Drag Queen for a Day


Book Description

The portraits contained in this book were taken from 2003-2013 at the "Red Dress" annual fund-raiser at the Gold Coast Bar in West Hollywood, California. It began as a tribute to Mark Ferguson, a bartender who passed away from AIDS. The affair has become an annual West Hollywood event.




Diary of a Drag Queen


Book Description

Longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2020 Life's a drag... Why not be a queen? 'Stories like the one where you shagged a 79-year-old builder and knocked over his sister's ashes while feeding him a Viagra. Or the time you crashed your car because you were giving a hand job in barely moving traffic and took your eye off the car in front. That's the kind of dinner-party ice-breaker I'm talking about.' Northern, working-class and shagging men three times her age, Crystal writes candidly about her search for 'the one'; sleeping with a VIP in an attempt to become a world famous journalist; getting hired and fired by a well-known fashion magazine; being torn between losing weight and gorging on KFC; and her need for constant sexual satisfaction (and where that takes her). Charting her day-to-day adventures over the course of a year, we encounter tucks, twists and sucks, heinous overspending and endless nights spent sprinting from problem to problem in a full face of make-up. This is a place where the previously unspeakable becomes the commendable - a unique portrayal of the queer experience. (c) 2019, Crystal Rasmussen (P) 2019 Penguin Audio




The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish


Book Description

Playing off "The Wheels on the Bus," this nursery rhyme book from a founder of Drag Queen Story Hour is a fun, freewheeling celebration of being your most fabulous self. The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish encourages readers to boldly be exactly who they are. Written by a founding member of the nationally recognized Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), this playful picture book offers a quirky twist on a classic nursery rhyme by illustrating all of the ways to "work it". The story plays off "The Wheels on the Bus" as it follows a drag queen who performs her routine in front of an awestruck audience. A fun frenzy of fierceness, this book will appeal to readers of all ages.




My Fairy Godmother is a Drag Queen


Book Description

Chris Bellows is just trying to get through high school and survive being the only stepchild in the social-climbing Fontaine family, whose recently diminished fortune hasn’t dimmed their desire to mingle with Upper East Side society. Chris sometimes feels more like a maid than part of the family. But when Chris’s stepsister Kimberly begins dating golden boy J. J. Kennerly, heir to a political dynasty, everything changes. Because Chris and J. J. fall in love . . . with each other. With the help of a new friend, Coco Chanel Jones, Chris learns to be comfortable in his own skin, let himself fall in love and be loved, and discovers that maybe he was wrong about his step-family all along. All it takes is one fairy godmother dressed as Diana Ross to change the course of his life. My Fairy Godmother is a Drag Queen is a Cinderella retelling for the modern reader. The novel expertly balances issues like sexuality, family and financial troubles, and self-discovery with more lighthearted moments like how one rogue shoe can launch a secret, whirlwind romance and a chance meeting with a drag queen can spark magic and light in a once dark reality.




Queen for a Day


Book Description

Queen for a Day connects the logic of Venezuelan modernity with the production of a national femininity. In this ethnography, Marcia Ochoa considers how femininities are produced, performed, and consumed in the mass-media spectacles of international beauty pageants, on the runways of the Miss Venezuela contest, on the well-traveled Caracas avenue where transgender women (transformistas) project themselves into the urban imaginary, and on the bodies of both transformistas and beauty pageant contestants (misses). Placing transformistas and misses in the same analytic frame enables Ochoa to delve deeply into complex questions of media and spectacle, gender and sexuality, race and class, and self-fashioning and identity in Venezuela. Beauty pageants play an outsized role in Venezuela. The country has won more international beauty contests than any other. The femininity performed by Venezuelan women in high-profile, widely viewed pageants defines a kind of national femininity. Ochoa argues that as transformistas and misses work to achieve the bodies, clothing and makeup styles, and postures and gestures of this national femininity, they come to embody Venezuelan modernity.




If You're a Drag Queen and You Know It


Book Description

Strike a pose. Blow a kiss. Mouth the words. A fun, sing-along book with a drag twist that encourage kids to embrace all the playfulness of drag culture written by a founding member of Drag Queen Story Hour. If you’re a drag queen and you know it, let it show by winking, shaking your bum, laughing real big, twirling around, and more! Join a cast of fabulous drag queens as you sing along to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It” in this playful celebration of expressing your brightest and boldest self. A perfect companion to The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish written by a board member of Drag Queen Story Hour.




Queen for a Day


Book Description

John and his wife Melissa just can’t seem to get along. He's sick and tired of doing all the work around the house while she loafs around and shows up to her modeling gigs once in a while, and she's frustrated that John doesn't understand how much effort she actually puts into her career. In the middle of one of their heated arguments, John suddenly wishes that Melissa could get just a small taste of what it feels like to be him, but he's completely unprepared for his wish to be granted! Suddenly he's in Melissa's body and she's in his, and neither of them knows why. But their work still has to get done, so they agree to just try being each other for a while. John is excited for his new life of relaxation and fun and looking forward to Melissa struggling with his usual duties, but he's unprepared for just how good Melissa is at being him, and he soon realizes that he may have gotten more than he bargained for when he made his wish...




Queen for a Day


Book Description

We know by page one of Queen for a Day that Mimi Slavitt’s three-year-old son is autistic, but if we told her, she wouldn’t listen, because she doesn’t want to know—until at last Danny’s behavior becomes so strange even she can’t ignore it. After her son’s diagnosis Mimi finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son’s. It is a world she shares only with mothers like herself, women chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice and martyrdom. Searching for miracles, begging for the help of heartless bureaucracies while arranging every minute of every day for children who can never be left alone, they exist in a state of perpetual crisis, normal life always just out of reach. In chapters told from Mimi’s point of view and theirs, we meet these women, each a conflicted, complex character totally unsuited for sainthood and dreaming of the day she can just walk away. Taking its title from the 1950s reality TV show in which the contestants, housewives living lives filled with pain and suffering, competed with each other for deluxe refrigerators and sets of stainless steel silverware, Queen for a Day portrays a group of imperfect women living under enormous pressure. Rosaler tells their story in ironic, precise and vivid prose, with dark humor and insight born of first-hand experience.




Queen for a Day


Book Description

"How would you like to be queen for a day?" Those words opened a popular game show of the 1950s. Teenage girls like Catty Wadsworth gazed upon sweet ladies on the show, who receive a gift--such as a new stove! Each woman has submitted a story of a tragic accident, disease, or an important need, like a wheelchair. Catty hopes for a new car for the family so her mother, the sole breadwinner, can get to work alive. Catty is a fantasizer; she dreams of Hollywood romances, but she lives in the reality of a single mom with low-paying jobs. She makes friends and leaves them, over and over, in a rootless journey through small Southern schools. Yet Catty has the spunk to make friends wherever she goes, even a boyfriend who promises her a car. Catty grows through tears and courage in this novel of a quest for security and a strong sense of self-worth.




Queen for a Day


Book Description

There’s no predicting a Denise Duhamel poem, except that it might be about something you’ve never seen in a poem before: Mr. Donut, Rodney King, or nude beaches; Gertrude Stein, phone sex, or the Girl Scouts. Poems from The Woman with Two Vaginas, a book that was censored when it first appeared, are based on Inuit folklore. How the Sky Fell offers revisionist fairy tales, and the poems from Kinky are inspired by Barbie dolls. In her new work, Duhamel suffers postmodern angst when using the “therapeutic I.” Denise Duhamel has startled readers of American poetry with work that pirouettes on a tightrope above the personal and the political, the spoken word and the page, the irreverent and the sacred. Queen for a Day showcases poems from her five previous collections, along with new work.