Send in the Clowns

Not a drag queen doing outreach

I have done many outreach sessions at various colleges and universities – typically for Human Sexuality classes. Usually I was accompanied by post-op, pre-op, no-op, male-to-females and/or female-to-males – a smorgasbord of trans individuals.

I don’t know how the professors prepared their students for our appearances, but oftentimes, the students were not expecting us – especially us male-to-females. The students’ questions and comments indicated that they were expecting drag queens and not the ladies that appeared before them. It was a teachable moment and our presentation enlightened the students, who were expecting someone more flamboyant. 

What was the source of their expectations?

The source was the media’s fixation on drag queens, that is, the media’s desire to publicize drag queens with inferences that the queens represent the trans community. My guess is that in many cases, the media does not know the difference or care about the difference between the trans community and the drag community. Their only concern is publishing their story and the truth be damned.

I have nothing against drag queens doing their thing. You go, girls! But I am not a drag queen and have an issue when they are held up as an example of me. So I strongly disagree that “any news is good news” – that the publicity drag queens receive is a good thing for the trans community or me.

Wearing Agua by Agua Bendita

Femulating at Santiam High School in Mill City Oregon in 1993.
A sample from our flickr Yearbooks collection.

Someday Funnies

Wearing Intermix

Femulating at Lakeland (Florida) High School in 1988.
A sample from our flickr Yearbooks collection.

Thank You

Thank you so much for your generosity. 

Reader contributions to the Femulate Coffee Break! fund were sufficient to cover the Flickr Pro annual fee. So I subscribed to Flickr Pro and rebuilt the collection of photos that Starla Trimm culled from online high school yearbooks. The photos represent womanless school events from 1929 to the present – mostly womanless beauty pageants, Halloween festivities, gender bender days and stage productions.

The 4500+ photos are arranged by the name of the school and sorted into 26 albums, A to Z, but not X (there is also an Unknown Location folders for a handful of images whose location are not known).

There are some duplicates in the collection and I am slowly weeding them out.

Anyway, without further ado, click here to access the Yearbook albums.

And thank you again.

Revisiting Henri

Tropical storm Henri was a bust. Contrary to the weather forecasts, it never reached hurricane status and remained a tropical storm as it spent most of Sunday working its way across the Southern New England dumping just 1.8 inches of rain on my weather station. Its winds were not bad and we never lost power, although other parts of the state were not so lucky.

Wearing J.McLaughlin

Femulating at Pike-Delta-York High School in Delta, Ohio.
A sample from our flickr Yearbooks collection.

 

Henri

Tropical storm/future hurricane Henri is heading my way and is forecast to hit my neck of the woods tonight. 

Last time a hurricane hit here (in 1985), we lost power for three days. A lot has changed in the power infrastructure since then, so we may not lose power at all or the outage will be shorter. Nevertheless, my daily posts may be interrupted if we lose power. I already have a post queued up for Monday, but beyond that is in the hands of Mother Nature and our power provider.

And so it goes.

Someday Funnies

Wearing Eloquii

Elijah Wood

Clowns in Gowns

Exhibit A

Exhibit A is a photo of a group of female impersonators (professional femulators), circa 1960. Discounting the glamorous evening gowns, these ladies resemble cisgender females you might see anywhere in the early ’60s.

Exhibit B

Exhibit B is a photo of what is considered 21st Century female impersonators (drag queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race). They more resemble the clowns in Exhibit C than they do cisgender females.

Exhibit C

Is it no wonder that I have no interest in modern drag queens? They are just clowns in gowns, in my opinion. 

I especially dislike it when they appear at Pride events and the ill-informed mass media and/or civilian population mistake them as representatives of the transgender community.

Not all drag queens are clowns in gowns. There are some who are professional femulators, but it seems that the clowns in gowns are getting all the attention today. Too bad.

Wearing Joie

Bob Uecker and Rob Stone femulating on television's Mr. Belvedere.

Someday Funnies

Wearing Kay Unger

David Amaro femulating as Ceca on Slovenia’s Your Face Sounds Familiar.

You can view this femulation on YouTube.

Once Upon a Time

By Mikki

Once upon a time, there were female impersonators all over the place. It was a mainstay of burlesque. There was even a Broadway theater named for Julian Eltinge. 

Female impersonator establishments displayed hundreds of ads for female impersonators in regular newspapers. But as more people were turning to television for entertainment, burlesque died except for Milton Berle and a few burlesque veterans who crossed over to television. 

Likewise female impersonator nightclubs... a few of the venerable ones like the 82 Club lasted a while longer and several television variety shows would have female impersonator acts – Dinah Shore was probably the last of TV shows to have them on, circa 1960. I was in the DC area and we had a bunch of clubs, including the Golden Key Club in North Beach, Maryland. We still have a few clubs, but not even close to what we had in the “olden days.”

