jislaaik! bob’s your aunty

By Bobby Jordan (Source: Sunday Times)

August 1, 2006: Dainti Delischia is the moffamorphic embodiment of SA’s frangipane fringe.

As a woman he’s absolutely hideous. Glitter-green mascara two inches thick, blowjob-red lipstick, polystyrene tits, flaming beehive hairdo tall enough to down a Boeing.

But as a man Charles Whiley is a gentleman in stiff-collared shirts who says things like “marvelous” and “how fabulous” and “I’m really a caring person, you know.”

As a woman he says things like “Well, I’ve had 300 lovers since last Thursday,” as he sits on your lap and squashes his polystyrene tits in your face. When he stands up, his sequined dress hoinked above his knee, the audience roars like a revivalist church gone apeshit — converts to the world of Dainti Delischia, the Queen of Drag.

“Dainti says things that Charles never would,” is how Charles explains it, almost embarrassed now.

One wonders what Dainti would have to say about that.

As Charles he is 70, a coy, effeminate, wrinkling former lawyer turned drag artist living in a cosy house in Joburg. As Dainti he is exactly 27, born at the Sun City Superbowl during the 1989 Million Dollar Golf Challenge, now drag icon and up and coming mascot of Gay SA.

If you’ve never heard of her you’re probably too straight.

Fact is, Charles Whiley, with his 10kg wig bag, his make-up kit, his heels, his four-inch fake eyelashes, his pearl earrings, his varieties of blush and base, his assortment of sexy strapless numbers from his considerable gender-bender wardrobe that completes an eye-catching transmogrification, is a bit of everything.

That goes for his gender, philosophy, bracelets, profession and life story. It’s what has made him one of South Africa’s top drag queens, a prolific performer at corporate functions, on stage at festivals, on top of dining room tables at surprise parties — Dainti pops up at the strangest places. She’s also one of the only drag queens around to have her own column — in the gay monthly, Exit.

And like all grande dames, she’s more popular the older she gets. At the Pink Loerie Mardi Gras in Knysna this year, she was a hit, a sensation, a marvel in mauve, pink and burnt orange: the mincing, masquerading, moffamorphic embodiment of gay pride and of South Africa’s fast-growing frangipani fringe.

Dainti Delischia — she’s everywhere: in the front row of the beauty pageant; on stage under a marquee; bringing up the rear of the Pride march on the back of a twin-cab mega-wheeler and yelling to a festival crowd. “Have some fun darling”, or “Looking good doll. Want summa me?”

Loathe her, lust after her, lick her cherry lips — Dainti Delischia is the drag-a-delic queen of the boerewors vlakte, and beyond.

How does she do it? How does he do it? How does a pap-en-vleis Sarf Efrikan laaitie turn into Evita Bezuidenhout’s wicked fairy godmother in a C-cup and pumps parading down the hoofstraat of a small coastal town in mid-winter with a band of lawyers, accountants, gym instructors — whatevers — dressed up in feathers, leathers, lace-ups, lace-downs, plastic, polyurethane and fairy wings? The mind boggles.

Not that anybody’s complaining; the only other people marching down streets these days throw rocks through shop windows. Dainti and her pink army blow kisses and throw streamers.

Chatting to me across the breakfast table, Charles — no sign of Dainti, it’s still 10am — divulges the surprising truth: parading in wigs and pink glitter is all about being normal.

“Our Constitution isn’t going to change attitudes towards gay people; the gay community has to change the straight attitude towards us,” says Charles, his hands in a flap.

“I don’t believe we need to march about it. We need to celebrate our identity and have a party.”

To show straights that gays can also run and jump and hold hands and sit at coffee shops eating muffins and jam. To show that society will still be okay, probably a little more interesting. And if that means dressing up like a brandewyn Barbie from the ’30s, then so be it.

Says Dainti: “For us this is about being able to feel normal, about a gay couple being together normally like any other couple. It’s really not that easy.”

In fact, Dainti Delischia was born in captivity, a relic from the days when men acting like women was considered burlesque. Charles, then working for an events organiser in Joburg, found himself at Sun City for the gala dinner of the Million Dollar Golf Challenge. He was asked to dress up like a chick.

“I said you must be fucking out of your mind,” recalls Charles, “I said no ways am I going to wear a dress in public. But the spotlight was on me and that was my great moment.

By the end of the evening most of the world’s greatest golfers had danced with me.”

Things got weirder after that.

Dainti Delischia started to make appearances at Aids benefits and corporate parties. It was all a bit of a mind-flip for the son of a conservative magistrate who grew up skinning springbokkies and sucking nectar out of proteas in several platteland dorpies; who later ended up in the debt-collecting division of a Joburg law firm; for whom life in the closet was a fact of everyday life, and police harassment — homosexuality was illegal then — a regular concern; and for whom a boyhood visit to the neighbourhood psychologist (his family suspected he was weird) was a cathartic turning point.

Charles explains: “After about six or eight sessions the psychologist said, ‘My child, some people are born with brown eyes, some people are born with green eyes, and sometimes you get one with a brown and a green eye. So who’s going to tell your family?’”

Charles did eventually tell his family; it came as no big surprise, though no doubt there were some raised eyebrows the first time they saw Dainti, who by the mid-’90s was jiggling her bootie in and around Joburg at corporate gigs, restaurants, and even twice at the Civic Theatre.

The major turning point in Dainti’s career, however, came a few years later, when Charles was quoted in an article about the annual Gay Pride march in Joburg: “I said I don’t believe we need a march because I look at a march as a protest — we’ve got our rights now in the new Constitution. So I said what we need to do is to celebrate our freedom and have a party.”

The remark caught the attention of a Knysna entrepreneur, who came up with the idea of a Pink festival. In 2001 the Pink Loerie was born, with Dainti the unofficial mascot. Charles was flattered — and astounded: “If you’d told me 20 years ago that I would be able to go to a gay festival I would have said you must be mad.”

Six years later the Pink Loerie is bigger than ever, one of the county’s premier festivals, drawing visitors from Finland to Vereeniging. Knysna’s population swells to twice its normal size, and the town decks itself out in pink ribbons, gauze, garlands, petunias and polka dots. Homophobes huddle in coffee shops and mumble darkly into cappuccinos. Shopkeepers hang up rainbow flags and offer specials on oysters, rosé and pink bubbly. Then the parties start: the Pink Sunset Booze Cruise, the Queen of Clubs drag competition, the Love Muscle Party, FMO Men’s Underwear Showing. Then comes the float parade; locals start saying things like “She’s a lekker stuk hey!” or “But jislaaik! It’s a guy!”

All of which brings a rheumy look to Charles Whiley’s eyes, one smiling, one crying. “I like to make people laugh, to make their minds wander,” he muses.

Is drag a necessary subversion of gender roles and rules that blinker and obfuscate — that discombobulate? Charles would say so.

Dainti wouldn’t give a shit: where’s the party?

Will more drag queens and princesses and fairy godmothers pirouette out of the closet now that things are getting back to normal? Charles hopes so.

Dainti wonders when things were ever normal.