Kate Zambreno

Imagine, for a moment, a Girl's Town in Chicago.

Not the station-wagon quaintness of Andersonville, but a nightlife scene marked off with towering rainbow columns--or maybe a more feminine shape, like arches. Instead of mannequin queens in eight-inch stilettos and spangly spandex peering out the windows, stores sell fedoras and facial hair for chicks who want to imagine having dicks and, of course, as many sex-toy shops as possible female orgasms in a night. When dusk falls and curious tourists go home, the district lights up. Girls! Girls! Girls! shouts one marquee, offering up for-ladies-only lap dances. Another club sponsors a burlesque night, the night before a poetry reading. A local theater screens a lesbian film festival. And the Chicago Kings, a drag-king troupe with Broadway-sized ambitions, are making the women swoon by throwing down moves from their latest boy-band routine inside their new space.

This fantasy is actually not that farfetched, due to a sudden explosion in girl-based entertainment. Although the boys on Halsted Street still rule the night, the local lesbian community is experiencing a social resurgence due to an influx of alternatives that sprang up simultaneously almost three years ago. From burlesque to drag to club nights, this queer subculture throws parties and debunks the stereotype that lesbians just want to stay home.

Up until a few years ago, lesbians about town were limited as far as nightlife. They could hang out at Star Gaze in Andersonville, or shoot pool at Girlbar in Lincoln Park, a venue that recently closed its doors. At T's, an Andersonville bar that serves a mainly gay clientele, three of the founders of the Chicago Kings, Mr. Izzie Big (Sam Bryer), Maxx Hollywood (Debbie Linn), and Harley Poker (Kristin Lohr), talk about their impetus for starting up their drag-king troupe almost three years ago.

"The main thing is that the four of us were a little discouraged with the lesbian scene," says Big, a tiny tough-talking graphic designer. "There was stuff for suburb dykes, and Girlbar, and that was it. There was nothing really fun to do like go and watch shows, and maybe hook up with somebody."

Along with Pussy Galore, who now lives in New York, they didn't really know many people in the city before starting, even though the troupe has now evolved to thirty core members and an umbrella group of about sixty kings. They didn't really even know each other. Big and Maxx were friends, and Harley and Pussy were a couple. As they talk, the Kings interchangeably call each other "he" and "she" as well as alternately call themselves by their real names and their manly personas. "Every time we talked to somebody out and about if we'd meet somebody they'd be like, where's our scene? Where can we go, and hook up, and make out with somebody?" asks Big. "And have fun. It was like, 'You're cool, where do you hang out?'" chimes in Harley, a soft-spoken carpenter and art handler by trade.

Both Big and Maxx had been exposed to kinging before--Big performed in an amateur kinging event, Maxx met a drag-king troupe when she lived in Washington, D.C. They didn't know what to expect in March 2001, when they booked Jak's Tap with seven acts and waited to see who would show up. "One thing that was so cool about our first show is that we had no idea what to expect," says Maxx, a tall dark-haired art conservator. "We would have been happy if fifty people came. It was just like everybody and their uncle came. And they were dressed in everything. All these women came in drag; there were drag queens; there were all these older women that came in their fifties. It was fantastic. There was leather and..."-- "people making out in the corner as we were trying to tear the stage down at the end of the night," adds Big.

"We totally wanted it to be available to everybody. We definitely looked at it as something for queer women to do on a Saturday night," says Harley. "For us to do," says Maxx. "But also, everybody," says Harley. "That's what makes it a great crowd, when people are next to each other, and they're not even noticing who they're next to or what they might have on their face that doesn't necessarily belong there all the time."

At the Spring Cleaning show at the Empty Bottle, the two MC's--Harley, wearing an ice-cream-man costume, and Big, decked out in a fedora--are having the time of their life with a bachelorette party that's wandered in. The bride-to-be wears a veil covered in little toy penises. "She got my popsicle," laughs Harley later of the routine she performed where she swung a large ice-cream stick into the screaming audience. "Excellent, yeah, that was good. We bought them a round of shots to help them celebrate," says Maxx.

