Drag show

I live in a place where an entire team of heterosexual men cross-dresses for its softball games. Men in dresses consistently win awards and throng our many town parades. My guess is, not one of these cross-dressers is gay or even particularly kinky, although who knows what goes on between their sheets?

I have observed little kids when first they see a man dressed as a woman. It is so far outside their experience, such a non-sequitur in the lexicon of their perception, that they stare unabashedly, unable to take their eyes off the fashion statement. They just don’t get it.

Transvestites or cross-dresser men are not necessarily gay; they simply like to wear women’s clothes. Cross-dressers are not minimalist players. In my experience, their breasts are too big, they wear entirely too much makeup, and they all have too much “big” hair. Maybe all that is the badge of entry; maybe it’s part of the fun of cross-dressing. I don’t know.

I have never experienced any great compulsion toward cross-dressing, if for no other reason than because I look like hell in women’s clothing. I don’t have a body that looks attractive in tight-fitting anything. I have no hourglass waist, no bosom, no flaring hips and my legs are not those of an attractive woman. I can’t imagine wearing high heels; I have injured my ankle falling off cowboy boots.

Furthermore, I have seen a lot of transvestites who simply didn’t cut the mustard in their wannabe garb. I have only seen one or two men dressed in drag that I thought made for an attractive woman; one of those looked damned good. Maybe I’ve just been looking in the wrong places…which begs the question: Which are the right places?

The right place to see men in drag—no surprise—is a drag show. I witnessed my first drag show a couple of months ago in Dallas, where we happened into a restaurant called Hung Dinger’s. At a show like this, there is no doubt that performers are, or once were, gay men. No simple cross-dressers and no pretense: They were gay.

Hung Dinger’s features a good Italian feed followed by a floor show with female impersonators, transvestites, transsexuals…whatever. I never did fully determine the sexual disposition of the performers; I think several were in transition between genders.

Regardless, although I didn’t deem my first drag show highly erotic, I fully enjoyed myself. The women were titillating and sexy, they flirted effectively enough to wrangle paper money from my pocket, and they had their act down. Most of the time, I couldn’t even tell they were lip-synching. That is, until they lowered the microphone enough to say, “Thank you, sweetie,” while the music voice-over continued unabated.

The show was good enough at Hung Dinger’s that it made me wonder how good a really high production drag show must be. In either case, high-rent or low, I do wonder something else: Why do gay men pay money to watch other gay men dress up as women? Entertainment value? Rite of passage? Good clean fun. Ah, that must be it.