I am regretfully skipping over a significant piece of male erotic performance history today. Female impersonators have featured prominently on stage since there WAS a stage. Male actors since ancient times have played female roles, usually in drag, depending on contemporary morals (in different cultures at different times, it was taboo for women to perform on stage). It's too vast a subject to squeeze in here.
However, today's show cannot end without a mention of one group who helped revolutionize the social possibilities for trans and cross-dressing performers. The Ballet Trockadero has become so respectable, one may not realize that when they first appeared in the 1970s, they totally freaked people out. Though embraced by critics, average people simply didn't know what to make of this "ballet cockadero" stuff. Happily, the ballet's more sophisticated admirers poured on the love and the money and today they are an institution. If you're interested visit the Trockadero history page.
I hope to revisit the history of drag queens. But for now I am jumping ahead to the rather amazing phenomenon of Boylesque. Erotic male stage performers who offer more than muscles have become a world-wide sensation in the last decade. Boylesque performers do many of the things their female Burlesque predecessors did: they sing, dance, act in sketches, or do comedy, usually ending with a strip-tease.
For more pictures and history, surf over to the Boylesque companies in San Francisco and Toronto
Here is a short picture show, starting with Tigger, perhaps one of the most famous of this new generation of male performers, and some other handsome (but unknown to me) young men.
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