At first glance, the party at the Bottle looks like the typical indie-rock scene, some crossing, some not, a mix of strapped-down wife beaters and both fake and real goatees. It's hard not to be slightly turned on by the brimming-over machismo on stage as the Kings run through all the male archetypal personas, from punk to cowboy to sleaze to gay boy to Chip Starlight, a John Travolta-wannabe who does a hilarious rendition of "Mr. Roboto." "I don't know if it's the beer talking, or the show, or what, but I get people coming up to me who are like, (mimics drunk voice)' I don't know if you know Maxx Hollywood very well, but if I wasn't straight, I would totally take him home!'" says Big. Maxx laughs. "Or, 'If I didn't have my boyfriend with me, I'd be all over that guy'," he continues. Their Circuit shows draw a more gay audience. "And that's cool too," says Maxx. "It's always funny. They are always like, 'I can't stand it when you guys come here, because I don't know who's a man, and who's a woman. I don't know who I can hit on'."

"I think what people do is, 'Oh, he's hot. She/he's hot', you know?" says Amy Hawkins, a Columbia College professor studying the Kings, who also occasionally performs in their amateur night, Kingdom Come, the last Friday of every month at Circuit, and played an acoustic set on stage the night of the Spring Cleaning show. "So if you're interested in the ways the line blurs, then it's really kind of fun to see what people do with it. It's sexy. I think straight people would find it really, really fun..." Big agrees: "We'll have straight couples that will come to our shows and be rethinking the dynamics of their own relationship and their own gender roles."

Hawkins first saw the Kings two years ago at their Halloween show at Circuit and became interested in the troupe as part of a larger queer cultural movement. "I had seen some drag in Detroit, but it was kind of, I don't know, it was OK. They were doing their thing. It was mostly one individual doing a ballad, a country ballad, a Frank Sinatra-type ballad. What I was so interested in here is that it's troupe driven. There's a lot of choreography, multiple people doing multiple things, there's a story line going on, not just lip-synching," she says. Hawkins is also intrigued by how the Kings play with gender and identity on stage. "What I think that they do, in a really, really smart way, conscious or not, they tap into queer theory, things about gender and identity, that I haven't seen performed like that."

Hawkins is not the first academic to try to fit the Chicago Kings into a theoretical framework. A member of the troupe is also researching them, and there's been a recent influx of literature since kinging has reached the mainstream. "In a lot of ways we're just doing work," says Maxx. "The troupe has evolved as it has and it's continuing to evolve." "We're so close to it," says Big. "We can't see what effect this has on Chicago, what effect this has on other drag-king troupes..." "Queer history, public queer history, there's isn't that much of it," says Maxx. "It's weird to see yourself as part of history, too," says Harley.

Tara Vaughan Tremmel, one part of the Sissy Butch Brothers, situates the burgeoning burlesque scene in the city as part of the history and revival of burlesque. Along with filmmaking partner Gwen Lis, the doctoral student in 20th-century U.S. sociocultural history is working on a documentary on burlesque in the States, entitled "Gurlesque Burlesque." When they came back from the Mojave Desert last year after shooting the Miss Exotic World pageant, they decided to throw a benefit at Star Gaze to raise money for the film. Tremmel, who goes by the nickname "Red," did a PowerPoint presentation on burlesque and from that lined up sixteen acts for their first show.

This July at Abbey Pub will be their fourth show of Gurlesque Burlesque; like the King shows, each one has sold out with 500-600 people per show. They draw a mixed crowd, says Tremmel, because of the mostly straight venues they perform in, like Subterranean and Martyr's. But it's still queer. "Sure, straight people are going to go, they're going to like it, it's going to turn them on, but really, it's like how do straight people pull from queer sexuality, as opposed to how are queer people always pulling from straight sexuality," says Hawkins. There are drag kings in the acts, and some of the Chicago Kings perform in the burlesque acts, both as butch and femme characters, although Tremmel sets up the burlesque scene on the other side of the gender-bending spectrum. "Culturally, it's a counterpoint, in that it gives feminine women a stage. It's a place that complicates the idea of feminine gender and sexuality."

