Anthony Trazo is the sexual health services coordinator for Billy DeFrank, an LGBT community center in northern California, specifically in HIV/AIDS testing and counseling. His office is unapologetically clinical. A sign on the door says that he speaks Tagalog, another that the office is a safe space. Inside, the room is like a doctor’s office, from the bright, white lights above us to the generic blue/gray linoleum under our feet. I almost feel guilty for dragging my dirty shoes into this pristine space.

Anthony stands about 5’ 10” and is built like a tank. He has a shaved head hidden beneath a baseball cap and wears a trendy keffiyeh-like scarf in white with black checks. But, despite his macho look, he has high-pitched voice that sounds like a blend of sugar, glitter, and rainbows.

He patiently answers me with his singsong voice when I ask pleasantries about his job (fourth year working), his past education (was an art major), his hobbies (volleyball). But our conversation deviates quickly: I am not here just to interview Anthony. I am here to ask for help.

I am an occasional amateur drag queen. I emerge a few times a year as “Bjorq,” an impersonation of Icelandic singer Bjork. I’ve made appearances at my dorms’ quarterly formal dinners and competed in my university’s annual drag ball, Genderfuk, twice. Each year, I had an outlandish outfit – a replica of Bjork’s swan dress, a mermaid-style wedding gown with a 20-lb train. Each year, I stood in the top three, chosen from a group of more than 20, almost certain that I would take the crown. And each year, my hopes were dashed as first place was awarded to someone else and I was relegated to Miss Runner-Up, which is just a nice way of saying Miss Not-Good-Enough.

This time, I have decided to step up my game. Until this point, I made the mistake of asking girls from my freshman dorm for make-up advice, not knowing that (1) girls often don’t know how to do make-up properly and (2) girls certainly don’t know how to do make-up for guys. Halfway through my first competition, I slipped into the bathroom for a quick check-up. Looking in the mirror, I discovered that I had unevenly distributed my foundation and the parts that I had gotten right had started to melt. Rather than looking like a glamorous queen, I looked like a leper who’d put his eye shadow on in the dark. “CoverGirl doesn’t cover boys,” Anthony admonishes me when I tell him this story.

This is why I am in Anthony’s office, surrounded by pamphlets about chlamydia and free samples of condoms, asking how high of a heel is just high enough. There is a tradition of drag mothers, experienced drag queens who mentor newbie queens (drag princesses, if you will) like me. Still, to ask someone to be your drag mother is no small deal: it requires responsibility, dedication, and large chunks of time from the mother.

For this reason, I don’t expect Anthony to be my drag mother: I have come only for advice – costume jewelry pearls of drag wisdom. Yet, before he will even agree to let me shadow him for one night, he gives me an appraising look, probably wondering if I’m worth the effort.

Anthony, when not at the Center, is a successful drag queen named “Beyonsoy,” Beyoncé’s self-proclaimed Asian step-sister. As his drag persona, he’s won many awards, including crowd favorite at Miss Gay and Pacific Alliance, and has an official fan club with more than a hundred members. After only his first appearance as Beyonsoy, Anthony became the “it girl,” and is now booking gigs upwards of a year in advance. To say the least, he’s a big fish and I am a shrimp.

I fidget in my seat and the vinyl-y cushion squeaks. I notice flyers on the wall for his sometimes drag troupe, the Acts of DesperAsian. The queen on the flyer is completely done-up: she would make mannequins jealous of her flawless skin and bone structure. Her lips are pouted in the quintessential “You caught me by surprise!” pose. She is perfect.

Anthony purses his lips and nods to himself. He agrees to meet me again for hands-on training. I’m not sure whether it’s because he sees potential in me or pities my former attempts at drag, but then again, I don’t care. All I want to do is win that elusive pageant crown.

Pain is Beauty

We make plans to get dolled up at the Billy DeFrank Center on Monday and head to the weekly drag night at a gay bar in my hometown, a place my queer and hippy high school friends and I revered but could never patronize. The weekend before, I prepare for my drag tutorial with Anthony. For instance, I walk around my dorm in 4” platform ankle boots. Some of my dorm mates laugh with and/or at me as I struggle around the dorm, occasionally clumsily and painfully slipping to the ground like a baby elephant learning to walk. (Apparently stiletto heels and freshly mopped kitchen floors do not mix well.)   A couple of them snap their fingers at me and cat-call, “Girl, those are some fierce heels.” Most don’t even notice my shoes, but look at me quizzically, wondering how I went from 5’9” to 6’1” overnight.

