King of the Queens

Then he goes whizzing off around the club, greeting people, zipping upstairs to the dressing rooms where a topless black woman (yes, a true woman, unless those were implants) is having her face made up. Resting on a couch is a muscular white guy in an enormous blonde Tina Turner wig, a tonga bottom, and high-heeled shoes. "Where's Kitty?" he asks. "Oh, you're Kitty? You're wonderful, I see you in front all the time. I'm going to be in the talent show. I hope I can win the rent." He grins and turns around on his shapely, shaved legs to shake his pale, bare butt at Kitty.

Though it isn't a skill he needed just then, Palacious claims he can recognize a transvestite at a glance, no matter how well disguised. "You look at the feet," he hints. But inside the throbbing club, things are not so simple. Here's a pair of willowy six-foot model-types gesturing with their cigarettes. Lovely. The feet look fine A what can you tell in high-heeled sneakers? Slender ankles, nice long legs. The faces are smooth, no five o'clock shadow, makeup perfect, the brows serene, jawlines delicate, no noticeable Adam's apple (could that somehow be concealed with makeup, the way Palacious made his nose thinner?). The arms are long and lithe and not overly muscular, all the movements graceful, not effeminate but female. And yet, and yet...

And so, sidling up to Kitty Meow, who is smoking a clove cigarette and drinking a glass of orange juice with a clutch of friends, you nudge and subtly point, and whisper in his ear, "Okay, I give up A male or female?"

Kitty giggles knowingly: "Those are boys."
When the show starts, the fellow in the Tina Turner wig is first. He strips down to the tonga and heels, maintaining the illusion of sexy female quite well even without much in the way of breasts, then hunkers down, exchanges the high heels for clunky construction-worker boots, whips off the hairpiece, and is suddenly a swaggering tough. Unfortunately, he is far too eager to please in both roles, so the contrast between them is a little pale.

He is followed by a singer in his fifties, then by a lip-synching chunky drag queen in red velvet, then a short Latino singing a romantic ballad, and then the willowy pair of queens, who dance and show off their moves, smooth bellies, and boyish butts. A heavy-set drag queen shucks his robe and lip-synchs a song, getting many laughs at the fat body underneath.

That's when a certain discomfort sets in. On one level, all this is just lighthearted fun, and it's easy to make too much of political correctness. People have always dressed up, drawn lines on their faces, pretended, played roles. But the point of roles is that they have meaning. It's difficult to say what the existence of drag queens says about women, though it may be significant that there isn't a subculture of women who dress up exaggeratedly as John Wayne or Elvis Presley. Palacious says, "It's a glorification of the female." But the heavy-set fellow in the robe isn't glorifying anybody, and neither is the audience. There is something cruel in their laughter, something the hefty queen seems to encourage. Is it directed at the audience themselves and the human condition, as one would like to think? Or at the queen and his obesity? Or at women, women's bodies, the power they have over men A a power from which these men are immune? Some gay men have an unkind name for women. They call them fish.

Edmund White, the novelist and author of a recent biography of Jean Genet, says, "There's something very romantic and beautiful" about the drag scene. Though openly gay and highly intelligent, White doesn't say what that is, and few of those on the South Beach drag scene appear to have thought much about it. They're too busy having fun, and Palacious insists, "I think it's more of a glorification than a putdown."

Maybe it's just that boundaries have dropped, boundaries of gender and of taste. Definitions are more rubbery. Maleness? In men's magazines smelling of cologne, manliness is defined as men showing off their underwear to other men (a central service provided by Paragon). From there it's only a step or two across the gender line.

"Dressing up" is also part of the ancient shallowness of being, as the Kinks's song title has it, "a dedicated follower of fashion," of label whoredom, of taking one's identity from a style dictated by a self-appointed "designer" in a city miles away. The narcissism and self-absorption that's always been present in a portion of gay-male culture has spread widely. And in this, the drag queen is no mere follower, but the vanguard A a creator, adding to fashion a veneer of wit, irony, and true personal expression. If a few drag queens seem to be mocking women, perhaps it isn't all women but rather those who fall for the hype of fashion. Yet the queens have fallen for it, too. The Moschino label in Kitty Meow's shirt is important to him.