Murray “Mr. Showbiz” Hill.

To start, Miss Lez is a real pageant: contestants compete in traditional categories like platform, swimwear, interviews, evening gown and talent. But, as suggested by its name, Miss Lez is a queer pageant, and so everything is deliciously turned upside down and inside out.

Every single one of the contestants who each represent one of New York's lesbian parties delivered a power punch of talent, originality and pure pulse. The word “joy” can’t accurately capture what I felt when Miss Snapshot, Trina Rose, who happens to be a little person, performed her talent portion of the competition as the Statue of Liberty to “Careless Whisper” by Wham. When the unmistakable opening bars of the saxophone cooed out of the speakers, the crowd went wild.

I was hypnotized as Snapshot sauntered and danced amongst cardboard skyscrapers, eventually slithering out of her dress and revealing the word “Midget” written across her stomach in tape. She brought the house to the edge, reveling in her glory, fiercely owning the label. And as she began peeling off the word from her stomach and writhing on the floor between the buildings, glitter blasted over her and rained on all of us in the audience. At the same moment, George Michael’s lament surrendered to Beth Ditto’s pulsing and ferocious voice, as the original version was overtaken by The Gossips' cover, turning the climax of the performance into a fierce and triumphant emergency. People were hanging off the balconies, everyone went nuts.

Multiply this times the number of contestants, who were Cherry Bomb, representing the I Heart Brooklyn Girls, Miss Choice Cunts (Scout Derwood), Mrs. Victoria (Laryssa Husiak), Miss Wildcard (Sequinette) and Miss Hugz (Mel Huckabee).

Brooklyn’s sultry Cherry Bomb came on stage in a dress meticulously constructed of metro cards. Miss Choice Cunts, a knock-out in a bikini, performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that surprised everyone three times, a ballad turned hot fight scene, turned beat boxing, turned TKO. Hugz performed Joan Jett's “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” as a queer military dream, complete with Budweiser and babes.

Mrs. Victoria stunned the audience with a brilliant interpretation of Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All,” where a rainbow sparkly dildo was carefully inserted into her at the finale of the piece, as she did a crotchless handstand. (Yes, there is such a thing.) Sequinette, the girl drag queen who dressed as a cello for the finale, eventually won the competition. In her talent piece, she came out in full regalia wearing a giant chicken head. More than one judge described it as “like being on an acid trip.” And the drag king group, Switch n’ Play performed as a flawless boy band throughout the night.

Backstage there was a sense of comradery and friendship between these talented, brave and sexy people. All shapes and sizes were present, as well as limitless variations and interpretations of gender and orientation. The Miss Lez Pageant was real pride, real old-school New York pageantry and performance claimed by a new generation: a celebration imbued with the message everyone is acceptable – that love is acceptable and, ultimately, that our community can turn everything upside down and inside out to prove what is completely right side up.