Do you know what bugs me about drag king shows? They make me think too much.

Here’s what I mean. When I see a drag queen show, I’m looking at guys that look like beautiful women. I get to pretend these gorgeous women are cooing at me. Even if these are really guys, they look like Cher or Gwen Stefani, and that works for me. Because it’s a fantasy I’m used to.

My wife, on the other hand, is femme. It’s not her fantasy to wind up in the sheets with Gwen Stefani, so she doesn’t get excited by drag queen shows. And if I get too loud, she gets a little jealous and punches me in the arm. It makes me laugh.

Then the San Diego Drag Kings started up. We saw them first at Pride and then at Dyke March, and suddenly it’s my turn to feel inadequate. My wife is squealing like a housewife at a Chippendales show and I’m the guy in the song “Beast of Burden” singing “Ain’t I rough enough?” See what I mean?

Here I am, a perfectly well-adjusted dyke, and these kings have got me thinking. Am I butch enough? Sure, I was in the Navy. I played football on Sundays at Queen’s Circle. I drank too much, smoked too much, cheated on my girlfriends – all that bad-boy stuff. But now I’m all domesticated. I got a wife, kids, a mortgage. I’m the president of a high school band booster club. How un-butch is that? These drag kings have got me evaluating my dykeness.

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I decided to go to Six Degrees. The San Diego Drag Kings are putting on a show, and my wife is excited. Once the show starts, my wife is all smiles, especially when this king Evan Longwood does a Lenny Kravitz air guitar routine, even bending over backward at the knee until his head is touching the floor. I don’t even want to know what was going through my girl’s head at that moment, but, hey, she’s having fun, and we’re not home watching reruns of “Law & Order,” so it’s all good.

That is, until “El Pachuco” comes out. He’s wearing a black suit and fedora and lip synching Sinatra’s “The Way You Look Tonight.” I’m not a fan of Sinatra, but El Pachuco looked so cool and confident with his black mustache and flashing black eyes that my damn heart actually fluttered, like a 12-year-old girl’s at an Usher concert.

“What the hell is this?” I barked at myself. “Getting all moony over a drag king? Why don’t I just go change into a skirt and tell my wife she has to be the top now?”

I tried to talk myself down off the ledge in my head; told myself that it was just the song. I must have heard it in a movie, and it reminded me of how much I love my wife. So now, hearing it here, I was transferring that emotion onto this king. Yeah, that’s it.

I focused my mind on this thought, to the exclusion of everything else – even the sight of Evan Longwood grinding against my wife’s crotch, promising to “make her sweat ’til she can’t sweat no mo’.”

A young, blond king did a Violent Femmes song, which was followed by a first-timer named Johnny Bravo doing some new song that I’d never heard but I’m sure my kids must know.

Slowly the panic left me. I began to relax.

Then El Pachuco comes back out. But this time as some glam rock Hedwig and the Angry Inch fabulous fag boy. He wore a gold waistcoat, a rainbow boa and a “Queer as Fuck” T-shirt. It was brave and transcendent and all that esoteric envelope-pushing stuff. But this time, instead of getting all weak in the knees, all I could think of was bending him over a chair and doing unnatural things to him.

I know what you’re going to say: “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Not in my weirdest fantasy have I ever thought about buggering some guy. That’s just not me. So what was that image doing in my head? It drove me crazy for a couple of days before I finally figured it out. When you combine this whole boy/girl thing, what happens is your body reacts to the female and your mind reacts to the male (or vice versa, however you’re wired) and you end up in this weird place in your head that you never knew was there. Then you’ve got to deal with it. Again, forcing me to think about things.

But what the hey. Go see the San Diego Drag Kings anyway. It’s a good time, and your girlfriend will think you’re evolved and self-assured. But you might consider bringing a shrink along to help you process.