Tag Archives: drag king

Vesta

Thanks again to Kitty Stryker for pulling me into the world of Vesta Tilley, Victorian drag king. Born Matilda Powles in 1863, Tilley was famous for her music hall performances where she accurately mimicked and mocked masculine roles in her comedic song and dance performances. Here’s an excerpt from a description of one of her shows by contemporary reviewer W.R. Titterton:

“…How sure the singer is! How despotically she rules over her audience – dallies with the rhythm, draws it out, pauses in mid-gesture, the hand in the air, the monocle nearing the eye – pauses perilously long, you get uneasy, the bicycle goes so slow you are afraid it will topple – it almost does, but in good time the chorus comes to its conclusion with a ‘My word!’ and one dainty feminine hand slaps the other, and the body wriggles into itself with a foot up. ‘My word! he-is-a naugh-ty boy!’ O Tilley!”

For a wonderful article about Vesta Tilley at the Victorianist blog and the full Titterton review click here, and for more photos at Buzzfeed click here.

Genderfucking Suicide Girls

I’ve never been keen on prescribed gender roles. At some point I’ll get round to writing a piece on female cross-dressing (as well as posting the picture of me as a drag king), but in the meantime, here are some thoughts and a lot of lovely androgynous eye-candy from Autostraddle.com’s article on genderfucking Suicide Girls:

“SUICIDE GIRLS: Way back in 2001 when Suicide Girls launched & subsequently popped up all over your alt-culture grill, it provided young budding queers with a plethora of alt-girl-on-girl imagery allegedly produced with a feminist agenda & an “alternative” beauty standard– the models sported tattoos, piercings & bisexuality-as-the-status quo and were notably sans plastic body parts and straight sex photo-sets. Of course it wasn’t really THAT alternative; most models were white (often VERY white, because goths wear a lot of sunscreen!) and skinny. Neither of those pointless and irritating exclusions seem to have changed much over the years, unfortunately.

The concept of a “sex positive community of women” who believe “that creativity, personality and intelligence are not incompatible with sexy, compelling entertainment” and aim to “mix the smarts, enthusiasm and DIY attitude of the best music and alternative culture sites with an unapologetic, grassroots approach to sexuality” still got our attention. Just try mentioning the Suicide Girls and find 50-100% of lesbian/bisexual women know so much about it despite having never mentioned it before, ever. It’s like part of our lexicon, but underneath.

Suicide Girls out-performed other alt-porn startups Burning Angel and Supercult (read more about the business side of alt porn in Audacia Ray’s Naked on the Internet!); expanding their brand via merchandising, books (Suicide Girls, Beauty Redefined, etc.), Showtime specials, a radio show and a live girl burlesque tour. (Also apparently a bunch of SGs just starred in an episode of CSI New York). The site earns cred for its content (a là Playboy — read it for the articles!), which is most of the site. Like now there are interviews with Peter Jackson, Dita Von Teese, Robert Pattison, Matthew Broderick, Diablo Cody, Kristen Stewart and Kathy Griffin.

Buttttttt we have mixed feelings about the allegedly “women-owned” SG because around 2005 the site ran into a series of controversies, when “a group of angry ex-models” began “bashing the SuicideGirls alt-porn empire, saying its embrace of the tattoo and nipple-ring set hides a world of exploitation and male domination.” But that whole thing was never really cleared up either way, as far as we can tell.

Therefore we have no choice but to show you ten of the hottest Suicide Girls anyhow. See COED magazine picked the 77 Hottest Suicide Girls which we think was maybe the 77 Femmest Suicide Girls. Which is all well and good and hot, but here’s some of the other kind.”

Click here to see the top ten Genderfucking Suicide Girls at Autostraddle.com.