From Hua Mulan who donned a military uniform and took the place of her father in the army to theatre master Mei Lanfang performing “drunken beauty”: cross-dressing has a thrilling and dramatic history in China both on and off the stage. The list of Chinese cross-dressers is staggering, including names such as Zhu Yingtai, Chou En-lai, Leslie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Cecilia Yip and Li Yugang.
For a lot of people cross-dressing is a glamorous drug. When they dress up, they shed their natural selves and enter the fabulous realm of ‘drag’. These gender benders disregard male and female. They’re neither man nor woman yet they are both sexes at the same time. Unpredictable, focused, self-confident, passionate and charming, they are gender revolutionaries who use new ways to communicate with this old world.
QAF Beijing had the good fortune to meet two blue-eyed and blond-haired drag queens – they are the bright shining stars of this week’s episode, strutting their stuff, talking the talk and showing what they got. And that’s a hell of a lot more than Mother Nature gave them.
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