They say it isn’t your grandmother’s bingo, and boy, are they right. At the Riviera Bingo Hall in Cranston, Rhode Island, you’ll find drag queens, shirtless men, and even the cast of “The Wizard of Oz.” Of course, you’ll also find bingo cards, and of course, a caller. There is a game going on, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who is really there for the game. Even a group of die-hard bingo fans who frequent the nearby Foxwoods Resort Casino for monthly bingo games admit that they came back to gay bingo because it was fun, and not just because it was a bingo game.

There are mainly gay men and women at the event, and it’s even become a sort of dating scene for many gay men, but there are plenty of straight people there for the music, the hilarity, and the overall experience. People come in costume. Drag queens sing show tunes. Even the project director was dressed as a scarecrow for much of the evening.

Gay Bingo may be a fun event as well as a great place to hang out with friends, but it serves a higher purpose. The local creator, Christopher Butler, who is also the executive director of the project, brought the wild game into Cranston in 1999, as a way to raise funds for AIDS Project Rhode Island, to distribute to AIDS-related charities. Copying the concept from a similar Philadelphia project, Rhode Island’s gay bingo game has become more and more popular.

The gay bingo games take place once a month from September to May and this year’s games raised over $65,000 for AIDS charities.