We were doing some drag shopping on Hollywood Blvd., and we saw Angelyne's big pink Corvette parked outside a dress shop. There could be no doubt that it was, in fact, her car; as if a big pink Corvette wasn't distinctive enough, she also has license plates that say ANGELYNE. We wanted to go inside the store and get a picture with her, but we both felt like it'd be just too dorky. Besides, I'd heard that Angelyne can be kind of nasty if you confront her in the wild, apparently she's not too fond of autograph hounds and the like. Well, after a fair bit of dithering we finally  decided to just go inside and see what happened. We would have felt like big wussy wimps if we hadn't even tried.

We went inside the store, and of course the place turned out to be full of hot pink rubber dresses and spangled bikinis and stuff like that. Nobody BUT Angelyne could have worn this stuff! We spotted her at the back of the store, picking through the racks all by herself, but as we approached I suddenly got cold feet. Typical - I always drag us into these weird situations, then I wuss out and leave the dirty work to K.

Well, K went ahead and asked Angelyne for a picture, and Angelyne said no... but at least she wasn't mean about it. She said her manager doesn't allow it, and even though I suspect that was just a line, it was better than just telling us to get lost. She DID give us her business card, though. It's pink and shiny and rather overdone... just like she is!

3/26/2000, 1:35 a.m.
I've had some great email penpals since I first went online a couple of years ago, and while it'd be kinda rude to name my favorites, I will say that Corinne, a swingin' chickie from America's heartland, easily makes the short list. Her emails are always a total kick in the head, and I wish like heck she had a website, so I could link to it here (and so I could read it everyday!). We've gotten pretty close in a hurry, and we always have these interesting arguments, mostly about Corinne's gender status. For the longest time, Corrine was convinced that she had to be either completely butch or completely femme, she's a self-described "all or nothing" type. Her current plan is to either go ahead and have a full sex reassignment surgery, or to completely repress this stuff for the rest of her life and go get married and be a pipe-smokin' daddy in the suburbs. I keep trying to convince her that there are MANY possibilities between these two extremes, and lately it seems like I could be making some progress. Heh heh... I'm bringing her over to the dark side. If I had any sense I'd give up and stop pushing her so hard, but I can't help myself. I've been where Corinne is now, and I wish I'd had somebody to bully me into doing what I really wanted but was too scared to do. I wasted too many years being miserable.

Even though Corinne puts on a big manly man front in her daily life now, she wasn't always that way. When Corinne was in her early teens, at that age where boys and girls pretty much look alike anyhow, she actually passed as a girl! She had a little posse of galpals who didn't know the truth about her, and they'd all go to the mall and the roller rink and do all kinds of fantastic early '80s teengirl stuff together. It sounds like heaven to me, but Corinne insists that she was so terrified of being found out that it was hardly any fun at all. She's got all kinds of hilarious stories about trying to pull off this grand deception... someday she's got to collect these things into a novel, I swear.

Maybe Corinne didn't enjoy her days as a teenage girl much, but I still turn neon green with envy when I think about it. I seem to be pretty hung up on the whole teenage girl experience these days, I get really envious & pissy when I look at Britney Spears or some happy little teen airhead like that. I feel like I missed out. I spent every second of my teens wishing I was something else, and not doing anything about it. Who knows, if I hadn't been such a damn closet case in my teens, it's possible that with some persistence I could have talked my folks into letting me get hormone shots & everything... I could actually look like a girl today! On the other hand, the whole thing could have gone very Ma Vie en Rose on me, my family could have been torn apart, you never know.

Ah, well. I guess I'll just have to get all that teenage girlness outta my system now. Better late than never, huh?

4/1/2000, 4:22 a.m.
Tonight's Club Makeup excursion had an iffy start. When we first got there, there was this hellacious line, way longer than usual, even. Usually these lines are pretty dull, but this one was livened up some by a cute little art troupe that had parked a van outside the club. They were walking up and down the street, carrying not very good paintings over their heads and hollering out terrible poetry. They were trying (without much success) to entice people to go inside their van to look at their traveling exhibit. We kind of wanted to check it out, but we didn't want to lose our place in the line. We also saw another sex dwarf! It's strange, but the only time I ever see midgets is at fetish and drag clubs. Are midgets really active in the club scene or something? There are all these bondage midgets running around town! The sex dwarf and the art troupe were swell, but there was also a homeless guy who was going up and down the line, trying to guilt everybody into giving him money. He was kind of nasty about it too, because he knew we all felt extra guilty and decadent because we were standing around outside this big party wearing our pearls and feather boas and stuff.

