For trannies and the men who love them, Divas is the place
John Koopman
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
It's after midnight at Divas. The lower-level bar is packed. Coco is lip-synching to Christina Aguilera. It's loud and rocking. Men sit at the bar and nuzzle women standing next to them. Two girls start dancing in the aisle, getting closer and closer until they're bumping and grinding, to the cheers of the people around them.
Pretty young women circulate through the crowd. "What are you here for?" they ask strangers.
It's a good question. Because this is not just any bar in any city. This is Divas, the most famous, or possibly notorious, transgender bar in San Francisco. It is the hangout for post-op transsexuals, pre-ops, cross-dressers, gender-benders, female impersonators and the men who love them.
"I don't know why people think this place is so scary," said one patron. "It's just another bar."
In some ways, Divas is just like any other bar. There are three levels open to the public. The ground-floor bar, when it's not being used for the lip- synch show, is just another bar. Men sit on stools and banter with the bartender. Televisions are on either end of the bar.
The third floor has a dance floor and a stripper pole. There are topless shows some nights, and the place is like a regular strip club. Women dance and tease. Men tuck dollar bills in G-strings. There's the requisite disco ball hanging from the ceiling.
The fourth floor is a more intimate bar setting, with the best-looking bartenders serving drinks, and a few sofas and easy chairs for socializing.
But that's where normalcy, as American society would define it, ends.
This is the sexual frontier. There are no easy identifiers for the women who go there, nor for the men. It's not as simple as gay or straight, male or female.
"I'd say 85 percent of the men who come here are married, and a lot of them have kids," said bartender Alexis Miranda.
The owner, Steve Berkey, said the majority of the male patrons consider themselves straight. They just like their women to have a little something extra.
The men are called "trannie chasers" by some of the girls, and there is a real love-hate relationship between them.
Alana Murtaugh, a 25-year-old transsexual from South Texas, said a lot of the men at Divas tend to objectify the girls, or they simply have a fetish for T-girls, as they are sometimes called.
"For a lot of them, the girls are just sexual playthings," she said. "Plus, the men have the luxury of just visiting. They can come in and have fun and they go back to their nice, easy lives. We live in this world."
The men come in all sizes, shapes and ethnicities. I went to the bar several times and saw white, Asian, Latino and African American patrons. There were men in suits, men in jeans, men in windbreakers. Men with distinguished gray hair and young hip-hop types with shaved heads and baggy pants.
The women are just as diverse. They range from extremely beautiful to, well, men in dresses. But most are divalike. They are carefully made up and dress exotically. They say a straight man can't tell the difference, most of the time, between a transsexual woman and biological woman. That's probably true. The one tip-off is that the transgender women are almost too perfect. You spot a beautiful woman out of the corner of your eye and turn to look. Even in a place like Divas where you know the women are transsexual, you can't help yourself.
The interaction between men and women at Divas is similar to that of any bar, or pickup joint, except that the women are more likely to approach the men. There are two reasons for this. For one thing, they are perhaps more interested in finding a mate. A lot of the women have spent their entire lives trying to find their feminine selves, and they want validation that they are, in fact, women.
And then there is the second reason: Some of them are working girls.
Divas is in Polk Gulch, ground zero for gay, straight and trannie prostitution in the city. Some women work the street and then step into Divas for a drink, to rest their feet and maybe see if they can find a trick inside.
And because the place has a liquor license, the stakes are high. Divas has an order for a 30-day suspension and a year's probation as a result of a prostitution investigation earlier this year. The order is under appeal.
"I don't want that kind of thing going on in here," Berkey said. "That kind of suspension would kill me. But I can't watch everyone all the time. The best I can do is keep it low-key."
Berkey estimates that 90 percent of the women at the club have worked in the sex industry, in some form or another, at some point in their lives. There are many reasons for that. Part of it is a combination of society and economics. The women need jobs, but a lot of companies aren't comfortable having transgendered people as employees. And being a transsexual can be expensive, depending on how far the woman takes it. There are hormones to take, surgeries to be performed.
Beyond that, sex with a man validates a male-to-female transsexual's femininity. "And a lot of these girls need all the validation they can get," Berkey said. "Sex is a rite of passage for them."
In the Divas world, almost everything is about sex. Alexis the bartender said most of the men who like trannies want hard, raw sex with someone who also wants it. They are more likely, she said, to get it from a transsexual than a biological woman.
"Look around at women today," she said. "They dress like men, or they're in sweats or whatever. They're not sexy. They're not feminine. A transgendered person works hard to be feminine, and they still have the male sexual hunger. So it's a perfect match."
Many of the trannie chasers might consider themselves heterosexual, but Jeff is a straight-up bisexual. Has been since he was a young boy playing games with other boys in the backyards of the East Bay.
He likes women and will probably marry one someday. And he likes transsexuals because they are beautiful and sexual.
"Primarily, I like women," he said. "It's a cliche, but this really is the best of both worlds."
Jeff, who asked that his last name not be used, said the men he knows at Divas are not interested in "guy sex." But they're into a kind of sex that a lot of wives and girlfriends don't like.
Although sex may be the primary concern of the patrons, Divas means something more to the women who go there.
For Alana, it's almost a second home. It's the transgender equivalent of the bar in "Cheers."
"This is a place where I can be myself," she said. "I don't have to worry about what anyone thinks. I can just show up and know I'll find people I know, people I can talk to and have a good time."
Alana is pretty, with soft white skin, and can easily pass for a woman in a store or on the street. She's fortunate that way. And she recognizes that she and her friends go there to meet men who want them. Everyone knows what the score is. A woman doesn't have to wonder how the man will react when he finds out she was not born a woman. It is a complementary relationship.
Even so, it's a murky world. There are various stages of transgenderdom, and everyone has his or her own particular likes, wants and needs in a partner. If you're a man and have sex with a post-op transsexual, are you straight? What if the person dresses as a woman but still has a penis?
"You know, these questions go round and round and round," Berkey said. "There are countless discussions, countless variations of gender identity and sexual identity.
"In the end, what I've figured out is, 'Who cares?' It's all about what you like, and what feels good. Definitions don't mean anything."
Berkey is 56, an amiable Midwesterner who looks a little like the actor Robert Conrad. He worked in the construction industry for years before he bought Divas. The career change had much to do with the fact that he is married to a post-op transsexual and he thought they could run the club together.
He's owned Divas for about three years. The bar used to be known as the Motherlode, a block away at Post and Larkin.
"If I weren't married, I could have a lot of fun here," he said Saturday night as the lip-synching reached a fevered pitch. He shined a flashlight on the rump of a woman dancing in the aisle. "My wife thinks that's all I'm after, so I have to be careful not to give her anything to be jealous over."
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