NEWS
BY DANIEL BROMFIELD
A QUEEN FOR THE BOOKS
The 2016 SLUG queen talks bar clowns, books and baby dolls
D
o you remember what your favorite color was
when you were a kid? Winter Peterson remembers
hers: multicolor.
“I saw that on a container of glitter when I was
a kid and thought it was one color,” she says. “But
no — it was all colors.”
Since then, her worldview hasn’t gotten any less color-
ful. Peterson calls herself a “recreational, loud, gaudy per-
son,” and she can often be seen around Eugene in drag or
even a clown costume. “People don’t expect to see clowns
out at the bars,” she says.
Peterson has gone by a lot of names over the years. As
a bar clown, she’s Ding-Dong. As a drag queen, Peterson
used to go by BabyJesus, but now she’s Heavy Flo. She
has the names “Jack” and “Jane” tattooed on her fists. “I’ve
been a little indecisive about my gender,” she explains.
Now she’s Winter, a name she describes as “androgynous,
with a touch of feminine.”
As of Aug. 12, Peterson can add a new name to this list:
Eugenia Slimesworth, the 34th Eugene SLUG
queen.
The SLUG queen is the outrageous
figurehead for the Society for the Legit-
imization of the Ubiquitous Gastropod.
SLUG queens, despite their name and
inexplicable theme, don’t actually do a
whole lot for actual slugs. Rather, the
queen runs with a platform — be it ani-
mal welfare, anti-domestic violence
activism, park restoration — and
appears at events around Eugene
to promote the cause.
SLUG queens consider
the “raining”
queen a goodwill ambassador for the city.
Peterson, an avowed bibliophile who works at Lane
Community College’s campus library, has chosen to pro-
mote and raise funds for Eugene’s public libraries. In ad-
dition to the SLUG queens’ public events — including the
Maude Kerns Art Center’s Jell-O Art Show (exactly what it
sounds like) that SLUG queens participate in each spring,
she says she hopes to make regular appearances at public
libraries around Eugene.
“If they need me for story time or any other event the
library wants me for, I’ll be knocking down the door for
that,” Peterson says.
She also plans to compile a calendar of pictures of the
old SLUG queens, with all the money going to public li-
braries in Lane County. One of the SLUG queens’ most
beloved credos is “once a queen, always a queen,” so there
are no former queens: just old queens (or very old queens,
if they’ve been royalty for more than 20 years; exquisitely
or sustainably old queens have held the title for 30-plus.)
SLUG queens, despite
their name and
inexplicable theme,
don’t actually do a
whole lot for actual
slugs.
Anyone over 21, regardless of gender identity, race,
creed, disability or “any other restrictions of any kind,” can
be queen, according to the 2016 SLUG queen application
form. Species doesn’t seem to be a limiting factor, either:
Among Peterson’s competition for the title this year was
a pit bull in a cape, going under the name of GastroPluto
the Perfect and representing Eugene’s Greenhill Humane
Society.
The SLUG queen coronation, which has taken place an-
nually at the Park Blocks and has had an on-and-off rela-
tionship with the now-defunct Eugene Celebration, looks a
bit like a John Waters-hosted beauty pageant crossed with
a high school graduation on mushrooms. It’s often impos-
sible to see the stage beneath the skirts, frocks and dresses
worn by both the competing queen wannabes and the old
queens who present it.
The One More Time Marching Band, which serenaded
the event, doesn’t have any qualms about drawing atten-
tion to itself; many, if not most, of the players this year
wore at least one stuffed animal on their heads. The same
could be said of the audience, many of whom weren’t
wearing much at all.
The coronation truly is a sight to behold, and though
it’s easy to lump it in with Eugene’s proud eccentric tradi-
tion, it’s really part of an older, purer camp that thankfully
hasn’t yet been co-opted by hipster irony. It’s right in line
with the loudness and gaudiness Peterson loves so much.
Something else Peterson loves un-ironically is her
doll collection, one of which — a sasquatch baby — she
brought to her photo shoot at EW (Peterson says she also
loves Sasquatch lore). She started collecting a few years
ago when, at a thrift store in Atlanta, she found a type of
doll her friend collected and purchased it for her. But be-
fore she could send the doll to her friend, she fell in love
with it.
“Most of my dolls are antique composition dolls from
the thirties and forties, some are handmade reborn babies
— made to look extremely real — and then there are a
bunch of random cuties: Kewpies, vintage Barbies, a Dolly
Parton doll, a Cabbage Patch clown, a polymer fetus, etc.,”
Peterson says. “They have their own room, and I like to
talk to them every day when I go in to get something from
the closet or just peek in to see how they’re doing. I’ll say
‘Hello, girls! Your mother loves you very much! Are you
having a nice day today?’”
She adds: “I’ll take one out with me sometimes like if
it’s a special occasion. I have one doll who has met Bernie
Sanders and one who has met John Waters.”
OK, back to the SLUG queens: Peterson, a Fort Lauder-
dale native, settled in Eugene about a year and a half ago
and heard about the SLUG queen competition upon arrival.
Needless to say, she was instantly enthralled.
“When I first saw it I immediately thought, ‘I’m gon-
na run for this someday,’” she says. “I decided this is the
year.”
In keeping with her bibliophile angle, Peterson’s win-
ning performance at the SLUG queen pageant’s “talent
segment” entailed a mimed performance to an Auto-Tuned
remix of a pro-book speech from beloved kids’ show host
Fred Rogers, of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame.
Her outfit, co-designed with her friend Eli Rise — who
also helped develop the choreography for the “Slugettes”
who backed her up — probably helped her chances as well.
Remarkably, it was mostly just cobbled together from stuff
she had lying around, in addition to a flamboyant green
cape contributed by Rise.
The only thing Peterson added to the costume was a
bunch of dollar-store fake flowers, which she promptly
pasted all over her bike helmet.
“I gotta get a new helmet now,” she sighs, “but it was
worth it.”
It was by far the most extravagant, and “multicolor,”
costume of the night.
“The idea of matching clothes never really made sense
to me until I was way too old,” Peterson says. “It’s still
foreign to me.”
eugeneweekly.com • September 1, 2016
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