Gaysia (20 page)

Our requests were met with radio silence.

I decided to just go ahead and visit Bourebonne-san when he was at work. On the night we met, he was working in Taq's Knot, pulling beers from the sunken bar and dressed as a regular guy. He wore a loud checked shirt with ironed-on scout's badges displaying words like MAXIMUM and CALIFORNIA. He was handsome, and tall by Japanese standards.

As a kid, Bourebonne-san hadn't seen many images on television of what he wanted to be, but as an adult, he watched RuPaul and the Australian film
Priscilla: Queen of the Desert
. Something clicked.

‘Priscilla and RuPaul changed my heart,' he told me in English, putting his hands to his chest and fluttering his eyelashes.

The music system had been playing Lionel Ritchie's ‘All Night Long', Culture Club's ‘Karma Chameleon' and Frankie Goes to Hollywood's ‘Relax', but when Bourebonne-san discovered I was Australian, he clapped his hands, squealed and flicked the system to Kylie Minogue's ‘I Should Be So Lucky' in my honour. Businessmen in their spectacles and ties surrounded me and my translator, curious and eager to chat.

‘So Otsuka-san told me you were becoming famous!' I told Bourebonne-san, recalling my conversation with Taq.

Bourebonne-san beamed at the news, delighted.

‘
Nooooooo
,' he said with typical Japanese modesty. ‘But you want to see me on television?'

He stopped the Kylie song and loaded YouTube on the monitor. We all watched as the opening credits for a daytime talk show called
You Wanted to Know!
came on. The male host introduced three apparently female guests who sat alongside each
other in carrels, as in a game show. Bourebonne-san was unrecognisable. In this episode, he wore a long brown wig, a flowery black ribbon in his hair, a long dress in autumnal colours and a flowing pearl necklace. It wasn't a conventionally outrageous drag outfit, but rather something you'd expect a classy aunty in her fifties to wear. Bourebonne-san told me he got most of his clothes from a costume website in the United States, though some pieces were made to order. Unlike many other drag queens, he chose to dress with class.

On the show, the three guests watched rolling news footage before making quips or offering their sympathetic take on the news. The camera loved Bourebonne-san. He was the most striking of the women – probably because he was a man – and offered the most arch jokes. But he was also very pleasant, polite and feminine, not vulgar or overly sexual like most drag queens on American TV. In the commercial break, the show cut to an advertisement showing a deliciously fat Matsuko Deluxe, seemingly pregnant, reclining in a white gown and breathing hard. I had no idea what the advertisement was for, but later discovered it was a teaser for Fuji Television's new season. Matsuko Deluxe was pregnant with the TV schedule, telling the audience it was due any day now.

When the video clip ended, the Taq's Knot clientele offered a smattering of applause.

‘Is it easier to be a drag queen on TV than an ordinary gay guy?' I asked.

Bourebonne-san thought about it. ‘Well, it's much easier to work with make-up and dress-up. Because you have to be – how would you say? – “catchy” to get work. You know?'

‘Is there a difference between this Bourebonne-san,' I said, pointing to the TV, ‘and the one I'd see at your drag show?'

‘Perhaps I'm less funny on this,' he said, pointing to the monitor. ‘There are less dirty jokes. Because this is a nationwide TV show, the whole country is watching, you know?'

I nodded, understanding.

‘The good jokes come,' he said, ‘when you're talking about sex.'

Several days later, Bourebonne-san pulled some strings and invited me to his drag queen extravaganza
Campy,
which was taking place in the basement of a seven-level entertainment complex called the Loft/Plus One: Talk Live House. Underneath the Loft's flashing green sign, someone had stuck a childlike, hand-drawn sign in big blobby texta letters saying, ‘
Campy!
Vol. 8.' Everyone in line was in good spirits as they clutched their tickets, content in the knowledge they had scored entry to a sold-out event.

The line seemed to be chiefly gay men who had arrived in hordes, teasing and slapping each other good-naturedly. My translator pointed out a prominent TV news anchor who was known to be gay in queer circles but wasn't open about his sexuality in public. Lesbians had come in small groups or couples. And surprisingly, there was a contingent of straight people, who had come in couples or rowdy packs. Macho straight men stood in line, hand in hand with their girlfriends.

A short, compactly muscled Japanese man with a beard took our tickets. He was naked except for a fake tiger skin that wrapped around his crotch and ribboned over his shoulder where it was attached to a plush tiger's head. After collecting our complimentary
Campy
DVDs, we were greeted by five drag queens.

‘Benjamin!' one of them said, putting his open palms by his face as a hello.

There was no mistaking Bourebonne-san's broad shoulders.
Tonight, he was dressed sleekly in the outfit of a chic First Lady, complete with Jackie O wig.

‘Bourebonne-san,' I said, planting a kiss on his cheek.

Another drag queen wore giant heart-shaped glasses like Lolita. A third had the hard, pumped body of an elite swimmer poured into a tight blue cocktail dress. When I reached out to shake his hand, I accidentally dropped my notebook. When I went to stand up, he'd shoved his arse right in front of my face. The queens hooted with laughter.

