Tranny

This morning I headed down to the Brady St. Pharmacy for breakfast. This has become one of my regular haunts because I like authentic diner-style joints, and this place is as authentic as they get. The restaurant is also cheap (a massive stack of pancakes, bacon, and a bottomless cup of coffee for around six bucks, can't beat that) and of course it being Brady St. you never know what you're going to see, kinda where this post is going.

So I plop down at the counter, unfold my Journal Sentinel and flag down the waitress. Then I gaze around the eatery and my eyes freeze when I see him/her/it. There was a drag queen at the other end of the counter, wearing something akin to the costume Tim Curry wore in the Rocky Horror picture show but off the shoulder, and with netting in the front.

Now it is already well-documented that politically I am somewhere to the left of Lenin, and I am as strong a civil libertarian as they come. In fact this is what I like about living on the East Side, it is the kind of neighborhood where you can spot a haggard grad student, a construction worker, and a transvestite all sitting shoulder to shoulder at the same lunch counter and not think anything of it. It is a neighborhood that fosters the kind of liberal openness that makes the Fallwells and Dobsons of this world wretch and stay away, and that's suits us just fine.

But back to this particular drag queen. He was a little long in the tooth (mid 50's possibly) and had not taken care of himself well. His hair, blonde with grey roots, was long, thin, and hairsprayed to within an inch of its life, but it was not enough to cover the receding hairline and massive bald spot. the outfit he was wearing was not the least bit flattering as the netting on the front was stretched to the limit by the massive beer gut, and the off the shoulder number revealed a dense forest of backhair. His makeup put him somewhere between Tammy Faye Bakker and Bozo the Clown, and it appeared that most of his lipstick had wound up on his teeth not his lips.

Now there is nothing wrong with men wearing womens clothes in public. Nevertheless being a transvestite is not something you can half-ass, you really have to go all the way with it. From a distance it would appear that being a drag queen requires a level of commitment and dedication that this guy just didn't have. You've got to be willing to invest the time, money, and effort into wigs, outfits, makeup, and attitude that will trick the world into thinking you're a woman, or at the very least make them wonder. Otherwise you're just a dude in a dress.