Star Search

Beauty pageants are perhaps the least gender-neutral of all sanctioned community rituals. Sure, you get the occasional beefcake-on-a-catwalk extravaganza to add a little balance to all the events teeming with docile, big-haired chicks with a penchant for mawkish speeches about world peace. But for the most part, conventional beauty and predictable entertainment ("Wind Beneath My Wings," anyone?) win out over true originality. That's perhaps why the Mr. and Miss GAPA Pageant has become such a prominent event in the gay Asian and Pacific Islander communities and beyond. Featuring bois, girls, and everything in between, the pageant is full of stereotype-walloping, tongue-in-cheek humor that lampoons the preening seriousness of your typical pageant yet doesn't compromise the fabulousness of its contestants. Tita Aida, resident transgender queen of the catwalk and doyenne of love advice, takes the stage as hostess, while Mr. and Miss GAPA 2007, Katu Tubo and Buka Kay!, bestow tiaras upon their lucky successors. This year's theme is "the future," and while spacesuits and kinky skits about aliens might figure into that, contestants will also be expected to offer their take on how the gay API community can take it to the next level — politically, artistically, and socially — in the coming years. Of course, in order to know where you're going, you gotta remember where you came from, and since it's the event's 20th anniversary, the night includes a reunion of past pageant belles who paved the way for API gender-benders everywhere.
Sat., July 19, 7 p.m., 2008