A leather-clad stud lounging at the corner by Mickey Rourke's gives Kitty a grin and cracks, "Wow, some bulge!"
"Hi!" Kitty replies, and enters Paragon, his place of employment. Here he greets people at the door, he circulates, he keeps customers happy, he recognizes VIPs and sees to it that they are properly guided, gushed over, and introduced around. Tonight is talent night. Hundreds of guys and two dozen drag queens are convened for the show. Kitty is suddenly a garish presence even in the bright-dark-noisy room, with a personality so much bigger than his body that it has to swell up and leap forth. ("I rip off my wig, I run on the bar, I walk on shoulders!") His job also requires discretion and middle-class manners, which he has, too. He drinks orange juice only and smokes his clove-scented cigarillos. His self-confidence is amazing, because although these are his people, so to speak, some can be very bitchy, and a few, by his own assessment, are so filled with envy, spite, and malice toward him that they take every opportunity to trash his persona. For example, when he disappeared from the job for a couple of days late last year, word went out immediately that he had been sacked from the club and was "now appearing at Dunkin' Donuts." He understood that it was funny, but it hurt. Tonight, though, friends laugh and gather around him, bending to hear his voice, a catlike husky purr.
Paragon is guys drinking, smiling, smooching, hugging, holding hands, dancing in the strobing, NASA-like light show under the spinning mirrored ball, the music so loud you can feel the rhythmic bass deep in your throat. Four muscular studs (the Charles Atlas Dancers?) hop around on pedestals in their underwear, stroking themselves, gazing down to admire their endowments and establish a proper mood of narcissistic appreciation for the male body. They look like a Calvin Klein ad, only they're wearing more clothes. All around are guys dressed in fashion grunge, gang colors and bandannas, guys in biker chains and Levi's jackets with cut-off sleeves, model-looking guys in stubble and leather and linen, guys in torso T-shirts and jeans, guys with sweaters over their shoulders or tied by the sleeves around their waists, guys in jeans with suspenders and no shirts, guys in Stanley Kowalski undershirts (only clean), some studs in Li'l Abner boots, a selection of off-duty preppies in khakis and Brooks Brothers button-downs and penny loafers, a guy in a beret, a Michael Jordan-size drag queen with orange sunburst hair that reads more like architecture than coif, a few carefully dressed older men, and many guys you would only notice on the street for their especially nice haircuts and a tastier-than-thou fashion sense. (Not everyone can be a "label whore" like Julian Bain, Palacious's roommate and partner, who professes to being able, the moment you enter a room, to name every designer represented in your outfit, and demonstrates by pointing at a reporter's shirt and saying, "Gap."
How can so many people of working age be out dancing at two on a Tuesday morning? Well, many of them are young. Some are models or actors or they wait tables or have other flextime jobs. And many, Kitty says, are "male escorts." Hustlers. "A lot of female impersonators are not the most appealing as men, so they tend to get the brushoff," he says. "So sometimes when you see a guy staring at you, you know he's a hustler." Male hustlers often prey -- for money -- on drag queens they think might be insecure about attracting a man.
"There's a difference between actual drag queens and popcorn drag, which is what I call what Shawn does," says Palacious's friend known as Denio, himself an occasional drag queen, who had gathered with other queens one Sunday afternoon at the Passport Cafe on Collins Avenue. "It's not realistic. Some actually want to be a woman, they feel like a woman -- I had a roommate like that. Or like Paloma. But popcorn drag is more theater than realistic."
Patrick, also known as Pink Fuchsia, nodded. "It's just to entertain people and make them laugh. It's like Halloween. I dress, of course, like a woman, but I'm not a woman, I don't wear breasts, I hate breasts. I like to be more like scary than pretty. It has to be pretty, but in a scary way." By scary, drag queens seem to mean startling and shocking. Palacious, for instance, had warned he would be "scary" before he put on the three red wigs, and he had been right.
When you think of a man in a dress, maybe you think of Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, or Some Like It Hot, or Flip Wilson or Milton Berle, or someone meticulously outfitted to caricature Tallulah Bankhead or Liza Minnelli. But for Palacious dressing isn't some solemn attempt to fool anybody, but only a lighthearted way to impress, shock, and amuse. It's on the fine line between art, theater, narcissism, and a spoiled child's cry for attention, any kind of attention. It shares that -- as well as the paradoxical act of concealment -- with the acting trade. Sometimes when Kitty puts on his makeup, he calls it "hiding."
