December 25, 1997–January 1, 1998

cover story

 

Photo: Bella Donna

“I was a pimp at one of the salons, and someone said, ‘You’re scaring me, you’re offending me… and you wouldn’t get out of costume all night.'” -Lucky 7 (Nicole LaGreca)

“Straight women are afraid of us, straight men don’t know what to do, and gay men are frustrated because they can’t have us.” -Mo B. Dick (Maureen “Mo” Fischer)

“We’re still stuck with ideas of femininity that won’t allow women to be ‘too coarse, too vulgar,'” says Laurence Senelick. He likens king drag to “the basic clown costume—it gives license to do things that they couldn’t do as women.”

 

Lucky 7 (above, with vintage auto) at the Balcony, where he works the crowd and fondles a prosthetic leg. Photos: Julia Lehman/City Paper.

 

Just Like A Man

First came RuPaul and The Lady Chablis. Now meet Lucky 7 and Mo B. Dick. The gender-bending art of drag kings messes with the masculine mystique.

By Jenn Carbin

On a crisp October night at The Khyber, dj Lucky 7 stands spinning at a back table, dragging on what might be the last cigarette on earth. With his velvet smoking jacket and Chinese imperial, Lucky is like some underworld count tonight—all relaxed shoulders and finesse. When he can break away, he saunters around the room, shaking hands and holding court. His swagger, which reeks of a particular kind of straight male cockiness, is cloaked in feline allure; think Marlene Dietrich in Morocco.

Lucky 7 is one of the many faces of 30-year-old Nicole LaGreca, salon organizer and club performer. Later tonight she’ll be a femme, horny housewife. On another occasion she’ll be the Tinman, serving up strawberry jam from a makeshift heart. And last year, Lucky 7’s incarnation as an altar boy nabbed him the 1996 Philadelphia Drag King crown in a contest sponsored by Grassroot Queers.

Whatever role she’s playing, LaGreca is helping create an underground scene that is turning the art of “genderfuck” on its head.

Drag kings—women whose performance art (or nightclub schtick, depending on the milieu) centers on the impersonation of men—are a relatively new phenomenon. While mainstream audiences are acclimated to such male-to-female performers as RuPaul and Lady Chablis, male impersonation has not, until recently, taken center stage, except as an intermittent component of one-woman shows like Lily Tomlin’s and Anna Deavere Smith’s.

True, women have been adopting male clothing styles for centuries (George Sand, Joan of Arc); in fact, women have cross-dressed for so long that there is arguably no such thing as female-to-male cross-dressing any longer. And the theatrical convention of women disguised as men has a long history, both as plot device (see Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or As You Like It) and as casting coup (see Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet).

But women impersonating men, in full costume, is, as a phenomenon at least, just a few years old, and subversive. When women “become” men, a whole power system is challenged (especially since many drag king performers are lesbians). Director John Waters, whose upcoming film Pecker features Maureen “Mo” Fischer (creator of Mo B. Dick, king of New York’s drag scene), says that drag kings’ subversiveness is part of their allure.

“Disney does queens now. They’re safe—families like them. Drag kings are still threatening.”

And right now drag kings are white hot and getting hotter. In addition to Waters’ project, German director Monika Treut (The Virgin Machine) shot footage of kings for her next film, The X/Y Files. Two documentaries on the subject are currently being made in Manhattan, where a drag king named Murray Hill ran for mayor in the run-up to the November elections. [Hill aka Betsy Gallagher, a School of Visual Arts grad, received a grant to write her thesis about running as Murray, a subway-booth clerk with a Bible-instructor wife and two kids.]

Judith Halberstam of the University of San Diego is working on two books about kings, both slated for fall ’98 publication: Drag Kings (Serpent’s Tail) and Female Masculinity (Duke University Press).

