First there was Terance Stamp in "Priscilla," then there was Patrick Swaze swishing around in that "Julie Newmar" thing, then came the box office smash ($120 million in U.S. grosses), "The Birdcage." With Nathan Lane (the one in drag) and Robin Williams (an awful drag in "Mrs. Doubtfire") butching it up here.

Some look at all this as the "Disneyization of drag." One thing is for sure, all this attention has sparked a new interest in getting all dolled up. In fact, it's gotten so you really do need a manual! And no better manual could be found than Julian Fleisher's lively book The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide. In his review in Dish, M. Scott Malliger notes that this funny read reveals everything from how to meet drag queens (it's a five step process) to how to help them tuck (yes, tuck). "Full of fascinating and fun facts and interviews The Drag Queens …is a virtual encyclopedia of New York drag, breaking down drag types, including Club Queens, Theatre Queens, Cable Queens, and Impresarios, with further break-downs into modus operendi: lipsync, singing, dancer, disc-jockey writer, actor, artist, and tuck; the queens are also judged on a 'glamour' to 'clown' scale."

For those of us who are not fortunate (or unfortunate, as the case may be) enough to live in the Big Apple, the book includes very interesting takes on drag queens by various celebrities. John Waters, the man who made Divine famous, noted, "I'm against the Disneyization of drag queens. I think it should scare families and not make them happy about themselves. When Divine started, drag queens were very square. They wanted to be Miss America. There were no hip drag queens. Other drag queens hated Divine because he would show up and try to be Miss America, and he would have fake scarves on and he would be carrying an ax. So I think that, God knows, drag queens now are much hipper than they were. That's the major difference."

Village Voice columnist Michael Musto says, "I find that with a lot of these drag queens they're much more beautiful and fabulous in drag, and it seems to tap into this fabulous person inside of them. Whereas as a man, a lot of them are kind of schlubby and not exactly the most vibrant people."

And bisexual comedienne/actress Sandra Bernhard spoke of some mysogyny behind the drag phenomenon: "I think it's gone to another level now where it's almost replacing an accurate look into what a woman feels and thinks. And women are in a precarious kind of position right now in terms of having a lot of their rights taken away…So, I have mixed feelings about drag queens. I think that they take away a certain amount of reality that women need to have right now."

Less intellectual are the interviews with the ladies themselves. Mallinger's favorite quote comes from Joey Arias: "I got fucked so hard my cherry turned into a blueberry." Next runner up: Chicklet, a 'Clamour' queen (midway between glamour and clown). "I'm from your typical white-trash neighborhood, really—very mixed. But a totally non-religious upbringing—I mean completely no religion whatsoever. So I have no ethnicity in actuality and I can just adopt whatever I want to. Like there are times, honey, I am too, too black, and you know, honey, I can be very Puerto Rican when I feel like it, and you know when I'm really in a bad mood, I am so Jewish, honey. I will complain, I will complain," she says. She also noted that tipping is appreciated, 'cause a fish gotta swim, but a bitch gotta eat."

"I've got some good news and some bad news, "Skip White wrote in Night Life magazine when "The Birdcage" was released. "The good news is that "The Birdcage" has some excruciatingly funny stuff in it. The bad news is that the deeper message of it isn't very funny for gay people. "La Cage aux Folles', a 1978 French comedy that "The Birdcage" is a remake of, did not try to be a political film, but it made wonderful inroads for gay acceptance through its steadfast allegiance to the two queens who were its heroes. The focus has shifted—or, perhaps, the worm has turned—in "The Birdcage." In a film that remakes the original mostly- scene-for-scene, it becomes an unpleasant mystery why some intregal character motivation has been eliminated.

"(The movie) is expert at establishing its premise: a pair of aging gay men have raised the son that one of them bore in a momentary dalliance with a woman years ago. The son is now eager to marry, and the girl of his dreams is the daughter of an ultraconservative Senator. The fun of "The Birdcage" is in the set-up, and it works best when it contrasts these two 'families'. We know that we are watching these contrasts for the inevitable moment when these two worlds collide, and we can't wait. And, in fact, the first few scenes of The Meeting are wildly funny.

"At this point," though, things begin to go astray with the characters. First and foremost is Nathan Lane's Albert. In "La Cage aux Folles,' when his character dressed as the boy's 'mother' to meet the in-laws, your heart broke because of the sheer devotion driving his actions, however misguided they might have been. His deeds were truly heroic, and the subliminal politics meant that the audience—no matter what they thought theoretically about big ol' queens—had to bond with him and realize that he was as fine a human being as anyone they knew.

