Dina’s Diner, May 4, 2020

IT WAS A GIANT DRAG

One of the Giants’ players en femme.

I found an interesting article from back in November 2019 on the Sora News 24 website. The headline read: “Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants Baseball Players Crossdress in Beauty Contest for Fans.” As the Sora News article points out, the Yomiuri Giants “are so well-known and respected they often draw parallels with the New York Yankees, acquiring top players with ease.” The crossdressing contest was a promotion for a Fan Fest Day that was held at the Giants’ Tokyo stadium in November last year.

Several players were professionally made up, bewigged and costumed in various feminine guises such as a geisha, a career woman, an art student, wearing a glamorous cheongsam dress, and the iconic Playboy bunny. The photos were tame and not risqué and were included on the team’s Instagram page. Fans voted for their favorite and guessed which players were in which photo. The big reveal would be made at the Fan Fest that was scheduled for November 23, 2019.

The Sora News reported, “With each entrant receiving over 13,000 likes, the campaign has been incredibly successful in catching everyone’s attention and increasing fan engagement. And with everyone now gushing over the beauty of the team’s players, it’s a very different scene from four years ago, when everyone was obsessed with the wife of Miles Mikolas, the U.S. baseball player who played for the Giants in 2015.” The top vote getter (with over 35,000 likes) at the time of the article (but before the unveiling) was believed to be player Shingo Ishikawa, nicknamed “Dynamite Shingo,” who was dressed in a simple beret and soft turtleneck sweater.

I can’t imagine our American major leaguers dressing in drag for a fan promotion. And this was serious glamour drag not some purposely hideous burlesque. If you look at the rest of the Giants’ Instagram page you can see most of the players are good looking Japanese guys with good faces and smooth skin. I hope other Japanese teams were paying attention and perhaps thinking of doing their own crossdressing promotion. Then fans could vote down to narrow the field leading to – yes! – the World Series of Japanese Major League crossdressing.

SWIMMING INTO A MINEFIELD

I saw a provocative item on the internet in April that I thought was worth writing about. Usually, when I see something provocative on the internet it is a crossdresser in a particularly fetching lingerie ensemble. But, no, this time it was an article headlined Sharron Davies Slammed After Comparing Drag to Blackface. There was a lot of reporting on this but the article I cited was on the BrainBored.com website on December 24, 2019.

Drag hating swimmer Sharron Davies.

Some background for those who never heard of Sharron Davies – me included – is that she is a British former Olympic swimmer who won a silver representing the United Kingdom in 1980. She is now 57 years old, she’s 5’11” tall, and still looks like a million bucks, or pounds sterling, if you prefer. She also got embroiled in another controversy about transgender people when she said in March 2019 that she didn’t think trans females should be allowed to compete in athletic events against cis-females.

The current (well, several months old now) controversy fuses two issues together: drag and blackface. Drag – at least in most societal circles now – is not very controversial. It’s on television every week, it’s in the entertainment news frequently, and drag bingo, drag brunch shows, and drag children’s story time are bringing the art of female impersonation right into the local communities. Blackface – well, that has come under increasing fire and retrospective criticism as societal attitudes change. This is what Sharron Davies had to say about the increasing popularity of drag performance: “Am I the only person fed up of drag shows? A parody of what a real woman is, like black face. Women are juggling kids, rushing out a wholesome dinner, doing the laundry and cleaning, holding down a job all with period pains and leaky boobs if breast feeding. Enough of the stereotypes.”

The interesting thing about Sharron’s statement (forget for the moment whether you agree or disagree) is that it takes two opposing positions held by progressive people (support of trans issues, opposition to blackface) and puts them on the same line. Heads will explode. And they did. The trans/drag community said there was no parallel because they were coming from a position of love. One drag queen tweeted back that she never pretends to be a woman but she loves dressing in beautiful gowns and makeup. Pardon me, but I think that actually makes Sharron Davies’ case. It’s all surface parody. Some people defend Al Jolson’s ancient blackface appearances as homages because white audiences never got to see black performers. So was that blackface performance coming from a place of love or admiration? Maybe. What if a current white performer wanted to pay a sincere tribute to black soul, R&B, or rap music by donning blackface to make it more authentic? You know what would happen.

So I just waded ever so slightly into the same minefield as Sharron Davies dove headfirst into. The trans athlete issue is very complicated and involves a lot of science. Sharron may be very wrong to make a statement with only feelings not facts behind her. The drag/blackface comparison – I think – is a decent parallel. It seems to me that either would depend on the context and the intent of the depiction. I don’t have any objection to drag, obviously. And blackface doesn’t seem like a good idea, even in admiration of black or brown culture. But the objections to Sharron Davies’ parallel seems to reduce down to “but it’s okay when we do it.”

THE NEW COLORS ARE RIGHT EN POINTE

I found an older item while poking around the internet on one of my favorite sites for offbeat stories, NextShark.com which covers issues from or about Asia. The article from November 14, 2018 was headlined “Asian and Black Ballerinas Can Now Buy Shoes to Match Their Skin Tone.”

The NextShark article reported on a collaboration of two dance-wear companies to create a line of ballet pointe shoes for dancers of color. I followed a link to the origin site by Freed of London and Ballet Black that had more background on the genesis of the new shoe line. I didn’t know this but the pointe shoe is supposed to represent the foot itself rather than a foot covering so as to give the dancer an unbroken line down to the toes. White dancers had white or pink pointe shoes to promote this concept but dancers of color did not. Until now.

Ballerinas of color.