A few hours before I am to meet Anthony, I step into the shower. I take with me the usual accessories: shampoo, conditioner, a loofah, but also a fresh razor and shaving cream. I don’t shave often due to my inability to grow facial hair, but the dress I plan to wear later is sleeveless and short enough to be considered a long T-shirt. Therefore, though I would prefer not to, I must shave visible body hair.

I stall for a substantial amount of time, washing my hair multiple times and exfoliating every inch of my skin. When my fingers start to prune, I take a deep breath and decide to bite the bullet. I fill my hand with shaving cream and begin the shaving process. The initial strokes are easier than expected, though there is some resistance: it just feels like I’m scratching an itch, albeit with a razor blade. When I clear a path of skin, I rinse it with water. Without hair, the skin tingles, as if I’ve slathered it with Icy-Hot, and feels smooth to the touch.  The only comparison I can make, oddly, is a rose petal.

Shaving off inches-long hair, it turns out, requires multiple run-throughs, which, in turn, requires a lot of shaving cream. Halfway through my first armpit, my bottle of Gilette putters out. I stand, razor in hand, in complete disbelief and curse my existence.

After a moment, I sigh and concede that I cannot do this without some form of help. Before I lose my nerve, I hastily wrap a towel around my waist and run back to my room, leaving shaving cream drippings in my wake. I peek my head into the room and cough at my roommate. “Hey,” I try to say nonchalantly, “could I use your shaving cream? I ran out and still have to do my legs.”

Luckily, my roommate is very accepting, not paying attention, or good at hiding his judgments, because I make off with his bottle of shaving cream without another word. I finish the set of armpits and move to my legs, for which I put on my underwear and sit on the disability seat in the shower.

My leg hair is surprisingly thick. As I shave, the razor makes a loud scratching noise, as if I’m sandpapering a leg made of granite. It takes me a good 20 minutes to finish my left leg and as I’m toweling off, the door, which I thought I had locked, pushes open, exposing me in my red briefs and mismatched legs.

The intruder is none other than the previous year’s Genderfuk drag pageant winner, who beat me by the slimmest of margins. He is also of Vietnamese descent, near my height, but half my weight. I could encircle the entirety of his waste with just one arm. As a boy, he already gives the twig-like girls in Vogue a run for their money. In drag, meaning six-inch stripper heels and a Tina Turner wig, he looks like the American version of a Thai Lady Boy.

He, like many Asian men my age, is rather slender and soft-featured, making it easier for him to pass as a woman. Anthony, who is built, has more difficulty, and even I, an average size, struggle. I don’t fulfill a somewhat prevalent gay Asian male stereotype. I am not without a fair amount of body hair and am not skinny: I cannot be a totally convincing woman. I have to win by other means: Beyonsoy, for example, impresses with her talents – kung-fu fighting while lip-synching, raving, and water-glass playing.

My rival stares at me while I, suddenly aware of my near-nudity, try naively to cover myself with my hands.

“You shave?” he accuses.

I make an indignant face. “I have a drag show tonight,” I say, but say no more, as I don’t want him to know about my plans to dethrone him.

“Well, your legs are gonna itch when the hair grows back,” he says as he turns around and exits the bathroom. I lock the door behind him and think, “As long as I win, I don’t really care.”

You’re going to wear that?

At the Center, Anthony flits in and out of his office like giant hummingbird. When I move in to hug him, he holds up his hands. “I’m sweaty,” he warns me. He has just come from volleyball. With a few broad sweeps of his arm, Anthony clears off several tabletops of space. Counter space is essential for getting ready for drag, he tells me.

Anthony bustles past me to retrieve more materials from his car. I sit in a chair in his office, next to a stack of magazines, which include general gay interest (most of which have glistening, shirtless men on them, no matter what the feature stories are) and HIV-positive-centered titles. One of the cover features Ongina, an HIV-positive contestant from the reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race, a show that searches for “America’s next drag superstar.” Ongina is a full-time queen, whose talent and dedication far exceed my wildest dreams.

In our first meeting, Anthony told me that he believes a budding queen must have a role model, someone to take inspiration from and aspire to emulate. Conversely, good role models are necessary to beget more queens; drag is not nearly as popular as it was in the Stonewall Riots era. Critics ascribe this to declining use of gay bars in favor of meeting on the internet; drag becoming something everyone is used to; gay society abandoning drag as it gains more civil rights and becomes more mainstream.  In such a situation, good drag queens are necessary to inspire future queens, to wave the flag for the drag community.