"I'm really interested in people that are outside the mainstream or the norm, and I think this community is even outside of the lesbian community in a weird way. But it's just people who are all trying to do interesting things, whether as filmmakers or as artists or as drag kings or as writers," says Ronit, aka "The Diva." Three years ago Ronit started DykeDiva.com, an online resource guide for this growing lesbian community that includes a calendar of events, a poetry section and a sex-advice column called "I Heart My Clit." The filmmaker who recently screened "A Day on the Force," a documentary on the inaugural season of the Chicago professional women's football team, was batting around the idea of starting a website while hanging out with the soon-to-be Kings at Star Gaze. "So we were definitely talking about it since the beginning," says Ronit. "And I would say, well Dyke Diva would definitely promote the Kings, so it was very organic." Diva reviewed their first show for her site. "To me it was an amazing celebration that I hadn't really seen. Embracing sexuality, embracing playing with gender, embracing being sexy, you know?"

Ronit pinpoints the beginning seeds of the "genderqueer art culture," as Hawkins would have it, or the "genderfuck explosion," as Big calls it, around the summer of Ladyfest Midwest, the woman-based performance festival that descended upon Chicago three years ago. "I think a lot of things happened at once. And I think that Chix Mix--they're a part of that too. Things shifted. It's modeled after the whole boy thing, and the boys going out and having their circuit parties. I think women sort of thought, why don't we have that, too?"

Things fell into place after the first Black Bra party thrown by Chix Mix three years ago, says Kathleen Ulm, who runs the nightlife-promotions company along with her business partner Julie Moser. Both Ulm and Moser work full-time in marketing and promotions, and decided to find the alternative to the circuit parties. "We just knew that we wanted something really cool like the guys had," Ulm echoes Ronit. "And so we thought, well we can give this a shot and see if it works. So we had the sexy theme, we had dancers, we wanted it to be something where people could dress up and come out, and think outside the box about what they were doing currently, which was just going to the bars." A thousand women came to the first event held at the now-defunct Drink. "We definitely knew we were on to something," says Ulm. Chix Mix grew from throwing four parties a year to three events a month, including the first and third Fridays at Circuit. Their parties feature certain themes--from Party Like a Rock Star, to this month's Coyote Ugly, complete with dancing on the bar, to a wet T-shirt contest last month--and incorporate CD and DVD releases, live acts, women dancing in cages and on poles, and lap dancers.

"I think the perception has always been that the lesbian community isn't sexual. And it's still the perception even though people know that the Chix Mix events are really popular. I think the guys' community really doesn't understand that the women's community is as sexual and they want to get lap dances and they want to do wet T-shirt contests, and that's what changed a lot. I think that we brought that to the table." The Chicago Kings fliered for their first event at the Black Bra party; Chix Mix has sponsored a Gurlesque Burlesque event. But even though there's crossover, Ulm differentiates between the still-mixed crowds at Chix Mix and Kings events. At Chix Mix, "it's more like if you went to a straight club. A lot of lesbians that come to our parties would think these girls are straight. The drag-king stuff is a younger, more edgy punky type of activist scene."

So is Girl's Town that far off? Ulm invokes a "Field of Dreams" metaphor to describe the lesbian scene, now taking place in mostly gay male venues, like Circuit, or straight clubs, like the Empty Bottle. "I think that we can all coexist. I think the perception's always been, there's only been these two bars, Girlbar and Star Gaze, and there's not a lot of women, and they don't go out. Well, if you build something that is interesting, they will go out." Hawkins sees the local lesbian scene as the beginnings of a cultural phenomenon. "I think it's found a moment. It's found a moment here."

(2003-06-25)

Also by Kate Zambreno

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