Cira Robinson is a ballerina working with the two companies in the joint venture. She explains further: “Wearing shoes of the same colour as one’s skin tone is essential for keeping an unbroken line from “fingertip to toe.” Dancers not catered for by standard-issue pink shoes have previously had to rely on ‘pancaking’ – the application of foundation or powder make-up to their shoes to make them match their skin colour. The process can take up to two hours to complete and require up to three coats of expensive make-up. Having a shoe made to fit my skin tone is an absolute dream that I never thought would come true. Pancaking has been the way of the dance world for years and to think that colouring my shoes and ribbons to match my skin (since we don’t wear ballet tights) gives me a different sense of liberation that I can’t quite put into words. I am very pleased, to say the least. In addition the tedious and time-consuming act of pancaking results in the pointe shoe becoming soft and boggy. This leads to early degradation of the satin covering and reduces the wearable lifespan of the shoe.”

The ballerina is a female archetype that sometimes shows up in crossdressers’ photo galleries. The leotard, tights and tutu hold a natural attraction and some crossdressing ballerinas include authentic pointe shoes as a particular interest. But I never heard before that any ballerina (whatever the gender identification) had to apply makeup to the shoes to match their skin tone. So you learn something every day.

THIS QUARANTINE IS A BALL

If you are looking for inspiration on how to express yourself during quarantine here is an idea. On April 2, 2020, I saw an article about Lucy Rogers, a New York career woman coping with the Coronavirus quarantine. A headline on the U.K.-based Daily Mail website proclaimed, “Woman wears different glamorous gowns every day while working from home.”

Ms. Rogers works out in an off-the-shoulder ball gown.

Ms. Rogers created an Instagram page to show what she was wearing while working at home for her job with a digital marketing firm. What she’s been wearing during the home quarantine is a collection of designer ball gowns and cocktail dresses. Her Say Yes to the WFH Dress Instagram site has (so far) 7 weeks of photos of Lucy doing work and household chores in glamorous designer dresses. By the way, WFH is shorthand for Work from Home. She told a Daily Mail reporter, “I created the Instagram account to make my friends and family smile, to be honest, but it’s taken on a life of its own. I’ve had so many messages from people saying they love the idea or are joining in and getting involved.”

I’ve seen numerous reports of how people are dressing (or not dressing) while in home confinement. One television reporter was caught without pants (beneath an all business shirt and suit jacket) during a home filmed segment. There is a mini-movement to get people to dress up to take their trash out each week; there is something called the “pillow dress” which entails belting pillows around your torso (this actually looks kind of cute for women); and a group of women in Australia did an homage to The Beatles Abbey Road photo as they pulled their trash bins in line through a zebra crossing. Many experts have advised that it is helpful for our mental states to dress – if not formally, at least not in loungewear all day – while staying at home.

Back to Ms. Rogers, the Mail reported, “Lucy has had a subscription with the fashion rental company (Rent the Runway) for a couple of years now because it saves her from having to buy clothes to wear to the numerous work meetings she has throughout the week. When her agency made the decision to work from home amid the Coronavirus pandemic, she considered canceling her subscriptions because she no longer needed the clothes. “Then I thought about all the dresses RTR has to offer that I’d never normally be able to wear in everyday life. There’s an incredible range of ball gowns and dresses that would be highly inappropriate for the office…so I decided now was the chance to try them all.”

Hmmm. Getting all dressed up in fabulous dresses even though we can’t go out in public. This sounds familiar. I think I’ve done that on occasion. Maybe you have, too.

SWIMSUITS THAT RARELY GET WET

The coastal states are wrestling with the time to reopen their beaches during the Coronavirus crisis. So fashion sites are still going forward with their usual updates on swimsuit trends. I don’t follow these things very closely but, to me, swimsuits from one year to the next look much as they did the season before. Nevertheless, I dutifully scrolled through a swimsuit update headlined 20 Swimsuits That Fit Like Your Favorite Push-Up Bra. The article appeared on Yahoo.com’s Lifestyle page on April 17, 2020. I thought women were always complaining about their bras so I was surprised to see them being used as a benchmark for well-fitted swimsuits. The article reports, “From hidden padding to designs that give a natural lift, these styles feel undeniably chic without taking away the feel of your favorite push-up bra.”

Six bathing beauties who never go in the pool.

If you scroll through the linked article you can see that to the untrained eye (like mine, like yours?) all the swimsuits appear pretty much like we’ve always seen them. I did like the extremely zaftig model in a sturdily constructed two piece number at the top of the page. Much like the model’s bosom, I felt positively uplifted at the sight of all that flesh squeezed into a swimsuit.

Crossdressers like swimsuits too, of course. Our concerns with swimsuits are not usually centered on whether they fit like our favorite push-up bra. In fact, if you are enhancing your bustline with an artificial substitute, the last thing you want is the damn things being pushed up where they can easily be seen or (worse) pop out. No, our particular area of worry is the bottom where we need to have enough material to tuck the boys out of sight. I’d like to see Yahoo cover THAT swimsuit fashion challenge!

I guess a good deal of women’s swimsuits never actually get in the water. A submerged swimsuit is a swimsuit that is not being seen by others. For crossdressers, we rarely ever get a chance to wear our suits to the beach or a pool. Judging by internet photo postings, I think it’s safe to say that at least 50% of all crossdressing swimsuit photos are paired with pantyhose and close to 90% of crossdressed swimsuit wearers are propped upon high heels. Swimsuit trends may come and go but (for crossdressers) high heels and hosiery is what makes the summer sun shine.

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Tags: crossdressing, featured, news, opinion

Category: Transgender Fun & Entertainment, Transgender Opinion