Laid Bare: Essays and Observations Read Online Free PDF

late-afternoon—every day—when I can often be found reading on my porch, I get to witness a lovely and unique procession: The Art House Drag Queens. Many of the acts booked here at The Art House are, in fact, drag acts. For that matter, a good percentage of the shows all over town feature male performers in fabulous female garb. Clearly, it’s one of the things visitors expect when they come to this last town on the Cape.
     
    Since all of us performers have to promote our shows by handing out fliers on the street (“barking” is what we call it) the drag acts have to spend countless extra hours in makeup and costume. God bless ‘em, I say.
     
    So ‘round about 5 o’clock, depending on the lineup that evening, the Ladies start to trickle out from the dressing rooms, which are behind my apartment near the stage door. And this is the part of which I’m so enamored: most of these gals sport precariously high heels for optimum dramatic effect. But high heels + gravel doth not a happy marriage make! So I drop my book to my lap and peer over my (2.00 strength) dollar store reading glasses and watch unseen as the queens traipse across the expanse of gravel to the brick paved sidewalk at the street end of the alley. It’s about 50 feet from the dressing room area to the bricks and depending on the heels (and the confidence of the Ladies) the voyage can be tricky or, well, trickier. I hear them as they march confidently up the concrete ramp from behind the theater and step onto the loose stones.
     
    And at that point the pace slows to a crawl. They focus their gaze on the ground ahead. Weight is shifted from the heels to the balls of their feet. Ankles wobble. Hands are deployed to the side--highwire-like--to achieve balance. Some delicately arc one foot in front of the other like great plumed birds. Others glide their feet mere centimeters above the ground. But no matter their individual techniques, they are all Elizas on the ice crossing the river of gravel to the distant brick-paved shore.
     
    And here is the glorious part: the instant those size 12 slippers hit solid ground, these wary creatures (that up to this moment very distinctly resembled nothing but men wearing dresses) swan out into the street as poised, regal, confident, fabulous Drag Queens .
     
    And all’s right with the world.

A Million Men
     
    A million is a vague concept to most people; one seldom encounters a tangible example of just what those seven digits represent. Dennis Bell, who recently acquired the complete assets of the Athletic Model Guild, understands all too well the scope of that number; he’s got about a million men in his storeroom, waiting to be counted.
     
    AMG was (and is) the parent company of “Physique Pictorial,” the publication instantly recognizable for its sublimely artificial tableaux of young men in posing straps engaging in not-so-innocent horseplay. Cowboys and Roman Centurions made regular appearances in its pages, setting the stage—and standard—for gay sex fantasies for decades to come. Primarily a one-man operation (Bob Mizer, its founder, shot every one of the images and each of the thousands of 16mm films and videotapes), the catalog spans nearly sixty years and introduced many a young man to the beauty of the male body.
     
    One of those young men was Wisconsin-born-and-bred Bell, who encountered a discarded stash of Physique Pictorials one afternoon in a ditch on his walk home from school. He, in turn, hid them away himself (presumably the preferred method of most collectors over the years) little imagining what a central role those pictures would come to play in his adult life.
     
    Little Dennis grew up and became a photographer in his own right, making a living shooting, well, naked men. Working for such adult studios as Hot House, Titan and Falcon (which is where I first encountered him) he became adept at adjusting his own style to the needs of the different companies. This, in turn, paid off when