In fact, Anthony derives his drag motto from RuPaul. “Be sweet” is the short part of it, though Anthony also sometimes adds “Cause there are enough bitchy drag queens out there already.”

Anthony returns to the room with a Ziplock bag the size of my torso, stretched to the seams with make-up.

“I have to shave,” he says, grabbing a razor out of the bag.

“Oh, I just shaved,” I say, proudly. “I just shaved my legs and my armpits for the first time in forever.”

Anthony looks at me, curiously. “You don’t ever have to shave your legs,” he tells me and pulls out a pair of tights. One of drag’s best kept secrets, I learn too late, is two pairs of tights or stockings on top of one another, which at once disguises leg hair and creates a shiny, smooth leg that sparkles on stage.

My face heats up with embarrassment and I switch topics to something I understand: clothing. I pull out my dress and show it to Anthony as he walks to the bathroom to shave. He stops and gives me an incredulous stare. “What is that and why did you pull it out of a box?”

I explain to him that it’s a dress and drape over my torso, as if seeing it partially on me could convince him of its beauty.

“I don’t know how I feel about you wearing that out,” he says, walking back to me and rubbing a corner of the dress between his thumb and his index finger. This is the first time that someone has criticized my clothing: I make a mental note to be kinder on my friends’ sartorial choices in the future.

He struts to the back of his office and rummages through a stack of dresses he has behind boxes of filing. (Anthony has so much drag paraphernalia that he keeps some of the bulkier stuff in his office and his car.)  He removes what looks like a plain black gown from the pile and brings it to me.

Up close, I discover that the dress is a vintage Jessica McClintock, tags still intact. It has rhinestone-encrusted straps with an open back, and sparkly lines that criss-cross across the entire dress, making it look like crocodile skin dipped in diamonds. Anthony places it in my arms. “This is yours,” he says. This is the first time I’ve felt ownership of my drag: this is mine.

More is More

People often define drag queens as female impersonators. To an extent this is true: the dresses, the make-up, the long hair all come from things typically used by women. However, drag queens don’t just mimic “femaleness” in general; they perform the diva sub-genre of femaleness. When, for example, was the last time you saw a drag queen in jeans, a baggy t-shirt with her hair pulled back in a bun? Drag dress invokes sequins from the 1970s Diana Ross and Cher’s down-to-there locks and make-up that is as a subtle a brick flying through a window.

Even though Anthony likes his make-up more on the modest side, it’s a process that spans two hours on a typical night and professional-grade materials. It also requires me to be completely re-educated.

We are standing in the Billy DeFrank Center’s bathroom, which Anthony swears has good lighting. He asks to see my foundation. I show him my bottle of CoverGirl liquid foundation. He holds the bottle to my arm and raises his eyebrow, silently admonishing me for buying foundation that does not match my skin.

He systematically destroys my blush, lipstick, and eye shadows — essentially my entire make-up collection. He alternates between giving me looks of scorn and throwing his head back in laughter. I ask him if I should throw it all away now, but he says no. “You’ll want to look back one day and see how far you’ve come.”

For make-up, we use Anthony’s supplies, which are of far better quality. He pulls in a chair from the lobby and spreads his materials across the chair, the two sinks, the soap dispenser, and the towel dispenser. “Counter space is key,” he tells me.

He insists that I do things for myself: how else will I learn? But when I put his pricey foundation onto a make-up sponge, which apparently is a wasteful, amateur technique, he takes a heavier hand in my make-up application. He turns his head every few seconds to check my progress.

“When do I know I’m done?” I ask him.

“When your real face has disappeared and everything looks perfect!” he responds cheerily.

I am apparently too shy and hesitant with my application. When I apply foundation, I use my pinkies to apply the cream and index fingers to blend. I check with him every few seconds, afraid that I have just put on one pinky-full of foundation too much. He is initially patient, repeating the phrase “Good!…but more.” Eventually, fed up with my snail’s pace, he purses his lips and spins me around. He empties a pool of foundation into his hand and applies palmfuls of foundation to my face. The foundation is cold in such large amounts, a contrast to Anthony’s broad, warm fingers.

“I’m sorry if I’m using too much pressure,” he says, but continues smacking my face with the same amount of pressure. It’s gentle enough that I don’t feel accosted, but it’s strong enough that I note to never get on Anthony’s bad side.

