When you’re a 325-pound drag impersonator of an internationally famous pop star, people can get their facts wrong in the heat of the moment.
Tanian will be in Chicago at Ka-Boom! this weekend for a show called “Everything Old Is New York Again,” an evening of imported stars from the Big Apple club demimonde. The show is hosted by the enterprising Manhattan party thrower Chip Duckett, who’s bringing along Tanian and a bevy of other polymorphously perverse scenesters of the sort known in the midwest only as characters in the Village Voice’s “La Dolce Musto” column. Among them: a DJ in drag known as Dinah who plays a weird pastiche of music–“from Kate Smith to Nina Hagen to Roseanne Barr,” says Duckett–and lip-synchs to everything; another DJ, the noted Tommy Richardson; a passel of “gogo boys” (Duckett: “You know, hot Latin types”); and a Boswell in the form of Michael Musto himself.
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A new vocation called. Tanian studies photography at the Center for Media Arts by day and pursues his new acting career by night. “A lot of people get it mixed up,” he says. “I’m an actor, and Queerdonna is my character. It’s not that I think anything’s wrong with transvestites, but Queerdonna is just a character I perform.” He’ll be featured in a new movie, Blond Obsession, a takeoff on Truth or Dare, and has a smaller part in a movie called Blast ‘Em that’ll be out in September.