In Philadelphia, Lucky 7 is in the vanguard of a scene that’s thriving not only in New York and San Francisco, but, to a smaller degree, in cities like Columbus, OH and Minneapolis. This fall, Mo Fischer (who hails originally from Philadelphia) organized a successful series of West Coast shows for a small band of drag kings including Lucky, and she’s planning a second tour for 1998.

Camille Paglia has written that “A woman simply is, but a man must become… [M]asculinity is risky and elusive.”

Drag kings show that masculinity is arguably every bit as theatrical as its counterpart.

Nicole LaGreca is chatting over the phone about highlights of the West Coast tour.

“I did an altar boy number that involved a candlelit procession, and a priest came out and sucked my dick.”

The caller hears a shriek in the background.

It’s LaGreca’s mother.

The shriek is followed by laughter, though. Nicole says that her mother—local real estate broker Lolly Crowther LaGreca—always encouraged her to be an independent thinker.

“I was never told it was wrong to have an opinion; I was never told it was wrong to speak up.”

An only child, she attended public and private schools in Philadelphia (mostly Center City), and her mother, a former dancer, took Nicole with her to dance classes. Nicole preferred modern, and from the start she was “fascinated with the costumes.”

She founded the now-legendary Fur Salon in May of 1992. A women’s dance-oriented party, it evolved over the years into “a punk party for queers in general” and eventually became The Salon, which this past year took place on intermittent Thursdays at The Balcony. A Salon evening could include everything from bands to fashion designers to drag to performance art—a grab bag of nightlife culture that served as a venue for developing the persona of Lucky 7. (Her first performance as Lucky—and her first performance in male drag—was when she competed in the Drag King contest.)

Lucky’s fame spread to New York when she began spinning and performing in early 1997 at Fischer’s Club Casanova in the East Village, a Sunday night happening that has been the throbbing heart of American drag king-ism. (Fischer is discontinuing the club on Dec. 28—and LaGreca’s putting a hold on the Salon—to prepare for the ’98 tour.)

“Nicole and I knew each other from about 10 years ago,” says Fischer. Their friendship was rekindled when a gender studies researcher at Penn called Fischer and mentioned LaGreca’s work.

She began dj-ing at Casanova—”just to hang out,” says Fischer—and before long she was performing as Lucky.

“She brought the house down with her numbers,” says Fischer. “Her stuff is smart—she doesn’t do the standard lip-sync. It runs deeper.”

LaGreca says that her performances are “about putting the unspoken out there and making fun of it in a multi-dimensional way.” She makes provocative, surprising use of props and favors an approach which makes collaborators of the audience.

On the night of the October Salon for instance, LaGreca’s turn as a housewife “strung out on coffee and smoking cigarettes” was both hilarious and tension-filled, full of the kind of “insinuating elements” LaGreca likes.

“This woman’s supposed to be lounging around in an elegant gown,” she explains, “but she’s really a manic-depressive chain smoker who has a twitch.”

Lip-syncing Julie London’s “Black Coffee,” she slinked through the audience and up to the stage, all the while wielding a cup and saucer. Performing at San Francisco’s Drag Strip Party as “Ernie”—what Ernie of Bert and Ernie “would really be” if he were a man and not a puppet—she gave audience members baby bottles full of candy, but only after they’d sucked on them to her satisfaction. Pacifiers, rattles and alphabet blocks were tossed around, too. That same night, Lucky shaved a prosthetic leg in a foot fetishist act that involved a flipper, a condom and a dildo.

LaGreca likes to be spontaneous in her performances, and doesn’t like things too set in place. For example, as the housewife, she lipped the song with a cigarette in her mouth. “It takes some of the perfection away from the performance,” she explains.

Costumes—or what she does with them—are the most vivid components of her performance art. She draws from a broad definition of “costume” that includes everyday wear.

“When I say ‘costumes’ I don’t mean in the extreme sense. It could be a daily costume: a soccer shirt and sweats—that’s a costume. It’s about different connotations.”

One crucial element in a drag king ensemble is facial hair.

