Long live the kings

Eugene women dress in drag for Lesbopalooza fundraiser

By Jillian Daley

Sevelius sheds her shades when she lip-synchs to a rock remake of Soft Cell's "Tainted Love."

Sleek shades, tightly trimmed goatee, baggy clothes and a player's strut are all part of the act as Jay Walker dominates the stage.

He dances like a master and sings Karaoke like the song is his own, but this is no ordinary show, and he is really a she.

Jay Walker is just a character; the real woman behind the sunglasses is Jeanne Sevelius, and she's not up there just because she loves to be a drag king.

Sevelius was "king for a day" to help raise money for Lesbopalooza.

Event organizers from the University of Oregon, including Sevelius, employed gender exploration to get funds for Eugene's version of the nationally recognized lesbian music festival.

Organizers held a workshop after hours at Morning Glory Cafe on Feb. 28 that taught attendees how to re-create themselves as men.

At 9 p.m. whether women attended the workshop and decided to become performers or planned their act for weeks in advance, whoever wanted to got to take a turn lip-synching to music.

Sevelius said that when she discovered how much she loved to dress in drag, she wanted to turn around and give other women the same opportunity.

"I went to a workshop (a few years ago), and they said, 'Why don't you try this?'" Sevelius said. "They stuck a goatee on me, slicked back my hair and put a tie on me, and it was a transformative experience."

Nicole Burns, or "Tricky," revamped the genders of the women interested in being in the show or the attendees who had always wanted to try drag. Armed with plastic freezer bags full of friends' hair, she snipped locks into tiny pieces and arranged the mini-hairs on the women's faces into beards or mustaches with an adhesive called spirit gum.

Most of the women arrived in whatever male attire they could assemble at home.

The costumes were clever enough to fool a few people — but only for a moment.

"When I walked in here, I thought there was a lot of hot guys," audience member Julie Smith said.

Performers were mostly kings, but one drag queen in a neon pink wig stepped up grasping a faux guitar studded with small square chunks of mirror bits. Steven "Cooky" Heslin rocked the stage as Elektra Thunderbunny.

Cooky slays the audience, singing along to Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl."

Other performers included a "boy band" all dressed in matching white shirts with words like "Stud" or "Player" written in black felt tip pen.

For some, drag is a dance of high sexuality and one of freedom.

"I think that being a drag king has allowed me to claim certain aspects of my personality that as a woman I haven't been able to claim — cockiness, being the pursuer, sexual prowess," said Sevelius, who headed the workshop.

Sevelius is doing her pre-doctoral psychology internship at the U of O, and is active in many queer groups and events. She has performed in drag many times before, although she said she acts more feminine in daily life.

Others said putting on a persona is only half of the Act — the kings need to be able to dance.

"There's two kinds of performance," said graduate student Suzi Steffen, a Lesbopalooza organizing committee member. "There's gender performance and music performance."

However, those who dress as drag kings on stage are often mirroring their own lives.

Sevelius said her situation is less common, and her life is, perhaps, a far less difficult journey than those of transsexuals and butches (masculine-identified women) whose genders are consistently outside the norm.

She added that drag king shows evolved from butch women exploring their gender.

Now more feminine-identified women like Sevelius are reclaiming their masculine side through drag.

Rachael Robinson invited Kerstin Meyers on stage, who danced with her for the rest of the song.

Sevelius said she enjoys the sensuousness of the clothes in which she dresses her character, Jay Walker — particularly a retro-disco suit with a high collar and flared slacks.

Her character's first name is simply a play on the first letter of her own name, "Jeanne." A friend suggested "Walker."

"A jaywalker is someone that crosses boundaries, and I liked that because that's what a drag king does," she said.

However, although this event was lighthearted, in the 1950s it was an arrest-able offense for women to be caught wearing fewer than three articles of women's clothing, according to Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues.

Today, there are stigmas still attached to cross-dressing, such as some people feeling less comfortable with the idea of drag kings than drag queens.

"Some trans guys have a theory that people freak out more when you widen the concept of masculine than when you widen the concept of feminine," said Steffen, who is also the U of O ASUO Women's Center lesbian gay bisexual transgender issues coordinator.

Steffen said the theory involves men's unconscious resistance to sharing their masculine power.

Others expressed similar views on the societal impact of gender bending.

Sevelius said that she enjoys challenging people's natural assumptions about gender and that drag shows are a safe forum for doing that — one that may fit more easily into mainstream life.

"We're taking things to an extreme, which somehow makes it more acceptable than if it were a day-to-day thing," Sevelius said.

This acceptance contrasts with the police busts of gay bars in the 1950s, when transsexuals, those dressed in drag and others in similar situations had no legal rights to defend their lifestyle.

Some see drag as a celebration of those with uncommon genders and, like Sevelius, as a way of questioning female-male behavioral standards.

"Gender is basically an elaborate series of rituals that you perform in order to comply with your assigned gender, and drag sort of makes fun of that performance of gender that we do every day," said sophomore Austin Shaw-Phillips, a member of the Lesbopalooza organizing committee and emcee for the show.

Yet, gender bending is an everyday thing for many of those who went to Friday's show, such as butch-identified Corie McMillan, who was at the show taking pictures for her friends.

"People call me sir a lot," said McMillan, although she doesn't consider that a bad thing.

"People treat me differently," she said because of the way she dresses and presents herself. " I definitely don't get picked for jobs in the office world."

She said that the way she dresses just reflects who she is.

"I guess your interests sort of shape how you look in the end," she said.