Chapter 33: In Which Our Heroine Is Menaced By Angry Drag Queens

I’ve mentioned this incident a couple of times, and someone asked me to elaborate. When I was in college at North Texas State University, now known as U. of North Texas, I stayed in the musician/actor/artist’s dorm. Bruce Hall was a crumbling mansion with no air conditioning and a dozen ways to smuggle in contraband. We had slackers, divas, and a little more than our share of those in Alternative Lifestyles. Bruce’s official motto was The Last Dorm to Conform, but we knew it as Bruce: Where Men Are Men and Sheep Are Nervous.

Anyhoodle, some of my friends decided to go clubbing in Dallas and made me go with them. I wondered how much fun I could actually have in a gay bar, but whatever. The first club was pretty cool- there were men and women, straights too- and I got propositioned by a beautiful woman in the bathroom. I don’t know why I’m still slightly proud of that. Probably because I’m a pathetic attention ho at times.

At the next club, they knocked a few people out of the way to get the perfect table. When I asked why, they just smiled and said, “You’ll see.” I did. The music started, which sent the guys into a flurry of primping; hair perfect, skinny ties adjusted, eyebrows pasted down. When the drag show performers took the tiny stage, they were in heaven and I was depressed. It’s bad enough to be intimidated by another woman, y’know? A million dollar’s worth of surgery couldn’t make me look as good as those guys. One guy, Bart, had his own hair grown out, no wig. It was glorious. At this point, my friends were practically drooling. Cheerleaders walking past a construction site wouldn’t get this reaction.

After the show, a few of the showguys sat at our table. In yet another example of why no one should ever drink, I said, “Let me ask you something. You all are Men, right?” I had infused the word with the proper amount of macho pride.

“Yes!”

“And you love men?”

“Yes!”

“And the men you love most look like women?”

You know those movies where there’s a party with really loud music and people chattering and the characters have to shout to be heard and one person says something very stupid and suddenly the music stops with that record-scratching noise and everyone stops talking and stares at her? Yeah, it was that kind of moment.

The two friends I had left hustled me out with declarations of how much I’d been drinking and how I wasn’t too bright in the first place. They never took me out again, which was okay with me, although Bart did give me some good advice on conditioner.