“Facial hair has a lot to do with a costume,” says LaGreca. “Lamb chops, goatees. Clean-shaven is a whole different thing.”

LaGreca sees herself as an interpreter of maleness—not an impersonator of specific men. When asked about the penis as prop (kings have a lot of fun with rubber penises and substitutes thereof, like bananas), and whether drag kings are more up front than other women about penis envy, she recoils. “Penis envy is not what being a drag king is about. If you’re a male impersonator and you don’t have [a penis], you’re falling short.”

What of the more political subtext—due to kings’ appropriation of the traditional power role? “I don’t like to attach a larger importance to it in the scheme of things—it’s what I’m doing in the moment.”

 

Ichiro Maki is an otokoyaky (man’s role player), a featured performer in the Japanese theatrical genre known as Takarazuka. Photo from Jennifer Robertson’s upcoming book, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan.

 

Since Lucky has appeared on the scene, LaGreca has noted some strong reactions. “I was a pimp at one of the salons, and someone said, ‘You’re scaring me, you’re offending me… and you wouldn’t get out of costume all night.'”

Drag kings get people riled up. And if LaGreca is reluctant to attach any larger political significance to the genre, there’s no shortage of opinion, academic or otherwise, on the implications of kings.

In Japan, the school of performance known as Takarazuka has, since its founding in 1913, inspired debate on the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality.

Takarazuka, the “female-to-man” answer to all-male Kabuki, was founded by Ichizo Kobayashi, a railroad tycoon who served as a cabinet minister in the 1940s. He envisioned it as a way to “resocialize maverick women [the only kind who would be actors] into sanctioned gender roles,” according to Jennifer Robertson, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her book, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan, will be published by the University of California Press in 1998.

By applying themselves to perfecting their performances as men (a bit less weighty a task than that of male Kabuki performers, who become Woman, supposedly embodying perfect femininity), these females would “understand the masculine psyche, a necessary condition to becoming perfect wives and mothers,” explains Robertson, who has spent 18 years in Japan.

The all-female revues may have helped traditional domestic bliss along; they also stimulated the development of a “butch/femme” lesbian subculture in modern Japan, generating concerns among psychologists and the press about “the increasingly visible masculinized female.”

According to Robertson, legend has it that the first performer of Kabuki, which emerged in late 16th- early 17th-century Japan, was a female performing as a man.

In the West, as in the East, drag queens have a longer history than kings. “The origins of theatre in religious cults meant women were barred from performance, a prohibition sustained by social sanctions,” writes Dr. Laurence Senelick of Tufts University in The Cambridge Guide to Theatre (1995). This meant that men played all roles, including the women’s.

He notes that the original “breeches parts” for women in the 1800s were “simply a means to show off [female] limbs and provide freedom of movement.” According to Senelick, “true male impersonation” (rather than tomboyish turns) was first introduced on the American variety stage a few years later by the English actress Annie Hindle and her American contemporary Ella Wesner.

Senelick figures that kings are descendants of “what was going on in the village in the late 1970s, at the WOW Cafe… We’re still stuck with ideas of femininity that won’t allow women to be ‘too coarse, too vulgar.'” Senelick likens king drag to “the basic clown costume—it gives license to do things that they couldn’t do as women.”

 

Male drag, cinema division (part one): Barbra Streisand in Yentl, Julie Andrews in Victor/ Victoria

 

Mo B. Dick creator Fischer remembers an early encounter which was arguably her first experience with the power of male drag: she had an audience with the Pope.

The daughter of a prominent Main Line businessman and restaurant owner, she grew up the seventh child and youngest girl in a family of 10 children. According to Fischer, her father “did a lot for the Catholic Church” and got an award from the Pope. She remembers kissing the pontiff’s ring.

