Beauty and fashion in the GLBT community has historically been thwarted by a necessity to survive within straight society’s status quo. In the 1940s state liquor authorities saw obvious gay behavior as disorderly conduct, meaning a harmless grassroots drag show in the local dive bar was grounds for raids and revoked liquor licenses. Sexually deviant queers and their flamboyant or odd desires to dress as the opposite sex was seen as freakish and grounds for severe punishment. Today, the scope of what’s permissible has broadened. Queer culture has always pioneered distinctive identities, relentlessly reinventing the face of the community and in turn expanding ideas of fashion and beauty beyond the status quo. When the rest of society’s rules don’t apply, it allows for a creative explosion with endless possibilities.

Recently, the Gay & Lesbian Times went in search of some good, homegrown and distinctly homo fashion and beauty tips. We interviewed drag queens and kings, trannies, lesbians, dykes and crossdressers – to bring you all the faces of beauty within the GLBT community.

In the ’40s and ’50s working-class gays flocked to seedy bars on the outskirts of towns as a place to call home. The topsy-turvy gender rules at gay bars allowed queers to perform or be whatever gender fit them; from this ritual was birthed the heyday of femme/butch and drag queen culture. In a way, queers were risking their lives at these bars in the name of fashion. It wasn’t really fashion that helped gays struggle and survive, but fashion was the manifestation of their need to express themselves and their identities, and this basic need is what kept them alive through the raids, rapes, beatings and humiliation.

Drag queen camp and femme/butch roles that grew out of the marginalized underground gay bars were beacons of open homosexuality prior to the Stonewall Riots. The queers, hustlers and queens, in a desperate attempt to find community, created the beginnings of a full-blown culture complete with beauty aesthetics, fashion identity and sexual and gender expression that today is called the GLBT community.

Later, the Stonewall Riots and Queer Revolution paved the way for what Lynnee Breedlove, the lead singer of the band Tribe 8, calls the Tranny Revolution. Breedlove identifies as a butch-dyke - “no ho, no low” (no hormones and no lower surgery) – tranny. As the lead singer of a band, Breedlove has been trailblazing the gender and queer political fronts for more than a decade.

“The Tranny Revolution is enabling people to express themselves more authentically,” says Breedlove, “and so we’ve been given free reign to run with whatever we are: butch, femme, gender queer, man, woman or Peter Pan.”

Eugenie Fitzgerald, a mixed-race, high-femme dyke and a prominent figure in San Francisco’s dyke community, is finding that gender and its accompanied fashion fixation have exploded in the GLBT community.

“There’s still a lesbian stereotype that hasn’t changed,” says Fitzgerald, “the [image] of the white-dagger angry feminist with the flat-top boots and flannel; but there’s so many different pockets of community that there isn’t just one image of the LGBT community. There’s tons of different communities within LGBT, and they have tons of different styles associated with them.”

Transitioning, it seems, has become trendy. Gay infiltration of television media is further evidence of America’s growing acceptance of a multi-faceted queer culture. Today we have “Queer as Folk”, “The L Word”, Ellen Degeneres and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”.

“It’s pretty trendy to call it trendy,” says Zak Szymanski, the assistant editor at the Bay Area Reporter. “The trendy label comes from visibility, but really more people being out and open and transitioning, which means more options are available to people.”

And those expanded options are about more than just what to wear – they’re about who to be. Jessica Clark, a San Francisco transsexual who works at Skin Zone, a favorite beauty outlet in the Castro district, is now happily experiencing girlhood adolescence at age 50, but called her transition process and years of hormone therapy a “gender nightmare.” Although born a man, she identifies completely as a woman and a lesbian and does not see herself as transgender.

“I was embarrassed by the fact that I was not complete,” she says. Clark says that when she called her mom before her potentially life-threatening bottom surgery two years ago, her mom asked if this was truly what she wanted. She says she replied, “Mom, it’s not a question of what I want, it is a question of what I need to be complete.”

