Subject: Some Marchers in Suits May Consider Fetishists and Male `Nuns' a Real Drag Date: Published: 4/23/93 (143 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Politics & Policy: Some Marchers in Suits May Consider Fetishists and Male `Nuns' a Real Drag ---- By David J. Jefferson Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal Although it's politically incorrect to even think it, when gay men and lesbians descend on the capital this Sunday for "The 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation," at least some organizers would like nothing more than to see one million Armani-suited men and Anne Klein-skirted women. What they'll get, besides traditional garb, is the likes of Sister Vicious, a man in a nun's habit with a three-foot-wide halo and fishnet stockings. As founder of a San Franciscan order of drag performers called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Sister Vicious, aka Ken Bunch, is furious that organizers haven't included in the march's title the word "transgender," a politically correct catch-all for cross-dressers and people who have had sex-change operations. Mr. Bunch talks of staging a drag-queen "die-in" to block the march, or maybe having transgenders carry their own banner in front of the procession. "When our lesbian and gay leaders call for unity, quite often it's really a call for conformity," says Mr. Bunch. He and many other colorful members of the gay community say the movement is relegating them to crazy-uncle status, in an effort to convince mainstream America that homosexuals are as "straight" as heterosexuals. It's an ironic twist, given that transvestites started the gay-rights movement 24 years ago with riots to protest police raids on a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village. March organizers have grand dreams of their event doing for homosexuals what Martin Luther King's march did for blacks 30 years ago. "The job of the Constitution isn't to grudgingly grant me rights if I can't become a straight white man," says Pat Hussain, who is on the march's executive committee. Though the date was set two years ago, the timing couldn't have been more perfect, given the homosexuals-in-the-military debate. Among the several hundred premarch events, homosexuals will lobby their congressmen, and Act Up, the radical AIDS protest group, will stage a "Hands Around the Capitol" demonstration. But unlike other big marches for abortion and civil rights, this one, akin to most gay-pride festivals, will be part demonstration, part Mardi Gras. And that has put the march's more serious-minded organizers on the defensive. "Drag queens are part of our community, but they don't define our community," says Nadine Smith, co-chairwoman of the march. "We also have gay librarians, gay pilots and gay athletes." Not to mention the "National Bear Gathering" of hefty hirsute men, the "Gay Spirit Meditation," the "S/M Leather Fetish Kick-off Party," the gay "Hoedown! '93," the "Biblical Self-Defense Workshop" and the "Drag Show on the Mall." March leaders like to call this "diversity." But such diversity may well startle mainstream America. And that has put the movement's leaders in a p.c.-bind: how to convince the country that most gay people aren't drag queens and leathermen, without sending those groups into a snit. Yet even the march's official title has been neutered; it purposely omits the "sexual" from "bisexual" for fear the event will be perceived negatively. "What we're trying to do is work with the mainstream press to demand they report on the rich diversity of the march, not just the sensational aspects," says Robert Bray, spokesman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. He adds somewhat weakly, "We love our drag queens." To try to ensure that the media focus on gay and lesbian soldiers, doctors, politicians and scores of couples exchanging commitment vows, there has been some reshuffling of the order of march. Rather than have the Harley-Davidson-riding "Dykes on Bikes" at the front, as is customary in many Gay Pride parades around the country, the lesbian motorcycle group will bring up the rear, behind the National Bear contingent. "I suppose there's a certain aura of political incorrectness about bears," says John Runyan of Seattle, who has organized that gathering so "older, heavier, hairier working-class men" from around the country could meet. "I've kind of wondered whether Act Up will show up and do a demonstration against us." David Turner, a Washington legislative researcher who attended one of this year's inaugural balls as "Ms. Liberty," says March organizers tried to push back the starting time for his drag extravaganza near the Washington monument from noon until 8 p.m. tomorrow, "when it's dark and all the tourists have gone home," he says. They finally compromised on a 3 p.m. start. Drag queens and transsexuals have been a thorn in the side of more straightlaced march organizers since early last year, when they tried to get their name into the title. At one organizing meeting, "one man got so mad he kicked over a chair," says Princess Dorothy-Christine La Rouge, a 45-year-old Seattle transsexual housewife and march representative. After getting a quorum balanced by "gender parity" and "racial parity," organizers ultimately voted to include transgender concerns in the march's mission statements -- but not in the name. "There are a lot of serious bunnies out there who want to make it really heavy and stuff, and it's unfortunate that they want to paint the transgender community as not serious and not important," says newly hot singer RuPaul, the blond-wigged, African-American drag queen who will perform his dance-club hit "Supermodel" at the march. "I say a wig is worth a thousand words. It's a political statement in itself." Perhaps surprisingly, the battle royal within the gay community comes just as cross-dressing has crossed over: RuPaul is an MTV mainstay; the Oscar-nominated "The Crying Game" features a transvestite character, and the Gap store chain is using the lip-synching, Joan Crawford lookalike Lypsinka as one of its celebrity ad models. The rock group Red Hot Chili Peppers has made kilts a fashion-statement for the hipsters, and designer Donna Karan is pushing skirt-like sarongs for men. Barry Douglas, coordinator of this weekend's S/M-Leather-Fetish Conference, is keenly aware of the public-relations problems the leathermen present. "It's always a very difficult question in our community: How do we behave at gaypride parades?" But he thinks buttondown homosexuals should lighten up and remember what they're fighting about. "I don't think anyone seriously believes that gays and lesbians are oppressed because straights don't like what we wear." Nor does he see leathermen and drag queens as self-indulgent. Demanding conformity "in a sexual liberation movement is obviously a hypocrisy that can't stand." The march's Ms. Smith insists she "isn't attempting to impose a dress code or anything like that." But she does concede that organizers want to shift attention away from feather boas and leather chaps. Such images have become liabilities to the gay-rights cause, especially as opposition groups use them to stereotype homosexuals during the current gays-in-the-military debate. Many homosexuals at the march will try to present their own version of "family values." Lesbian marketing executive R. Christine Hershey and her partner, commercial photographer Susan Van Horn, are coming from Los Angeles with their 3 1/2-year-old adopted son. "We're trying to show that there are professional women and moms involved in the movement," Ms. Hershey says. "Five years ago, the movement had to push sex in the face of the media just to get their attention," says Howard Bragman, president of a Beverly Hills, Calif., public relations firm that represents many gay causes. "Now, at gay pride festivals, I'm always tempted to take reporters to the kitchen-cabinet-refacing booth to show them gays and lesbians can be as boring as the rest of the world." 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