Memories of papal splendor aside, she says she first became aware of kings the summer of ’95, in Provincetown, MA. “I saw Buster Hymen perform a Jim Morrison routine that was really fabulous.” Fischer was interested, but thought she was “too femme” to perform. That is, until she saw an article in the San Francisco Weekly covering the city’s varied, evolving king scene. “I realized that you don’t have to be butch to be a drag king. I’m an actor.”

She first went out on the town in male drag in November of ’95. Her friend, well-known NY drag queen Mistress Formica, helped her get dressed. “A lot of people didn’t recognize me.”

She’s tried different personas—like her punk-rock boy, for instance—but “what clicked for me was being a rockabilly rebel.” Mo B. Dick was born.

John Waters, who interviews Fischer for the current issue of Grand Street, met her when she came to a book signing of his. “She’s very funny, very sexy and not that butch, which is what I love about her. She really becomes a character when she’s Mo B. Dick.”

In March of ’96, Fischer started the Club Casanova party at Velvet in the East Village, with the help of Mistress Formica. “We decided to concentrate all our energies into one night, and make it big.” She credits Formica with being her mentor.[ She] taught me how to do a party, how to host, introduced me to influential people. [She] was my segue into it all.”

Fischer, who has dated “plenty of men,” came out as a lesbian in ’94. She’s adamant that Casanova was never about putting men down. Her parties, she says, are about “keeping women on the cutting edge”; they’re not about “degradation of men, [but] more integration of men,” or integrating the male in all of us.

 

Male drag, cinema division (part two): Katherine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett and Marlene Dietrich in Morocco.

 

If drag king-ism can be seen as a commentary on maleness, it’s particularly interesting to explore what it means for gay men, and what it says about the relationship between gays and lesbians.

Esther Newton, professor of anthropology at Purchase College at SUNY, has written extensively about drag queens, from her dissertation at the University of Chicago to Mother Camp. She said by phone from New York that she sees the emergence of kings in San Francisco, New York, and Cherry Grove, Fire Island as the result of a “relative difference in lesbian and gay male power since AIDS.”

Cherry Grove, always a hot spot for drag queens, in recent years witnessed a “generational turnover” in population, according to Newton. “A lot of men died. That, along with women making better incomes and more women coming to Cherry Grove, played out in the realm of representation.” Kings appeared, and even the occasional woman costumed in queen drag, much to the consternation of many Fire Island female impersonators.

Film director Treut sees the rise of drag king-ism as “the end of the repression of the male element in lesbian culture,” where open hostility to men is not unknown.

Fischer, who says that “Casanova is one of the few lesbian parties that welcome men,” agrees. “We have ‘misogyny,’ this word that means hatred of women. Hatred of men? Traditionally that word has been ‘lesbian.'” She sees drag king performance art as cathartic. “Instead of being an angry woman, I’ve become a funny man,” she says.

For some gay men, drag kings are a turn-on, albeit a complicated one. Local drag queen Brittany Lynn (Ian Morrison) was blown away by a Mo B. Dick performance at the Deluxe.

“I thought he was a hot guy—a rugged, handsome guy… I was like, ‘wow,'” says Lynn.

But kings, as Mo Fischer points out, can also be “frustrating” to gay men. John Waters is one. “It’s sexual terrorism. Kings are generally sexy to gay men. They cause people to shift in their sexuality—to question their sexuality. That makes me laugh. They’re funny and dangerous, my two favorite things.”

Judith Halberstam, considered the reigning expert on drag kings (a reputation soon to be cemented by her two upcoming books), comments that “a lot of gay men are quite threatened by drag kings. I hear a lot of gay men say, ‘What’s great about Mo B. Dick is that she’s great-looking out of drag.’ It’s a comfort thing—if you can see that there’s a woman under the drag.”

Fischer sums it up with the observation that, when it comes to sexuality, drag kings are equal opportunity offenders, with the potential to stir up audiences regardless of sexual orientation.

“Straight women are afraid of us, straight men don’t know what to do, and gay men are frustrated because they can’t have us.”

