Sex doc last Tuesday.

So, the sex doc last Tuesday was on drag queens, and it was the best discussion ever.

There were 2 films, one on a drag bar in Portland, OR, interviewing performers audience members the owner etc., and another one a short film from England from the 1970s that was on a 16mm projector and was a 50-something transvestite talking about his life while he put on make-up (though the talking about his life was dubbed over and the words didn't match his mouth as it moved).

Anyhow, the big interesting part of the discussion was how the straight women who would do bachelorette parties at the drag bar would oftentimes fondle the performers like they were objects, so the conversation turned a lot towards whether the drag shows were productive in that they opened up space to new realities for people and were like some kind of activism, or whether they were forums for straight women to act like assholes.

The past few docs there's been this early 60s Mexican guy who grows his hair out long -- but, his hair is shoulder-length and kind of stringy, so he tends to look like a southwestern medicine man or something, only in a skirt -- and who is transitioning who's been coming to the films along with this older American-born Asian lesbian/2nd wave feminist, and this time they came again.

Interestingly, one of them mentioned that they were partners... I find it very interesting how many lesbians end up with people in a sex change-type situation; they seem very tolerant.

Anyhow, the guy said that back when he was a drag queen, no manager at the bar would tolerate behavior with someone touching a performer, but he guessed that times had changed.

Later, the one older (white) guy who used to be a thug in an Italian neighborhood but then became a male nurse and later a sexologist was saying that one time when he was doing a costume workshop, he was in a full body fishnet stocking and a woman went and reached behind him and played with his anus, then with his scrotum, and then with his balls, and finally his penis, and he was fine with it, but then she did that to a gay man, and he wasn't fine with it, so then they all sat around and talked for hours about their different reactions and how they felt.

Later later, the Mexican transvestite had a bunch of interesting comments that were off the main topic a bit:

1) When he worked at a porn bookstore, many young (black) guys would come in from the nearby Cabrini-Green projects as hustlers and pick up men "for the money", but that could only happen for so many years before you got to thinking that it wasn't for the money.

2) When he used to be a waiter - in drag? - back in the 1970s, so many men would come in as regulars and hit on him and be really indignant when he refused, like just because he was different sexually he had to sleep with them, and that that mindset was so out of touch with reality that it scared him.

After that, a lot of people at the series and nodded and said that being sexually deviant in a visible way and being out there made you the target for a lot of stuff - being hit on, but also just being a resource for people who have questions about shit like that and don't know where to turn (e.g. the owner of the drag bar in the film had a woman call him because she found out her husband liked to wear women's clothing).

Also, later the male nurse said that a friend once took him to an area support group for straight male transvestites, and that they were all really masculine guys like truck drivers and police men "who had a more limited range of gender roles available to them", and that many came in lingerie but they didn't shave their chests or try to act in any way feminine, and that he felt that it was a privilege to be there.