Drag King Dreams »

From award-winning and best-selling author, Leslie Feinberg, comes Drag King Dreams, the story of Max Rabinowitz, a butch lesbian bartender at an East Village club where drag kings, dykes dressed as men, perform.

A veteran of the women's and gay movement of the past 30 years, Max's mid-life crisis hits in the midst of the post-9/11 world. Max is lonely and uncertain about her future — fearful, in fact, of America's future with its War on Terror and War in Iraq — with only a core group of friends to turn to for reassurance. Max is shaken from her crisis, however, by the news that her friend Vickie, a transvestite, has been found murdered on her way home late one night. As the community of cross-dressers, drag queens, lesbian and gay men, and "genderqueers" of all kinds stand up together in the face of this tragedy, Max taps into the activist spirit she thought had long disappeared and for the first time in years discovers hope for her future.

Publishers Weekly

After a harrowing encounter with a bigot on the PATH train, Max Rabinowitz, drag king and bouncer, quarrels with cross-dressing friend Vickie-who is brutally murdered that night. Soon a transgender friend with AIDS is hospitalized, the East Village club where they work closes and a friendly Muslim neighbor disappears after defending his kids from the cops. Loyal, tender and apt to paint apartment walls with Yiddish poems, Max is appealing yet strikingly isolated and quick to get enraged. At the book's beginning, Feinberg, author of the queer classic Stone Butch Blues (1993), only hints at why Max, now hitting midlife, carries pre-Stonewall armor into a post-Stonewall world of polysexuality and queer television. Though seemingly trapped in a world-weary, self-made transgender noir of tough breaks and lassitude, Max is returning to activism by book's end. Max's first person is charged and poignant, and the appealing group of secondary characters makes Max's world as desperately full as it is bleak. Still, readers who don't define themselves by their political protests are likely to want a lot more dancing to join this revolution. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.