She glides on stage a designer’s vision of a gypsy: Tall, in command and attired in black lace, copper-colored cape and satiny, feather-sprouting turban. From her mouth comes the music of Eartha Kitt, purring, “I don’t want to be alone without my baby.”
Not to worry. She is anything but alone, cheered by an adoring crowd at the Baton Lounge on Clark Street, where the audience is in on the secret: Tasha Long, all satin, lace and hauteur, is a man.
“Is mine a comfortable life? I love it,” she says later, in casual women’s wear in a bar just downstairs from her North Side apartment. “It’s hard. Not the money part. I make enough to pay my bills. But the pressure. We do three shows a night, five nights a week. And living your life as a woman offstage is hard, too, trying to interact with society and getting everyone to accept your lifestyle. Even in Chicago. A lot of people I meet assume I’m a woman, but not everyone. I don’t exactly have the softest voice around.”
Unlike such flamboyant persona as Divine, Ru Paul or Lady Chablis (of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” fame), Long, offstage, is subdued, soothing, almost maternal. On stage she transforms into Kitt, Whitney Houston or Dionne Warwick. Offstage, she’s more like the girl, or lady, next door.
“I grew up in Birmingham and went to school there,” she recalls. “I wanted to be a cosmetologist. While I was in beauty school, a friend of mine suggested I enter a contest. I’d never done drag. But I always dressed more unisex. I went, lost, entered again, lost again and finally won my third time out. A couple of weeks later, I was offered a job.”
That was 1983. Contests, tours to other cities and night performing soon wrecked Long’s school credits. Her fate was sealed: “You could say I’ve used what I learned about hair and make-up in another field.” Getting started in Alabama wasn’t as hard as some might think-there’s a strong tradition of drag throughout the South.
“It was a Bible Belt state,” Long says, “but it wasn’t that tough, either. I was still living as a guy offstage, then. I wasn’t shaving my eyebrows or anything.”
In 1988, she entered the Chicago-based Miss Continental Pageant for what would turn out to be the first of seven tries to win. “I didn’t know what I was doing that first year,” she explains. “In other contests, there are rules insisting no surgery or alterations or hormone treatments. The Miss Gay America Pageant is still like that. But when I came here, I saw beautiful girls with lovely bodies and gorgeous hair. They looked just like magazine cover women. I gagged. I didn’t even make the Top 10.”
The differences still exist in what is an expanded female impersonator universe. For de-cades, drag queens were strictly real men-often flamboyant, campy performers who carried off their illusion with costumes, make-up and attitude. But as surgery and hormone treatments be-came more common, pre-operative transsexuals, who sometimes wait for years before final surgery, have created a different, some argue much more convincing on-stage female image.
In the South, there’s more emphasis on se-quins and headdresses, on the theatrical side to it all,” Long says. “Here, it’s high glamour and looking as much like a female as you possibly can.”
A year and a half ago, Long moved to Chicago and be-gan living her life as a woman full time. She finally won the Miss Continental title in September. Now 34, she, too, has undergone hormones and surgical augmentations, though not surgery. She may never do that.
“It may sound strange, but I have no desire for a total sex change. I enjoy the way I am. A sex change would defeat the purpose of what I enjoy the most, which is entertaining. The public wants a man up there-that defines you as a female impersonator.”