Fresh, a San Francisco transgender butch of color, has won second and third place in San Francisco’s drag king contests over the past two years. She performs as Barry White, Ray Charles and with her drag group, Butch Magic, doing Temptations covers. The GLBT community, Fresh says, is “constantly creating new ways to be beautiful. We’re a community of beautiful people.”

Fresh commonly passes as a guy, feels like a man and is said to resemble Ice Cube. She looks to black male actors and performers for fashion ideas and has since the age of 10. In 1999 she went on “Maury” (the Maury Povich-hosted daytime TV talk show) and learned from the professionals how to do drag. For a beard, she uses her own hair and spirit gum. (“Take it off with cold cream and water,” Fresh advises. “The other shit burns.”) Fresh believes that style in the dyke community is influenced by mainstream culture, and that mainstream culture is influenced by black culture.

In contrast, for San Francisco drag queen Suppositori Spelling, shock value is embraced. A performer who DJs every Friday night for Guilty, at San Francisco’s Stud bar, Spelling works a punk-rock slant into her routine and experiments with bruises and other effects like red glitter coming out of her nose.

“I’m an attention whore,” Spelling says. “One of the reasons I do drag is that [in drag] I don’t require as much attention from my friends or boyfriend.”

Spelling is somewhat anti-fashion, with her ratted-out hair and carefully-constructed damaged look. Yet, the Christian Dior/Paris Hilton messiness makes her so tragically glamorous you can’t help but fall in love. She’s a no-tucking diva: With a name like Suppositori Spelling, she says, “I couldn’t cover up my suppository.”

Spelling’s favorite drag-queen beauty tip is to use Kryolan Clown White makeup to highlight cheeks, bridge of the nose and brow bone, and dust red blush over beard areas before applying foundation to keep anything from showing through. She lives for performing and could care less about the hassle of getting ready and putting on makeup. “Gym bodies are boring,” Spelling advises, “and no matter what you look like, there will always be someone who thinks you’re hot.”

Surprisingly, it is the high femme dyke, and not drag queens like Spelling, who seem to most relish the transformation process.

“Getting ready is usually the highlight of my night,” says Fitzgerald. “Often times it can’t get better than that. The most fun for me is getting ready for an all-dyke event, because there’s no such thing as over the top. If it’s a straight event, I feel like I have to start peeling back and un-high femme myself. The kind of world I’d love to live in is one where it is appropriate to wear a ball gown, [or] wife beater and cowboy boots, any day of the week.”

Fitzgerald learned the tricks of the trade from drag queens and stripper friends, and carries on the notorious tradition of old-school high femmes by pushing the envelope and creating sexier vixen versions of today’s styles.

Gina Lance is a crossdresser/tranny and editor in chief of the online magazine Girl Talk, slated to launch this month, July 21. Like Fitzgerald, Lance says the transformation process is a highlight of her experience.

“I feel the transformation when my female face begins to take shape in the makeup application process,” says Lance. “Dressing and putting on the wig are the final moments. The instant you see the transition from male to female is quite startling and breathtaking. You’re achieving your innermost desires and wishes.” Lance says she learned her best techniques from master makeup artist, Jim Bridges, and she has had electrolysis and laser hair removal on her face. She says lasering is the most cost effective, but electrolysis works for finishing touches with hard to remove grey hairs.

For Szymanski, who started taking testosterone in 2001, hair removal choices merge with identity politics. Szymanski identifies as a queer man, and he says he keeps his body hair “stubbly, not furry,” a conscious choice he uses to differentiate himself from “stealth trans men who don’t want to be associated with dyke or queer communities.” His body hair aesthetic makes him visibly male, as well as visibly queer. Whether on hormone therapy or not, both Fresh and Szymanski recommend shaving facial areas, such as sideburns, to stimulate hair growth. Szymanski feels more at peace now after transitioning.

“I have a body I can relate to,” says Szymanski, “which is more than half the battle, when it comes to fashion. I no longer enter clothing stores in a panic or leave them as an emotional wreck. Now I have muscles and a flat chest and things look good on me, which kind of makes all the difference when you’re getting dressed.”