To some extent, the presentation of masculine women as sex objects flies in the face of the old-school lesbian woman-centered ideal. Before he came out as trans, when he'd just started doing drag, Lagartera's fellow Winnipeg lesbians accused him of "emulating the oppressor," he says. "I said, it's not me being a man," says Lagartera, who's transitioning and currently on testosterone. "It's me being masculine. And passing for something other than a woman." (In fact, all of the members of Kingdom Come, androgynous offstage, identify as masculine in some way. Neevel prefers "transgendered" or "faggy dyke"; Noelle Campbell-Smith, aka Toronto's Christopher, identifies as a "boyish lesbian"; NYC native Whitmire likes the term "genderqueer.")

Christopher -- the sexy-but-nutty playboy alter ego of Campbell-Smith -- isn't that different from the person she is offstage. Besides the few painful years when she was married, before she came out (she has a 9-year-old daughter who doesn't know about her mother's performance life), she's always preferred to look androgynous. "I like being a woman," says Campbell-Smith, a 32-year-old Web designer. "And I like being a man whenever I feel like it. I'm fluid all the time, depending what day it is." Her family and friends have always accepted her boyish nature, she says, which is probably why she shrugs off the politics of drag. "Christopher's just the male me. I don't think that being a drag king is political for me. I'm not trying to fuck The Man. I've probably only done a couple of numbers where I've tried to make a statement."

Kingdom Come isn't the first drag-king tour -- Mo B. Dick started the Club Casanova in the 1996 and took it on the road two years later -- but it's the first tour to bring along a camera crew. Slutsky, the film's director, met Neevel while working on an unrelated documentary featuring Neevel's ex-girlfriend, also a drag king. Slutsky accompanied the couple to the International Drag King Extravaganza -- an annual conference held in Columbus, Ohio, and produced by fellow Kingdom Come performer Luster (Columbus' 42-year-old Síle Singleton) -- and was immediately intrigued. "Drag really challenges set notions of gender," she says. "In large part because drag kings pass so seamlessly. For me as a woman, looking at another woman who -- in a very short period of time, with very little manipulation -- can appear to be a man, is fascinating."

Since drag has historically been an urban phenomenon, the kings were somewhat wary about traveling through rural areas, especially the South. Neevel chose the route because she wanted to introduce the art of drag king to new audiences: "The premise of the experience was to see how people who maybe haven't seen drag kings react to us, and what it means for us to be traveling through these towns," she says. But that didn't ease the other kings' fears. As the only people of color on the tour, both Lagartera and Singleton, who's African-American, were especially nervous. "I'm not just nervous that we're going to the Bible Belt, where people have no bones about their differences," says Singleton, a former scholar of race theory who now produces drag events full-time. "I'm also nervous because I'm not quite sure the majority of people going with us understand what it means for me, as a black person, to be surrounded by white people, with my big queer trans self being like, 'Hey, everybody, guess what I do? Wear a dick and dance around onstage!'"

But so far, the kings have been pleasantly surprised. They've discovered that there are rich, energized queer scenes everywhere. "They're just as sexual when we do our shows -- hooting at us and stuffing tips down our pants," says Whitmire. "They may live in a small town, but they still know what they like and they're not afraid to express it." In Biloxi, Miss., the staff at the lesbian bar where they performed painted a mural of the Kingdom Come logo. Luster made over $100 in tips that night, and afterwards, the kings signed everything from T-shirts to breasts. "We weren't sure what to expect, being in Biloxi," says Whitmire. "There was a pretty young crowd -- a really hungry market. I don't think anybody there had seen a drag troupe. I talked to a few people there, a 22-year-old young dyke and a dyke in her 40s, about how to start a troupe of their own." And that's what they love about drag, say the kings: They know how powerful it can be, they know how it's enriched and informed their lives, and they're energized by the idea that it might reach more women. "I mean, how boring it must be to be totally straight -- totally feminine or totally masculine," says Singleton. "It's such a beautiful place to be here, floating along back and forth."

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