Drag

I need to decompress, darlings, so let's chat about something entirely frivolous and off-the-wall today. I spin my mental Wheel of Fortune, and it lands on...drag.

One of the gay stereotypes that absolutely refuses to die is that we all like to wear women's clothes, or that we all have a sexual attraction to men who wear women's clothes. Going about thus attired is commonly known as "doing drag." Those who cross-dress are known as "drag queens."



While it is true that drag is an old and established part of the gay scene, wearing dresses is no more a universal practice among gay men than the taking of Roman Catholic Holy Communion is a universal practice among Christians.

And oddly enough, all of the men I've known who expressed a sexual fascination with cross-dressing were heterosexual. You think I'm kidding? Think again.

Mind you, I'm sure there are gay men who find a guy in a Jean Harlow wig a turn-on. I just haven't met any in the past 36 years.

My first encounters with drag queens took place when I was a mere stripling of 15, lying about my age to get into bars. (Sorry, Ma. They didn't have high school groups in those days. Unless you count Drama Club.) The very first was either Jerry or Charisse, depending upon the day. Jerry was an amiable fellow who wore bow ties. Charisse was a spangly, red-hot mama with an Anita Baker fixation who scared the living daylights out of me.

I've often wondered why. She never did or said anything threatening. In fact, she never spoke to me beyond a casual greeting. I think the fear must have arisen from my lack of experience with those who defy category. At that age, I needed other people to fit neatly into the little boxes stacked in my head. It was difficult enough not knowing what my place in the world was supposed to be.

These days I've relaxed sufficiently to appreciate people who wander hither and thither, obliterating the boundaries that separate male and female, gay and straight. If that sounds anarchistic and objectionable, try to see it from my side. When you're a member of a minority group so controversial that your fellow citizens consider your right to exist open to debate, you welcome almost anything that makes it more difficult to decide what exactly is "normal."

However, even though I've come to appreciate drag, I still don't enjoy it. Not on me, and not on others. I once got suckered into attending a performance at a local club called "Night of a Thousand Drag Queens." I made it to number 26, but my nerves were shot for the rest of the weekend.

And I'm no better about wearing women's clothing.

It has happened twice, both times on stage. First, I played Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest - a stunt that got me into hot water at my lousy high school. Our costumer was a stickler for period detail and I wore a corset, a fifty-pound brocade dress with underskirts, and a fifteen-pound hat with an entire stuffed bird on top. By the end of our two performances I had aches in my back and neck that lasted for two solid weeks.

Years later, with a company in Boston, I played a nun in John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves. I had to shave my tough beard every night just before the show in order to avoid five o' clock shadow, and my starched wimple chafed terribly.

Some men are just not strong enough to be women.

Given all that, I have had more than my share of drag names, all bestowed during the operatic phase of my young adulthood:

• Mademoiselle Folie de Grandeur
• Signorina Cavatina Caballetta ("Tina" for short)
  
• Dee Fledermaus

Those rarified jokes tell you something–make that everything–about my friends at the time. Most drag names are more democratic (one might say blue collar) in their appeal. Among my favorites:

• Dieta and Tulita Pepsi (a sister act from, I believe, St. Louis)
  
• Formica Dinette
• Regina Upright
• Frida Lay
  

If for some reason you'd like your own drag name but don't feel up to the task of invention, experts suggest combining the name of your first pet and the name of the first street you lived on* as a child. Mine, following this formula, would be Sandy Pittsburgh.

Dear God, can't you just imagine the wig that goes with that?

*If you lived on 14th Street, you can substitute your mother's maiden name. If you lived on 14th Street in New York City, it's entirely possible your mother was a drag queen.

La Mère Coupable

I was riding home on the train last night when a woman in a nearby seat asked about the shawl. (Two more rounds to go, thanks.)

At this point, I've been carrying the thing with me for three months. Questions have been commonplace. My 30-second spiel was primed and ready,* and I delivered it.

What I wasn't expecting was her response: "Seeing you do that makes me feel so guilty."

I asked why. She said that she has two small children but doesn't knit, crochet, or sew. What's more, she doesn't want to. And so, "You're a guy, making something for somebody's baby, and I'm a mother and my kids get all their stuff at the store. I feel bad about that."

Her children weren't present, but I'm guessing they're not running around Chicago naked. More likely they're as well-fed and nicely groomed as she. And yet the fact that their clothes were bought, not handmade, troubled her.

Here was an aspect of the knitting-and-gender issue I've never pondered. Men sometimes get flak for knitting. But a woman suffering guilt for not knitting? Still? Now? In 2007?

Honestly, I figured that last vestiges of that sort of thing had drifted away when I was a kid in the mid-seventies, buoyed aloft by the heat rising from a million brightly burning brassieres.*

Is this just a mother thing? Or does it affect womenfolk in general? Needless to say, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this.

More on "Missed Connections"

I didn't pursue the fellow on the subway because I couldn't recognize him from his description, and you'd have to experience the Freak Parade that is my commute to appreciate what a can of worms a blind hello might open for me.

I don't know why he didn't/doesn't just come over and say hello, unless he's painfully shy or was crushed to death by a bus immediately after posting his notice. In which case, I sympathize. But I have to finish this shawl, so honestly I'm not looking around much between my stop and the university.

Oh, and my guess about what happened to Patrick? My guess is that when the gangway hit the dock, Patrick suddenly remembered he had a boyfriend at home. They're called shipboard romances for a reason.

Or so says Dolores.

*Little-known fact: Large-scale lace knitting in public is the perfect training for making "elevator pitches" to film and television executives. Hollywood, here I come.

**In a moment of uncharacteristic candor, my grandmother once said apropos of this topic, "No way in hell I would walk around without a bra. But I would have burned my darn girdle if they asked me."