Your Mom Wears Combat Boots

Your Mom Wears Combat Boots

By DAVID BERREBY
Published: Sunday, March 9, 1997

''So many people get snagged on the details: 'I'm a white Republican male. I have to wear a three-piece suit. I have to eat with this fork.' Forget that! The party really begins when you can throw all that stuff out the window and say, 'I'm ready to experience life.' ''

-- RuPaul, in the January issue of Interview magazine.

DRAG queens like to say that anything you wear is a form of drag. After all, when the day ends the yuppie guy trades his power tie for sweats and a cap worn backward; the businesswoman's practical pantsuit and sensible two-inch heels get exchanged for things tighter, clingier, blacker. So why shouldn't businessmen dressed as cowboys in a Houston bar be called, as one fellow drinker put it, ''transwestites''? What are clothes, anyway, if not a projection of a fantasy?

In ''The Man in the Red Velvet Dress: Inside the World of Cross-Dressing'' (Birch Lane Press, 1996), J. J. Allen writes that the day will come when he can go to any party and get compliments on his beautiful dress. (''After all,'' writes Allen, a successful salesman and contented cross-dresser in Los Angeles, ''a good dress is expensive -- and is a guy so wrong for wanting a compliment on his appearance?'') But if the response to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's performance at the Inner Circle dinner for press and politicos last weekend is any indication, Mr. Allen will have a long wait.

The Mayor's pink-gowned, platinum-curled alter-ego, Rudia Giuliandrews, was all over the newspapers. One of the Mayor's Democratic opponents, Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, told Newsday that the show was ''weird'' and implied that the Mayor might need help of the sort only psychological jargon can supply: ''I couldn't decide if it was Freudian or Jungian.''

Maybe 20 years ago the Mayor of New York wouldn't have performed in a wig, gown and make-up thick enough to have coated Elizabeth I of England. But nowadays, in movies like ''Priscilla, Queen of the Desert'' and ''Mrs. Doubtfire,'' drag is safely desexualized, presented as a lovable eccentricity, well-suited to that standard Hollywood message: just be yourself.

In the real world, drag is not confined to amiable lip-synching by cute, nonthreatening gay men. Gay culture has its spectacular drag queens like the Lady Bunny, organizer of the annual Wigstock bash in Greenwich Village, and its satirists like Hedda Lettuce, the singer-impresario and columnist who, writing in the gay weekly Next, recently scoffed at the very idea of a heterosexual cross-dresser: ''Their denial is as great as their need to wear bad make-up.''

Yet there is a separate culture of cross-dressing straight men, who sometimes involve their wives in transvestite organizations that won't admit homosexuals. And there is a third kind of cross-dresser who considers himself female and is preparing for a sex change.

If the drag subculture has been sanitized for the mainstream (''I'm a Disney character,'' said RuPaul, who is, among other things, host of a television show), perhaps that has helped make heterosexual cross-dressers more acceptable, at least if they are famous or powerful. Howard Stern lost no fans by promoting his last book in drag. Whatever fans think of Dennis Rodman's refusal to become a plaster-saint Inspiration to Youth, his penchant for dresses is seen more as eccentricity than perversion; Neil Cargile, the Nashville businessman known as ''high-heel Neil,'' hasn't been drummed out of business, polite society or even the Republican Party.

In ''Vested Interests'' (Routledge, 1992), a meditation on society's periodic flirtation with cross-dressing, Marjorie Garber, a professor of English at Harvard, proposes that drag marks a ''category crisis,'' a blurring of cultural, social or esthetic distinctions. Conventions of gender change over the centuries (an 18th century French aristocrat would not have regarded his wig, makeup or silk stockings as effeminate). But the lines are always drawn, and their blurring, Ms. Garber argues, is a sign of cultural flux.

Women in Boxers

A century ago, a woman in pants could provoke as much unease as a man in a dress. But now practically no item of man's clothing -- combat boots, even boxer shorts -- is off-limits to women. To shock, a woman has to appropriate other tokens of maleness, like the false beards used by ''drag kings.''

Sometimes women take up articles of male apparel like ties and shoulder pads that connote privilege, power, even menace. And that may be a kind of fantasy of power -- power to pay salaries, hire and fire, arrest and harass, which belong, disproportionately, to heterosexual men. But these women don't seem to provoke male anxiety.

Neither does the drag of gay performers. ''The essence of drag and camp is about people on the margins,'' Jennie Livingston, director of a 1991 documentary on transvestites, ''Paris Is Burning,'' once said.

But for straight white men, a binge of cross-dressing can symbolize not marginality but its opposite. The corporate executive who straps a halved coconut to his chest for a routine at the summer-fun outing goes back to power suits, power lunches and power. A drag queen, however fabulous a creature, is an outcast. For an influential man, drag can be a way of stating he has power to spare.

Maybe that's why the straight cross-dresser is resented by many drag queens, and not infrequently by women. ''At least RuPaul is the real thing,'' the theater critic Linda Winer wrote in an essay comparing straight men in drag to minstrel showmen in blackface. ''It's straight actors pretending to be women who make me really cranky.''

In other words, there is drag and there is drag. Mr. Giuliani was not merely showing that he could have fun, but that he could afford to. It's a safe bet that if Mr. Ferrer or anybody else posed a threat in the polls, the Mayor would have spent Saturday night in Republican male drag: a three-piece suit.

Photos: Howard Stern, chatting recently with David Letterman, in book-promotion gear. (Associated Press); The Mayor's inspiration: Julie Andrews in ''Victor/Victoria.'' (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

A version of this article appeared in print on Sunday, March 9, 1997, on section 4 page 4 of the New York edition.

Fonte: NY Times