Girlfriend:: Men, Women, and Drag

"Looking at a drag queen," Holly Brubach remarks, "we instantly grasp the distinction between male (a biological category) and masculine (a cultural category), between female and feminine; they are obviously not one and the same." Brubach, the former style editor of the New York Times Magazine, has traveled to the drag capitals of the world--New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Tokyo, and Rio--to observe people who deconstruct traditional notions of gender every time they get dressed. Whereas a less sensitive author might present this material as a revue of freaks, her combination of fashion savvy and sympathetic objectivity makes Girlfriend a captivating travelogue filled with interesting people we want to know better, including J. Alexander, an six-foot-three African American expatriate in Paris who gives femininity lessons to runway models; and Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who recounts fleeing from the Nazi police in wartime Berlin. Some of her subjects choose to live as women; others merely want to perform the feminine on special occasions. Brubach is to be especially commended for getting the pronouns right, i.e., referring to each of her subjects with the gender that he or she has selected. The text is accompanied by 79 photographs by Michael James O'Brien--one only wishes that there were some pictures from Brubach's own excursion into transvestitism, a "drag king" seminar where she became "a self-styled downtown kind of guy, in an Armani suit on loan from a friend and a dark silk shirt buttoned at the collar; no tie." --Ron Hogan