Drag Kings

"Behind every great man is a great woman," Elvis says, comfortingly.
Finally, it is time for the announcement of the semifinalists: Pierre Byrd; Jonathan Newt, who sang a nasty song about Newt Gingrich, plastic lizard in hand; and Ronnie Earl, an actual man, who portrayed a redneck jaw-jutter with the IQ of a plank.

"How many dildos do you own, and do you have names for them?" the judges ask Pierre Byrd, to test her intelligence and suitability.

"I have lots of little fellas, but they're not really little," Byrd says. "I call them my alter egos."

Sigmund Freud, the premier Mr. Id and Ego, would have had a tough time explaining drag kings. In fact, today's sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists -- even therapists specializing in gender issues -- find it difficult to explain the needs and behaviors of those now being called the differently gendered.

"TR>here's so much new that is going in terms of gender fluidity -- the more we know, the more we don't know," says San Francisco psychotherapist Lin Fraser, whose gender-issue work spans 25 years. Perhaps, Fraser says, the amorphous new roles signal the first open flicker of a buried fire: a sign that the old notions of femininity and masculinity, and other dualities, are collapsing. "We don't know if this is just some kind of symbol of what's going on in the whole culture, or if it's a sign that we are moving away from a binary system. We don't know why this is happening at all," she says.

The only thing that seems clear, she continues, is that people are seeing more options. Instead of trying to fit into a stereotypical male or female mold, "people might say, 'I'm bigendered, or I feel somewhere in between,' " Fraser says.

But why do they feel in between? The literature offers few answers, experts say. Traditional psychotherapists sometimes theorize that the transgendered identity is a defense -- something used to block pain. "Another theory being discussed," says Fraser, "is that the cross-gender or transsexualism is a dissociation," a kind of fugue state that people use to split off from reality and escape pain.

Most gender experts believe there is some kind of biological underpinning in differently gendered people, she adds. "But we don't even know for sure when gender identity is established. We used to think it was between the ages of 2 and 4, and now we're not sure about that."

Statistics don't help; they mostly don't exist. Psychologists currently believe that the number of female-to-male transsexuals -- loosely defined as people who take male hormones, have mastectomies, or have penises surgically constructed -- is 1 per 30,000 in the population. About 1 per 100,000 female-to-males actually undergo sex reassignment surgery, says Judy van Maasdam, coordinator of Palo Alto's Gender Dysphoria Program. It is also believed, says van Maasdam, that there are just as many female-to-males asR> male-to-females.

Surgery is less common among female-to-males, though, because it's far less perfected. Phalloplasty, one of two available procedures, involves taking skin, typically from the forearm and wrist, to construct a penis. "The sensitivity isn't great, it doesn't function well, and it doesn't look good," says Fraser. The other option, metoidioplasty, involves injections of testosterone, which can eventually enlarge the clitoris, creating a sensitive "microphallus" perhaps an inch and a half long. The labia can also be pumped up with implants and fashioned to look like a scrotum.

The procedure, in any event, is not something sought by most of the women calling themselves drag kings. Cross-dressing, drag kings point out, is a far different thing than what is traditionally described as feeling like a male trapped in a female body. And no one has statistics on the number of drag kings in the world.

"It's a campier side of lesbians," says Leigh Crow, on a lunch break from work at a thrift store. Like Stafford and Jordy, Crow admits to being a thriftaholic. "Drag is something a lot of people in the gay community" -- men and women -- "can relate to, as opposed to the really heavy political aspect of the women's community," Crow says. "It doesn't even have to be political. It's light, and funny, and has a certain whimsy to it."

It's play, says Bay Area psychotherapist Marny Hall. "I think that for many butch-femme or postmodern dykes gender is a role they can assume, and make fun of, and use as a costume," Hall says. "And if you accept the notion that gender is costuming, instead of essence, then you can play with it however you want."

Portola Valley author and lesbian therapist JoAnn Loulan puts it this way: "On the whole, the world believes there are only two genders. I think there are thousands."

Francis Vavra, deep-voiced and dark-haired, wears a sleeveless red dress when she opens the door to her Oakland apartment. Her artist husband, whose nudes -- all female -- grace the walls, isn't home. The sun filters through her living room, glints off the wigged mannequin in the corner, warms the cat on the couch. In half an hour, Vavra will strip to bare breasts and jockey shorts and start preparing for an evening as a man. There's an AIDS benefit in San Francisco, and she's the "male" escort for Miss ETVC, the representative of what is discreetly called Educational TV Channel, the largest transgender group in the nation. Miss ETVC is a male-to-female.