This weekend I attended an exercise in gender. One of my cousins is getting married next week & her sister threw her a party designed to piss her off. It didn’t work, but we all had fun regardless. There was a penis cake, a penis wand, penis straws (in fact, somewhere an aunt of mine has a picture of me using one…), a penis necklace, the token gay friend, and of course, women with penises!

What we did was go out to Julia’s on Broadway, a restaurant/club in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district. Capitol Hill is the “gay” area of Seattle and home to my favorite coffee shop, so I’m there pretty often when I visit the city. This makes me make comments like “this place is so much more in touch with it’s gay side than LA!” to my cousin, who then reminds me that I probably have a skewed idea of this kind of thing. *ahem* /tangent

We went to Julia’s after the Bridal Shower that my aunts threw and had a quick dinner. They then kicked us out to set up for “the show”. The show in question is Le Faux, a female impersonator caberet. It was awesome. There truly is no other word for that evening. Hanging out with my cousins & aunts, watching gender-bending performances, and just all around enjoying myself.

There were about 5, maybe 6, “female impersonators”. They impersonated & performed as Madonna, Cher, Tina Turner, Reba McIntire, P!nk, and many, many more. In that sense, it was like seeing a revue of all your favorite (and some not so favorite) songs performed live. Sure that wasn’t really Cher in the fishnets with Navy backup dancers, but it looked like her and it sounded like her. And yup, they had back up dancers. There were 5 back up dancers; we found out later that they were exactly the genders they appeared to be, but part of the fun of the evening was the confusion that the atmosphere generated.

Each person who I saw got an extra glance: he looks male but is he? He looks gay, but is he? When the female backup dancers first appeared, I stared: that Tina Turner looked like she might well be a man (as, indeed, the real Tina Turner does), but the backup dancers looked, well, female. But since it was a female impersonator show, I assumed I was wrong. The same with the male backup dancers: I assumed that they must be female, however male they looked. One was pretty hot & I couldn’t tell if I thought he was hot as a man or if she was hot as a woman.

It was a cabaret, so there was some stripping (and one of the female impersonators stripped down to pasties, which was a bit of a shock; most of the others, especially Dolly Parton, had [sometimes comical] prosthetics). There were a couple skits, including a Lucille Ball skit, and a crank call. I was unsure if the singing was lip-syncing or not. Sometimes it definitely appeared to be and at other times, it definitely was not.

The Mistress of Ceremonies was Sean Paul, who told us that if we preferred to refer to him with a woman’s name, we could call her Conny Lingus. The night was filled with that kind of humor. The second-to-last number of the evening was by Sean Paul himself, a rendition of What Makes a Man a Man in which he started out in a floor-length dress & full drag and walked up to the stage, where a dressing table was set up. He stripped down to his tighty-whiteys (which was quite surreal with the face still on), removed the wig, and then sat down to wash his face. The transformation was complete after putting on jeans, a white T, and a leather jacket. It’s a slow song & watching the transformation juxtaposed against the lyrics was quite bittersweet.

Each night the men look so surprised
I change my sex before their eyes
Tell me if you can
What makes a man a man
…
So many times we have to pay
For having fun and being gay
It’s not amusing
Theres always those that spoil our games
By finding fault and calling names
Always accusing
They draw attention to themselves
At the expense of someone else
Its so confusing
Yet they make fun of how I talk
And imitate the way I walk

It would have been a great way to end, since it’s sort of the culmination of the whole evening, but they did a final number to pump us back up.

Then we got introduced to the whole cast. Most of the impersonators were introduced with male-sounding names, but one had a distinctly female name (the one with the breasts above). This was odd to me, but she was still impersonating Marilyn Monroe (pretty well, too…although as a female impersonating a female impersonator, I did not guess that she was, in fact, female). And at that point, my brain exploded. After the introductions, Sean Paul lead them out in a procession. They then hung out to mingle with us, dressed in full face but with “normal” clothes: like they had been watching the show with us. (By which I mean, they were no longer in fishnets and corsets, but in jeans, heels, and nice shirts.) Which added to the surreality.

Honestly, I think most people should be required to experience something like that. It was quite an education in social gender constructs. Incidentally, read this article about the same. Pronouns were something that stuck in my throat, one of the many ways that gender as a construct is forced upon us. Why would it matter whether that person is a “he” or a “she”? I simply wanted to comment on the hat that he or she was wearing. But I found I could not articulate a simple thought. A man who dresses as a woman is still a grammatical man, unless he wants to be called by a female pronoun, which I would never know without asking him. And similarly, he may want to be a grammatical woman when he dresses as a man.

After Sean Paul’s on-stage transformation, he was wearing a leather jacket that struck me as being very N’Sync; which was cause for another examination of my ingrained gender issues. “He may be dressed as a man now, but he’s dressed as a gay man.” Even though if not for the jacket, he would “scan” as het (to me). And I have to admit that the whole thing made him very attractive to me. Whether I would have thought that if I’d simply passed him on the street or if it took me an hour of him wearing a dress for that I’m not sure of. Which again gives me pause. The male backup dancer who I thought was a lesbian really did end up being slightly less attractive to me once there was no more ambiguity.

And finally, the female impersonator (”transvestite” was never used, which makes me wonder if they consider themselves to be so) who was, in fact, female was an anomaly who made me wonder if she had always been a female. Which made me ask myself if it really mattered.

Check out this YouTube for stills of the show. (Photography was “strictly prohibited”.)

The Religion Angle: John said I should mention this. One of the songs was “Long as I Got King Jesus“, a rousing gospel hymn that got everyone in my (Irish & mostly atheist) family clapping, hand-waving, and shouting “Amen!”. This was funny to me not just because of their usual lack of religion, but also because they were the only people in the audience doing it.