Interspecies Drag

With help from Jake Squid, I now have access to a hard drive full of stuff I wrote years ago. This is an article I wrote for the late Anodyne Magazine. It’s a true story.

Interspecies Drag

by B. Deutsch

In a blue-collar town in Connecticut, there’s a supermarket, called Stew Leonard’s, which is three times larger than the largest supermarket you’ve ever seen. The food is high-quality and fairly inexpensive, the building is brightly lit and attractive, and the employees are the most helpful and friendly supermarket workers in the world. People drive miles out of their way to shop there, and tourists from other countries take snapshots. The story of Stew Leonard’s is the archetypical American saga: a milkman with only elbow grease and a dream, ends up with a mansion, thousands of employees and a decade in prison for sneaking unreported cash out of the country.

I was fifteen years old, and Stew was still years away from minimum-security disgrace, when his store hired me to be Daisy Duck. Although my parents, when they ordered me to find a job, probably hoped for employment with a more respectable wardrobe, in most ways playing a duck was the best job I’ve ever had. I still doggedly list the job on my resume in the vain hope that further duck-related work will turn up.

At Stew’s, I wore head-to-toe duck, with a giant head, yellow tights, immense orange feet and a name tag declaring me “Daisy Duck” (it’s amazing Disney didn’t sue). Dressed in this ridiculous fashion, I was instructed to wander around a supermarket playing with children, which is more worth doing than anything else I’ve ever been paid to do.

Although I shaved my legs for the job (Daisy would never have leg hair showing through, after all), I didn’t think of it as drag at first. Sure, Daisy was a girl and I’m a boy, but c’mon – Daisy’s a duck. Who thinks of waterfowl as having gender?

I hadn’t counted on my then-shapely legs, which were amply displayed by Daisy’s short skirt. The furtive stares from adolescent boys were flattering, but the elderly male shoppers who pinched Daisy’s butt were too much. Usually I’d stay in character – whirling and wagging a feathery “shame on you” finger – but sometimes I’d tower threateningly over the pervert (I was nearly seven feet tall in Daisy’s freakishly huge fiberglass head) and whisper “Stop it, bud!” in my manliest baritone. As a class, men who sexually harass ducks aren’t comfortable with gender-bending: they’d generally turn purple and flee without saying a word. (Just goes to show, there are sadistic pleasures to even the most benign job.)

I was more troubled by my co-employees, who detested me because I played Daisy Duck rather than the male Clover Cow. (Told this story, a European friend exclaimed “male cows? No wonder Americans are confused about sex!” Alison Bechdel, the brilliant cartoonist behind Dykes To Watch Out For, pointed out that in cartoons, men are unadorned and women are men in drag; so in Garfield, the sexy female cat looks just like Garfield wearing mascara and lipstick. We all knew Clover was male because he was undecorated, whereas Daisy was femmed up with painted-on eyelashes and a pink bow on her head.)

I didn’t get it at first. Enlightenment came from an employee I was training to play Daphne Duck, the ex-girlfriend of a tough who worked in poultry (at Stew’s, the men who worked in the poultry department were the macho kings of the store, with shoulders like bricks, slicked-back hair and perpetual scowls. Apparently it really does take a tough man…). This woman, whom I’ll call Daphne, asked me point-blank if I were gay. I didn’t answer her (at the time, I figured my sexual orientation was a private matter between me and my mattress), but our talk clarified the situation at Stew’s for me.

They think I’m gay because I wear a female duck costume?, I shrieked as Daphne shushed me. For weeks after, my coworkers couldn’t move their chairs away from mine in the cafeteria or glare at me in the hallways without my giggling, which probably didn’t improve my standing in the Stew’s community. Nor, oddly, did the rumor that Daphne and I were sleeping together. Apparently people had no problem believing in a homosexual who crossdressed as a duck and screwed his female trainees – that’s just what you’d expect from a man who’d voluntarily dress as a lady duck.

It seemed more serious when Daphne’s ex-boyfriend in poultry cornered me to show me his knife. Was he threatening me because I was gay or because I was sleeping with his ex? I doubt even he knew. I cheered myself up by wearing the duck costume to school, having a wonderfully campy day crossing my legs in calculus and bussing the class dean on the top of his bald head with my enormous beak. But the end was clearly near.

I left Stew’s shortly after my supervisor asked me not to let the children hug me so much. Maybe I should swat them aside?, I asked (he didn’t answer). Perhaps someone should do a study, I ranted to the very patient Daphne: are men dressed as ducks an increased risk for child molestation? What it would have made me had I dressed as something really femme (a French poodle, say)?

Life as a crossdressing duck is years behind me now, but I’m convinced it’s relevant nowadays. Right-wing Christians want to restore men to their proper place ruling the family roost, while others predict the end of civilization should if men marry other men. We should laugh at them both: how can biological sex be that important, when it can be threatened merely by wearing enormous duck feet and a fiberglass head? I say we kidnap Pat Buchanan and crazy-glue him into something fashionable with a short skirt and a big yellow beak. We’ll make a gender outlaw out of that bad boy yet..