Nathan Lane is not granted this blessing in the remake. His motivation for donning Barbara Bush drag to meet the in-laws is never clear; what leads up to it is more of the whining and moping and suffering that trumpeted his character from the onset. We're not sure if he's acting out of ego, spite, or devotion when he shows up to face off with Gene Hackman over dinner. And this ambivalence is an awful thing, removing the inherent healing message from this script and replacing it with more of the same 'let's laugh at the Circus Animals' mindset that straight people seem so much more comfortable with in their audiences with gay screen characters.

One can't fault the performers in this picture, only the limitations that were imposed on them. Robin Williams does brilliantly when he takes his role seriously, and shows us the pain and conflict he faces as his son asks him to re-closet himself to make the correct impression. This character has clearly worked hard to make peace with his 'out' gayness, and his pain and offense is clear as his son asks him to deny a part of his identity.

Lane, in a shower of initially-enjoyable excess, plays the mother of all faux-mothers, paying homage to most every marauding screen Diva in his opening tirades. He is, ironically, most memorable in one short scene without any dialogue. He comes out of the bathroom dressed in 'heterosexual' drag, for the examination of his lover and the son. So self-conscious is he as he walks to the couch and sits, that we begin to laugh almost immediately. But it gets better. In the tradition of the great silent comedians, the camera stays on Lane, watching him wordlessly try to adjust a hip, cross a leg, just his jaw; his pathetic stab at butchness is unbelievably funny, in that inexplicable way that speaks of true genius."

While "La Cage" was not afraid to be about these two aging queens, "The Birdcage" does everything in its power to avoid them, even to having the last shot being of the two young lovers, looking at the camera and rolling their eyes with a "look at what we have to deal with" expression.

"Mike Nichols' 'The Birdcage' is an enchantingly witty and humane entertainment, a remake of the 1978 French farce 'La Cage aux Folles' that actually improves upon its source," thought Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. "La Cage aux Folles,' clever and likable as it was, always seemed a bit of a gay minstrel show, the kind of 'safe' drag queen burlesque that could become an art-house crowd-pleaser in an era when true gay cinema remained locked in the closet. Amazingly, 'The Birdcage' manages to be hipper, more in tune with the times, than 'La Cage' was in the late 70s. One reason, I think, is that the image of the gay man as limp wristed, lavender souled swish looks different to us now. Yes, that image is still non-threatening, but in the last decade it has also been reclaimed by 'queer' culture as a stance against bland American normality. Real gay liberation, it appears, isn't about rejecting 'sissies'—it's about insisting that they have the right to be included in the great American collage…The film's inspired mechanism is that the more these two try to pretend they're something they're not, the more obvious it is who they really are. Their delirious overrefinement keeps bursting out, whether it's Armand's casual remark about just having had his wall sponge-painted or the uproarious episode in which Albert gets a hopeless lesson in how to walk, talk, and smear mustard on toast like a real man. This is a movie in which the punchlines come to seem as deliciously irrepressible as the characters."

Critic George Meyer said, "Time has not been good to 'The Birdcage' It's cute, amusing and moderately entertaining, but it just doesn't come close to the original. May's screenplay comfortably adapts the scene from France to Miami Beach, and adds some silly jabs at tabloid journalism, the political right and long-term relationships.

"Thus, while it's amusing to watch Lane lend his considerable talents to a juicy role, viewers wait for flavors that rarely come. Without its element of surprise, it's easy to be bored by the story's now familiar plot."

When interviewing Williams, Empire magazine noted that a piece in the New York Times accused the film of ridiculing gays, denying them dignity and such like. Williams hotly denied it: "When I play a part like this, I try and create a character with dignity and when someone says they have no dignity I have to say, 'You're full of shit.' I created a character which is based on people I know and is based on myself. I grew up in San Francisco! It's a very political time in America and when you see a character doing this (lifts his hand up limply in a camp impression) that's when people are very sensitive about it 'cause it can be used against you. When a truck driver does this (falsetto camp voice), 'Sa-ay hell-o!" he's trying to defuse it and make it less threatening than if another truck driver looked at him and said (deep butch voice), 'You know Bob, you're an attractive man. I want you to bend over and squeal like a fax machine.' Then it's like 'Deliverance'—the home game."

When asked if he considered himself 100 percent heterosexual, he said, "It's hard to give percentages when you live in San Francisco. There's no percentages any more. It's a blend, you know, a mix and match, my dear. 100 per cent? Yes, if you said ten percent heterosexual, ten percent homosexual. Mmm, God I don't know after my neighborhood. I used to live two blocks away from Harvey Milk…"

Excerpted from The Best of the Superstars 1997: The Year in Sex, Edited by John Patrick, one of a series from STARbooks Press, a foremost publisher of high quality erotic tales. Information about STARbooks offerings can be found at your local book store or by mail from STARbooks Press, P.O. box 2737-E, Sarasota, Florida 34230.