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Popular Culture Review
spending too much, going too late, staying too late, buying too many drinks for
others, buying too many drinks for themselves.
The theme under discussion in this article involves a perception of trickery.
Very often, as these respondents grew to feel comfortable perhaps, they would in
turn ask for a response. ‘‘How many of the strippers,’’ they wanted to know, “were
really men in drag?” (Note: often the phrase is “. .. men dressed up.”) At first blush
this seems an impossible question. Certainly a skilled, even a merely capable,
male cross-dresser might generate a fictive female using the full panoply available
from cosmetic prosthetic devices, to modified clothing, to unabashed miming of
movement and body language. But most of these elements are quite literally out of
the hands of a typical performing stripper (who by definition strips away much of
this material). Could a powerfully stimulated, and certainly alert and focused
audience of heterosexual males be mis/led in these circumstances?
Looking into these stories or tales of male cross-dressing striptease artists
it was intriguing to find that a very large portion of all men queried on the topic'
were at least willing to accept the possibility that these virtually nude performers
could in fact be men passing as women. A surprising number of men, and some
women, were willing to share their own stories involving the existence of male
cross-dressers functioning in the role of female exotic dancer without the audience’s
knowledge.
O f course, many had narratives of experiences or of received stories about
cross-dressers in cabarets, with talented perfonners creating an “aura” or sense of
a female presence (typically a celebrity) on stage. That is not the subject of this
article.
Most respondents seemed to fully understand the ramifications of the
assumption. That is, the acceptance that in actual fact men dress as women and
perform a striptease under the motivated gaze of excited viewers. Accepting these
received narratives as true means that the recipient accepts the tangible, physical
reality of the effort involved and of the willingness to risk