The Changing Room

The First Major history of cross-dressing in theatre
Whether it's Ziggie Stardust strutting the stage in a white satin gown or a troupe of Kabuki actors masquerading as women to a mesmerized male audience, the evocative transvestite performer offers a subliminal homoerotic fantasy and provides the lasting image of the show long after its closing night. Award-winning theater historian and critic Laurence Senelick synthesizes a vast array of material from archival research and a lifetime of theater-going to provide a monumental record of cross-dressing on the stage. Pantomimists, dame comedians, principal boys, glamour drag artistes, androgyne rock stars, and male impersonators are traced from their roots in tribal ritual and Christian pageantry to today's forms -- the dandyism of Little Richard, the queer sensibility of Sylvester and the Coquettes, the thrift-shop drag of Boy George -- capturing the allure and excitement of gender-bending performance: its rebellion, it's public spectacle, its amusements, its tragedies, its escapism. Senelick brilliantly elucidates the dynamic between the theater as both mainstream forum and anti-establishment haven for misfits, ravers, radical activists, and outcasts. With 100 rare photographs, "The Changing Room" offers a voyeuristic vision of a lifestyle watched by many, but lived by few, and a compulsively readable, authoritative account of the theater at its most sexual and effective.