Once we finally got inside, things went pretty well. The evening was hosted by Alexis Arquette, the Arquette nobody talks about. She was okay, she can sing and she's not agonizing to look at, but she had this really nasty attitude, she was trying way too hard to convince us all that she was a major badass drag queen. She's one of those "fierce" queens. A little bit of "fierce" can be OK, but Alexis seems to have a lot of real hate behind her cute little jibes, and it makes her cute little jibes not so cute. She shouted "muthafucka" an awful lot, and she'd introduce people with lines that would've had me in tears. At one point she got into this argument with somebody in the audience, and it actually looked like a fistfight was about to break out! Charming. Apparently she's the new, regular host, so I guess I'd better get used to her. I don't know, I'd probably think her act was fine at a punk show, but this club has more of a glam rock vibe, and that relentless "fuck you" attitude just didn't fit. I mean, sure, I'm pissed off that I'm not really a girl too, but I don't see the point of vomiting my hate out all over a bunch of people who've done nothing to deserve it. It takes a special kind of talent to make nastiness appealing, and I don't think Alexis is that kind of talent. Mean queens like her almost make me miss those old skool, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" dragsters, the sequined monsters who think everything on earth is FABULOUS, darling. As annoying as they can be, at least they're cheerful.

The highlight of the show was actually a twisted version of an old skool drag spectacular, this gigantic negro queen who actually sang "Sweet Transvestite" from Rocky Horror. I know, that song is kind of a cliche in the drag community, but it's still a great song, and this girl really sold it. The crowd went absolutely nuts! You just knew that ten years ago all of these people were at their local arthouse theater jumping to the left and all the rest of it. In that crowd,  "Sweet Transvestite" is like the national anthem. Of course, Alexis introduced this girl by saying something like, "Say hello to a big, stinky-assed whore," but somehow it was the Sweet Transvestite who left the stage smelling like a rose.

4/9/2000, 4:55 a.m.
Oy, it's been one of those days. Or, more accurately, one of those nights. The really annoying thing is that everything that went wrong was my own damn fault. We'd planned to go to Dragstrip tonight, but the club gets super-crowded late in the evening, so K wanted to get there fairly early. Well, I was making pretty good time getting ready, so I got overconfident and decided to get experimental and try some nail polish, something I'm not that experienced with. MAJOR mistake. I spilled some on the floor, and then when I was trying to clean it up I got it all over my fingers, and then I got some on my neck... ARRGGHH! I managed to clean the stuff off, but the polish on my actual nails ended up looking so smeary and awful that I had to wear gloves to cover it up, and of course gloves didn't go with my dress at ALL, so I had to change my damn dress, and the new dress COMPLETELY showed my bra, so I had to peel everything off again and find a new bra, and...

Well, suffice to say, by the time I was ready, I looked like hell, and we were running really late. We got into a nasty, stupid argument, an argument that lasted just long enough to ensure that it was now officially too late to even bother going to the club. So, we didn't go out, we wasted a looong time getting ready, and we fought like two lunatics. Oh, and I got a LOT of work due early this week, so after that whole mess with K, I'm trying to get work done tonight while I'm so upset I could put my foot through my monitor.

At this exact moment, I feel completely stupid about being a drag queen. I know this will pass by tomorrow, but at the moment, I'd sell my Uncle Bob's left nut just to be goddam "normal".
 

4/10/2000, 12:17 a.m.
We've pretty much completely recovered from last night's debacle, thank goodness. We've both accepted that it was just a completely stupid night all around. We do certainly know how to have knock-down, drag out fights once in a while, but at least we  always make up pretty well. 

I still feel kind of weird about being into drag, but it's passing. When we were at the mall today I almost dragged K into one of the girly clothes stores, so I think I should be back up to my full girly potency before long.

5/1/2000, 5:33 a.m.
Lately I've been wodering about lesbian porn. OK, see, I know why I like lesbians... if I see a movie where two girls are getting frisky, it's fun to imagine I AM one of them. But what I don't get is what regular guys get out of it. I mean, if you're not getting off on the idea of being one of the girls, where ARE you in the scene, you know? How do they project themselevs into it? I mean, yeah, watching a girl masturbate doesn't include a man at all, and it's still sexy, but it's a completely different dynamic than a girl-on-girl scene. If you're looking at a girl playing all by herself, you can think, "Goodness, she looks lonesome, poor thing. If I were there, I'd show her a good time! Hubba hubba! 23 skidoo!" But if I'm watching a scene with two actors, it's not sexy to me unless I can kinda  project myself into the situation somehow. When regular guys watch lesbian stuff, do they imagine themselves charging in to bust up the action? "Right, enough of this fiddling around... let's get down to business!" Maybe they just ignore the whole lesbian angle, and enjoy this stuff because it offers two vaginas on display, instead of just one. I don't get it!

It almost makes me wish I had some regular guy pals, so I could ask them. The only problem is that for me to ask the question, the guy would have to know about my gender stuff. So, he'd have to be a guy who was into lesbian porn, but had no gender issues of his own, but was OK with trannies. Hmm, finding somebody like THAT could be a tall order! So far, everybody I've talked about this with has been either transgendered, female, or gay, all folks as in the dark on the whole lezzie porn issue as I am. Maybe I'll have to post a survey on this website or something. (Then again, anybody visiting my website probably isn't much of a "regular" guy, either!)