I take Anthony’s heavy-handed advice at its face value: he wants to help me learn to put on make-up correctly. Anthony didn’t have such help. He prepared for his first pageant almost entirely by himself. While the other contestants had incalculable amounts of practice or friends with experience, Anthony was alone backstage. As he lifted up his eyeliner to begin his make-up, the pageant’s emcee stopped him. “That goes on last!” she screeched.

Anthony immediately dropped the offensive pencil and stuttered, “Yeah, I know that. I was just trying it out.” He still struggles with advanced things, such as applying fake eyelashes. He admits that he gets the eyelash glue everywhere, sometimes sticking his eyelids together.

After foundation, we work on lips with lipstick (the redder the lipstick the whiter your teeth look) and mauve lip liner, applied to extend past my natural lips such that I always look like I’m pouting. Anthony takes black eye shadow to my eyebrows, which are the bushiest he’s ever seen, he assures me, and darkens them until I look like Madonna when she was still a brunette.

Only after a rosy-pink blush and a tutorial on how to wash Anthony’s set of six makeup brushes do we finally get to eyes. Anthony instructs me to spread silver eye shadow around my entire eye. I hesitate and tell him that my past make-up instructors told me to avoid drawing both above and below my eye, as creating such a boundary would make my Asian eyes even smaller than they already are.

He continues applying his silver eye shadow, not missing a beat. “What’s wrong with being Asian?” he asks.

I don’t have an answer for him other than a dumbstruck “Uh…” It strikes me again that as Beyonsoy, Anthony is one of the few prominent Asian Pacific Islander (API) drag queens in the SF Bay Area. One of the only other famous API queens is the current Empress of San Jose, who, in winning her title, was the only API contestant in that pageant. Neither Anthony nor I can explain this phenomenon completely. There is an element of perhaps not having had strong API drag role models, which is connected to a larger issue. When Asian men do drag, though this is an egregious, broad, sweeping generalization, they’re expected to be completely feminine. And when they don’t fulfill that expectation, they’re not as successful.

Beyonsoy and his fellow API drag queens fight against this. They’re certainly pretty and ladylike, but not all of them are stereotypically dainty or feminine. They compensate with wild performances and larger-than-life personalities. They accept that being an Asian can mean many things in respect to drag. While they embrace and endorse fuller-figured Asian-American drag queens, they also celebrate their slim sisters.

When I tell Anthony about my rival back at school, he belly-laughs. He says, “Good for her!” It is then that I realize that I’m not competing against my rival as the more “authentic” Asian-American. I am competing with him.

I lift my chin to better catch the bathroom light and apply my eye shadow, both above and below my eyes.

After make-up, I slip into the dress, which, just as Anthony had promised, drapes wonderfully. I put on my shoulder-length wig, the only drag item of mine that Anthony approves of. Adjusting the placement of the wig, I turn to Anthony for assessment.

He looks at me thoughtfully. With his make-up completed, he looks like the fabulous Filipina girl all the girls in my high school wanted to be and all the guys wanted to be with. Pursing his lips, he reaches into his ziplock and pulls out a box with false eyelashes, roughly 2” long, ending in bright blue mini-feathers.

I wince as I remember his difficulty with eyelash and eyelash glue. As much as I want to be a complete drag queen, I don’t particularly want to be a drag queen that looks like she is eternally winking.

But my fears are unfounded because he succeeds the first time. He next brushes the bangs to the side and adds one of his personal flower flips. He takes a step back and gasps quietly.

“You look so good,” he says, and I blush beneath my 23 layers of foundation. He continues with platitudes, partially congratulating himself on a job well done, but mostly flattering me out of my mind.

“I am so your drag mother,” he says.

Before we leave,  Anthony grabs my arm. “Have you looked at yourself?” I haven’t yet, I admit, not really.

I look into the mirror. My wavy hair sweeps across my face; the blue flower clip above my ear echoes my blue-tipped false eyelashes. My face is blemish-less, my lips look like they’re perpetually pouting. Glitter dances across my cheeks and my dress sparkles in the light. I don’t look half bad.

I pull my camera out of my purse and Anthony takes it from me. He instructs me to pose with a quarter turn, hands on my lips, chin up and a smile on my face as if I were born a winner.

He snaps the picture and looks at the preview screen. Smiling, he says triumphantly, “Winner, winner, winner.”