JULY 1976

HIGH GEAR

Page 23

by Yet Fat Aunt Annie

Sitting here in some damp and sticky rathole bar, with one too many drinks in front of me tends to make me wonder about the human race. How come we're so dumb or maybe just so moralistic that we cannot see the thousands of years of humanity which have come before us with the same yearnings and traits we have?

When archeologists can unearth dice and discover ancient wall paintings that assure us that man has had the gambling instinct for so long-why do we continue to make gambling illegal and dissipate millions of tax dollars a year. trying to control it? And since man discovered that fermented fruit juice made him feel good 'way back in umpty-ump B.C.-why do we keep making it so difficult to get? I guess we'll just never learn from ourselves even though we are the only species in history that has discovered a way to pass down the findings of previous generations so that the next one doesn't have to keep making the same mistakes to get to the same spot in life.

...

And, of course, when it comes to sex we're dumbest of all. Woman has willingly been making a fast buck on her back since the year One. So why do we still try to bust her after all these centuries? As for the gay life stories and poetry of the love of two men for each other (or the love of two women for each other) are also as old as history. Whether it was Greece Rome, Babylonia or the forgotten early tribes of North American Indians, the story has

QUEEN ARDE'S LACE

been the same--and will be as long as man lives.

What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that being a drag queen being a person who dresses in the clothing of the opposite sex and takes on their secondary sexual characteristics and functions -has just as long and honorable history. If anything, it's even more honorable! The ancient Greeks designated the goddess, Venus Castina, as the one who responded with sympathy to the yearnings of feminine souls "locked up in male bodies". When the Scythians burned the temple of Venus at Ascelon in Syria, she turned them into women as punishment. And throughout ancient mythology and religion, men who "became as women" were highly regarded and often members of the Priestly class to be greatly venerated.

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Priests of the God Attis in ancient Phygeria castrated themselves as part of their qualifications and dressed as women. And old folk tales in India speak, in the Mahabharata, of the king who became woman, bore a hundred sons and then refused to be changed back to a man because he felt that "a woman takes more pleasure from the act of love than does a man". Philo, a philosopher in Alexandria described many men of that ancient time as "expending every possible care on their outward adornment, not shamed to even employ every device to change artifically their nature as men, into women".

The Roman poet Manilius wrote of the men who "robes of women wore". Nero married one

of his slaves who had been "converted to woman". And the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus had himself married to a powerful slave and took up the female role in their relationship, offering half of his Empire to the physician who could equip him with female genitalia (that's progress today it only costs, about seven grand).

Coming up on history, Henry III of France wished to be consider a woman. And the Abbe de Choisy was a woman in both dress and behavior until his appointment as Ambassador to Siam by Louis XIV (and maybe afterwards, too). While the Chevalier d'Eon was famous throughout the European courts as a lovely lady -once even carrying out a secret diplomatic assignment in Russia in 1755 while "in drag".

To lend further respectability to the seemingly low social position of the drag queen, many primitive societies throughout the Russian Tundra and the northern Indian tribes of the North American continent place great importance on the transformation of their shaman (a sort of quasi-religious medicineman/oracle) into the female role in terms of dress, function and behavior. Among the Yuman Indians, they were called eixa. Among the Cocopa Indians, they were e-L-ha. Among the Mohave, the shaman-to-be often were dressed as women and acted accordingly. Or dressed as a man when female. Of either sex, they were called alyha. The Navaho called them nadl-E. And the Pueblo called them mujerado, possibly a Spanish term.

All of which is to say, that even the lowly drag has a place in the undeniable history of mankind. So, when you sidle up to one at a local bar, smile and say hello to just another one of man's great urges that all too often gets swept under the rug. Like gambling, booze, herbal drugs and plain-or-fancy sex, we're here to stay. Besides which, if she turns out to be the right kind of person, she might have the power to put a "curse" on you if you aren't nice ... or turn you into a woman... or just get off her barstool, raise her hand with pinky a-slant in a nice lady-like gesture and fetch you a fast shot in the chops. Not that we'd like to, or anything--but it gets awfully boring down here in some rathole bar with one more drink than you ought to have and nobody to talk to...

FULL

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