A few anecdotes from the West Coast tour show just how drag kings push buttons and test limits.

Mo B. Dick and a posse of kings from Club Casanova—Willy Ryder, Nicky Fingers and Lucky 7—embarked in early November for a series of performances in San Francisco and San Diego. Dred, winner of Her/She Bar’s 1996 Drag King Of The Year, joined them in San Diego. (Halberstam calls Dred “what’s happening” in the drag world, with his “recognizable masculinity and very sexy act.”)

Lucky’s Tinman (who is, interestingly, a rather genderless character) messed around with crowds in both San Francisco and San Diego. He wore a foil crown of tall spikes, silver hair, face and hands and threw huge glitter hearts to the audience. The big wind-up: the audience, following the example of a staged bit of business between Lucky and Mo B. Dick, took matters into their own hands, reaching into Tinman’s tinfoil heart and scooping out handfuls of strawberry jam. (“It was a sticky mess,” remembers LaGreca.)

Why the Tinman? “The whole point—’If I only had a heart’- and the trivial fact I’ve always just wanted to paint myself silver.”

She also appropriated another pop icon when she did a lip sync to Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” at San Diego’s The Flame.

“I got lots of tips.”

The San Diego part of the tour, which culminated with a performance at a national gay rights conference, illuminated how the drag kings’ work can trigger unexpected responses in the mainstream and the gay communities

After a day of caucuses and workshops, around 900 conference-goers were treated to, among other Casanova delights, Lucky doing a Tony Bennett lip-sync in a tux. The crowd loved it. LaGreca says that despite the fact that San Diego’s gay and lesbian community is a lot more conservative than, say, San Francisco’s, Casanova “played for huge crowds, was extremely well-received and were invited back.”

There were prohibitive laws, however. “In San Diego, there are laws… you can’t touch your breasts, you can’t touch your genitals, you can’t use an inanimate object to simulate sex. We could have been arrested just for being in drag. There’s a law about not deceiving.”

But Fischer and LaGreca agree that Lucky’s showstopper was the altar boy piece which LaGreca performed at the Embassy’s Club Confidential Party in San Francisco. The crowd “was very quiet during the performance,” in which the traditionally garbed altar boy participated in a candlelit procession, and received communion before receiving, uh, services from a “priest.”

But when it was all over, “they went wild,” says LaGreca. Though she wasn’t raised religious, she admits to a fascination with the ritualistic aspect of Catholicism—and altar boys.

“Altar boys are hot as shit. They turn me on.”

 

Lucky 7 does his thing at Silk City. Photo: Dominic Episcopo

 

What’s next for drag kings? Not everyone is sanguine about the future of the art form.

Newton doubts that the present climate will support this kind of transgressive, gay-oriented theater.

“Ever since the NEA debacle, gay performance [in general] has been under such attack… There are the police crackdowns on gay clubs in New York—I don’t know how successful the drag king scene is going to be.”

Halberstam admits that people sometimes don’t know what to make of drag kings. “Audiences are impatient… They want them to be as funny and campy as drag queens, but drag king performance is a very crude form of performance—it’s in gestation.”

For Julie Davids, local AIDS activist and Grassroot Queers’ Drag King ’97, it’s the everyday implications of male/ female drag that deserve the most attention. Davids, who cultivates a boyish look most of the time simply as a matter of personal preference, says that, with the exception of the occasional run-in with a homophobe, she is less hassled when she’s dressed like a guy.

“The big issue for me is that it’s important to remember the day-to-day shit that women that look like women get.”

As for LaGreca, she’s taking her performances one gig at a time.

There are lots of possibilities, though: Fischer is looking to organize her group for a European tour, and there are plans to go to Las Vegas in early ’98.

Any fantasies yet to perform? LaGreca says, “I wanted to do a Jerry Lee Lewis ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and set my ‘dick’ on fire… But then I thought that would be problematic.”