The Loft was a grungy parlour that had the look of an old strip club with exposed wiring and lights hanging off banisters. Seats filled quickly and people crammed in around small tables the size of lazy Susans. My interpreter and I made friends with a table of raucous straight men and women who'd come just because they thought drag queens were a scream. We shared snacks and ordered rounds of beer and Japanese lemon sours.

It didn't take long for the entertainment to become a blur: partly because I didn't understand the Japanese jokes, but mainly because I was drunk. Most of the jokes, my translator told me, were saucy and foul but the puns were so linguistically and culturally specific that they were nearly impossible to translate. From what I could gather, no topics were off limits. They joked about eating disorders and how ugly they all looked. Bourebonne-san delivered a sordid monologue about going to a love hotel with a guy he'd met while still in drag. When they discovered the love motel only played boring straight porn, Bourebonne-san had to use gay porn on his iPod to get his lover into the mood, by which time the man had fallen asleep. One of the drag queens made a really graphic joke about hanging a shit so big it wouldn't flush down the toilet. I didn't need a
translator for that one. Let's just say it was all in the miming.

When it was all over, Bourebonne-san came up to me, sweating through his make-up.

‘People love you guys!' I said.

‘Yes, drag queens are getting very popular!' he said, dabbing at his face.

The audiences left the Loft grinning stupidly,
Campy
DVDs in their bags. Bourebonne-san said I was right: a chunk of the audience tonight were straight. Most were gay or lesbian, but about a third were heterosexuals who loved seeing drag queens, camp men and giggly transsexual women on their televisions and stages. Still, I felt there was an obvious missing element.

‘What about lesbians?' I asked.

Bourebonne-san nodded, as though he'd given this some thought.

‘Oh, being lesbian is harder than gay,' he said. ‘For gays, it's much easier to be seen as funny. Boys getting dressed as women? That's already entertaining. For ladies, it's a different story.'

Ayaka Ichinose responded to my interview request pretty quickly. Perhaps she needed any publicity she could get. If Ayaka had a business card, it would have said something like ‘model/actress/writer' or simply ‘Japan's first celesbian'. Ayaka was blessed with the kind of looks Japanese women would kill for: soft, long hair and flawless skin, like a teenage boy's fantasy avatar for a video game. Though she had recently turned thirty, she still looked like a high-school student.

Ayaka had started out as something called a ‘gravure model', which wasn't exactly nude modelling, but posing in just enough
clothes to give the
impression
you were naked. She was also smart enough to know that modelling got you only so far in Japan. To be successful, you had to diversify. Lately, Ayaka had been branching out into writing a thirteen-episode manga series called
Real Bian
, lesbian comics based on her own experiences. She had also produced and starred in
SekuMai
, a gravure modelling DVD that combined footage of her in skimpy, barely-there gear with a discussion of issues pertinent to lesbians in Japan. In between sequences of Ayaka posing in her underwear, she talked about what it was like to live as a lesbian, recounted the history of the Ni-Chome district and interviewed other queer women. Her work was sexy
and
educational.
Sexucational.

I met Ayaka in a ground-level café in Ni-Chome that was around the corner from the DVD porno shop of horrors. Though I had seen photos in which Ayaka was topless and bent over in a G-string, on this occasion she was dressed conservatively in a beige zip-up dress. Accompanying Ayaka was her manager, Nakazawa-san, whose weathered face made him look like a Japanese Tommy Lee Jones.

‘The majority of lesbians in Japan don't come out,' Ayaka explained. ‘So the interviews in my DVD were trying to address those issues.
What are lesbians really like? What are they interested in? What do they do in their spare time? What kind of fashion are they into?
' They may as well have been fantastic and mythological creatures, such as hydras or mermaids: mysterious and vaguely heard about, but rarely seen in everyday life.

‘I get the sense that seeing gay men, drag queens and transsexual women is really common here,' I said. ‘But not lesbians.'

‘Yeah-yeah-yeah,' Ayaka said. She got this question a lot. ‘It's true: you don't really hear about lesbians in Japan, mainly because it's still a man's world. In the gay scene here, the majority
of the venues – the saunas, the bars – are targeted at men. A lot of females aren't as interested in that. Or they try to hide it. When I was young, I knew I had feelings for girls, but didn't actually
know
I was even a “lesbian”. There was no point in coming out, because I didn't even know I
was
one.' No one spoke about lesbians, so Ayaka hadn't realised that such a thing existed.

In her twenties, Ayaka worked part-time at a mixed-sex bar in Shinjuku Ni-Chome. Very quickly, her looks attracted the attention of local glamour photographers. Modelling scouts approached her and she picked up gravure modelling easily, as well as minor acting jobs and TV appearances. About two years into her career, her prospects were looking good. Then she decided to come out as a lesbian. It wasn't an easy decision.

‘There had been no lesbians that had come out in this industry,' she said. ‘So it was like, “Oh my god, should we be doing this?”'

Part of the probem, Ayaka said, was that a lot of Japanese people didn't actually understand what a lesbian was. Even her manager hadn't suspected.

Nakazawa-san laughed now, thinking about it. ‘Oh, I was
shocked
,' he said. ‘She was the first lesbian I had ever met.'