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Show 161 billed them as "Salt Lake City's most unusual show." The Tin Angel's success as a mixed establishment depended on such framing, or "domestication," of homosexuality as entertainment." In her study of gay identity and community based on fieldwork conducted in the late 1960s, Carol Warren observed that heterosexuals and gays mixed best in bars featuring drag performances, which focused patrons' attention on the show rather than one another: "The focus of eye attention is the stage, and interaction is suspended. In such a situation, two potentially colliding worlds can stay out of collision, and more or less ignore one another.?" Whereas Radio City accommodated both straight and gay patrons in separate shifts while projecting a facade of heterosexuality through mixed dancing, the Tin Angel's straight and gay clientele shared alike in the artifice of impersonation, which parodied heterosexuality in a nonthreatening way as performers interacted with male audience members. With successful impersonation rather than purely satirical representations of women serving as the draw, the shows featured "glamour drag" in which performers worked within prevailing standards of beauty and sex appeal to create a convincing similitude of "femininity." According to Ben Holbrook, "the bar was full of straight more than gay people, they couldn't believe that guys could do this and some of the guys really looked better than their wives or girlfriends, and that's what was 41Paulsen, Holbrook, Jeffries, Kelly, and Ramos interviews; Allen Metcalf [pseud.], interview by author, Tape recording, Salt Lake City, 15 January 2005; flyer for "The Misfits" in Ben Holbrook's possession. 42Carol A. B. Warren, Identity and Community in the Gay World (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), 25. |