I found out about 82 Club (aka Club 82), my favorite by far, from friends at the Golden Key Club, and when I went to work in LA, that same friend told me about the Queen Mary Nightclub. “The Queen” was large and had a back bar that was very CD/TG/Drag-friendly. And when I went to work in San Francisco, the venerable Finocchio’s was there waiting for me. My great surprise there was that the beauty I saw (and fell instantly in love with) in the Jewel Box Revue when I was 13, LaVerne Cummings, was the star of the show. 

The 82 Club lasted until 1978. Finocchio’s and the Queen Mary hung in there until 1999 and 2003, respectively with “The Queen” devolving from live into lip sync. Today, you have to go to Vegas or Bourbon Street in New Orleans to find a dedicated female impersonator club. 

Female impersonation just faded into the background, but RuPaul is responsible for exhuming it in a public way. Of course, there are bars all over the country that have drag on occasion, but RuPaul put it back in the open. 

Now I’d probably be hard pressed to find a town of a moderate-to-larger size that doesn't have some sort of drag brunch. Here in Baltimore, we have a very active drag scene. And the closest thing to a Jewel Box Revue we have are those RuPaul’s drag queen contestants on tour. The two I've been to were in large venues that were packed. The audiences were way more "civilian" than our community. My friend and I were the only two “ladies” at the shows. 

Drag/female impersonation has gone from ubiquitous to dedicated show bars, back to local bars and now back out in the open, if differently, thanks to RuPaul. But dedicated clubs are still as rare as hen’s teeth. And maybe the audience has reverted a bit toward the people who went to see female impersonation back in burlesque, not surprised to see it and comfortable with it when they do see it. 

And the RuPaul tours play to largely packed houses. So watching this “evolution” makes me think that drag and female impersonation will be around for a long, long time. And it’s probably going to creep onto television bit by bit until it and we are going to be hardly noticed. And we won’t have to be nearly as concerned about acceptance.

Wearing Bella Dahl

Postcard from Club 82/82 Club in New York City

Someday Funnies

Wearing Bella Dahl

Harry Langdon gets forcibly-crossdressed in the 1927 film His First Flame,
which you can view on YouTube.

Please Support Femulate

Femulate is 100% free to read with no forced subscriptions, no advertisements and nothing hidden behind paywalls. 

Readers have asked to reinstate the Femulate flickr website that hosted the thousands of womanless beauty pageant images that Starla Trimm culled from online high school yearbooks. Rebuilding that website would be a major effort and I am willing to do that, but I am less willing to pay the annual $70 fee that flickr charges. 

If you value our daily content and would like to see our flickr website up and running again, you are welcome to contribute $5 or $10 or whatever to Femulate by clicking Coffee Break! image in the sidebar of the blog. 

By the way, if you contribute via PayPal, please select the “Sending to a friend” option, otherwise, PayPal deducts a fee (for example, Femulate only receives $4.37 of your $5 contribution). 

Sincerely,

Stana Horzepa

About Out and About

Doing outreach at Southern Connecticut State University

I was planning to go out en femme this Thursday to the monthly Creative Cocktail Hour at Real Art Ways, which restarted in July after shutting down during the pandemic. However, the way things have been going downhill pandemic-wise, I wondered if the Cocktail Hour would be cancelled or at a minimum, require masking and social distancing. 

I received an email last week informing me that the Hour had indeed been cancelled with hopes of restarting it in September.

Darn it! I may go out anyway.

When out and about, have you ever run into a friend or acquaintance from your male life, who is unaware of your female life?

I have, but I managed to avoid being caught with my pants down (and my panty girdle up).

First time it happened, I was shopping in Macy’s and saw the receptionist from my office strolling down the aisle. I believe that most people who know only my male side would never recognize me en femme, but in this case, the receptionist had seen me in my office girl costume on Halloween. So I quickly ducked down a side aisle and avoided the confrontation.

Second time, I was doing outreach for a Human Sexuality class at Southern Connecticut State University. After class, I exited the classroom and saw a family friend, who was a student at the University, hanging out with some other students. Nowhere to hide, I girded my loins, walked down the hall and passed unnoticed.

Which reminds me of my favorite question received during outreach Q & A:

Student asked, “Are you married?”

I answered, “Yes.”

The student followed up with, “...to a woman?”

And so it goes.

Wearing LIKELY

Grayson Perry

Please Support Femulate

Femulate is 100% free to read with no forced subscriptions, no advertisements and nothing hidden behind paywalls. 

Readers have asked to reinstate the Femulate flickr website that hosted the thousands of womanless beauty pageant images that Starla Trimm culled from online high school yearbooks. Rebuilding that website would be a major effort and I am willing to do that, but I am less willing to pay the annual $70 fee that flickr charges. 

If you value our daily content and would like to see our flickr website up and running again, you are welcome to contribute $5 or $10 or whatever to Femulate by clicking Coffee Break! image in the sidebar of the blog.

By the way, if you contribute via PayPal, please select the “Sending to a friend” option, otherwise, PayPal deducts a fee (for example, Femulate only receives $4.37 of your $5 contribution). 

Sincerely,

Stana Horzepa

Someday Funnies

Wearing Wynn Hamlyn

Eddie Cantor femulating in the 1931 film Palmy Days