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female to affect Barbie's exaggerated "feminine" look, which may be part of its appeal. Before The Crying Game, a movie whose most beguiling "female" character isn't biologically female, one might have been hard pressed to argue that drag queens have a more profound understanding of "femininity" than do biological women. But merely possessing an XX chromosome does not guarantee a mastery of (or a desire to master) the stylized conventions of "femininity." The "feminine" signals that say come hither to heterosexual men can be affected by persons of any gender; they have also been in large part invented for women by gay men. "Cults of beauty have been persistently homosexual from antiquity to today's hair salons and house of couture," Camille Paglia writes in Sexual Personae. "Professional beautification of women by homosexual men is a systematic reconceptualization of the brute facts of female nature."

Barbie—who doesn't bleed, kvetch, or demand to choose her own outfits— may be, for some gay arbiters, the apotheosis of female beauty. The doll is built like a transvestite, with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and huge breasts. Significantly, in the late eighties and early nineties—when Barbie sales rocketed—the fashion industry worked hard to make the idealized female body that of a drag queen. Designers like Jean-Paul Gaultier (whom we have to thank for the torpedo brassiere Madonna wore outside her clothes on her Blonde Ambition tour) and Stephen Sprouse were among the first to use male transvestites, such as Terri Toye, a Barbie-esque blonde, to model women's clothes. Other designers followed: Todd Oldham employed Billy Erb, Kalinka engaged Zaldy Soco, and Thierry Mugler brought out Connie Girl—a striking black "woman" who is also a Barbie collector. Race is no impediment to copying Barbie: between his platinum wig and steep heels, black transvestite recording artist Ru-Paul—who, as a child, excised the breasts from his Barbie dolls and, more recently, reported on the introduction of Mattel's Shani doll for the BBC—does a good imitiation.

So does the Lady Bunny, the drag queen who organized "Wigstock," an annual transgender Woodstock-type festival that takes place in New York's East Village. She feels that the look of the early Barbies—the ones she knew as a little boy in Chattanooga, Tennessee—had a significant impact on her style. "I loved the shiny hair," she told me, "which is a kind of cheap wig hair. It's not meant to look natural, it's meant to look brassy and showbizzy. Which is a look I try to get—I love the wigs with the big bumps in the back." Size-twelve, Barbie-style mules also assist her trompe l'oeil; they lengthen her legs and curve their calves, making them appear more "feminine." If the shoes are a little small and the heel hangs over, that's okay, she explained. The overhang is called a "biscuit."

When she was a child, her parents were reluctant to buy her a Barbie; they feared it might affect her gender identification. When they eventually relented, she used the doll to puzzle out the components of "femininity," or "the tricks of the trade," as she calls them. She is still envious of the effortlessness with which the doll pulls off certain hard-to-achieve effects. "It's so easy for her to work those evening capes with the crinkled taffeta," she said. Had I only spoken to her while she was in drag, I might not have appreciated the extent to which her "look" was "worked," or been viscerally struck by how artificial the cues that telegraphed "feminine" were. When we made a date for tea, I had expected to interview her stage persona— a Barbie doll with a sweet southern drawl. But she met me as her offstage persona—a clean-cut young man wearing blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, the image of Ron Howard in American Graffiti.

Vaginal Davis, a poet, drag queen, and self-described "Blacktress," with the bearing of Norma Desmond and the seeming height (in heels) of Michael Jordan, also acknowledges a debt to the doll. As a child, Davis used Barbie and her friends to project herself beyond boundaries of gender