by Erin Donaghue The young man who had been standing on the tables, shouting and clapping to the music just a few minutes before, doesn't look quite so confident now that he is on the stage, sitting in a wooden chair at the mercy of the cabaret performer in stilettos. “Miss Martina,” sporting a short black wig and fishnet stockings, flaunts her dominance over the squirming kid, circling him with mocking interest like a cat about to attack.
The audience grows wilder with each bar of the driving, aggressive beat. Patting his face smartly, she presses a wine flute full of water to his mouth and tips it, forcing him to drink. Water spills down the front of his shirt. The kid lifts his wet face and squints into the bright lights, swatting away the pungent mist from the smoke machine, and the act reaches its wild conclusion. The performer jumps into his lap and kicks her legs high into the air, forming a perfect V with her body, a bold flourish that exclaims Voila! There's just one catch to the act of feminine dominance she has just completed: the performer is actually a male. The performance is in Prague's premier travesti (drag) club, Tingl Tangl.
By day, Miss Martina has a desk job, a la Clark Kent. But it takes a little more than a phone booth to complete the transformation into her near-superhuman alter ego. Performers spend hours creating their female stage personae—a process that is mental as well as physical. Within the attractive performance space of Tingl Tangl, beneath the gaze of international audience members, men dress themselves as women to create interactive art that presents traditional gender roles in a new light. But for some, drag or cross dressing is not just a performance—it's an integral part of their gender identities. And in the harsher context of Czech society, transgendered people have a more perplexing plight.
 “Transgendered” is the broader term that describes the condition when someone's clinical sex is an inaccurate or incomplete description of that person's gender identity. “Transsexuality and transvestity are relatively well-defined disturbances of sexual identification or role,” says Dr. Jaroslav Zvěřina at the Charles University Institute of Sexology.
In many cases, surgical modification can be an important part of the “transformation” process. “We have two girls here that were men before. They underwent the whole process of transforming into girls, ladies. The operation, and surgery, all that,” says Tingl Tangl manager Jan Janata. “A lot of ladies here want to do that—to try to get to that gender somehow.”
Those who do undergo sexual reassignment surgery join a growing group of people in the Czech Republic (now around 1,000) known as transsexuals. About six to 10 of these surgeries are performed here yearly, and the majority of surgeries here are actually female to male, according to Dr. Zvěřina. But the Czech community can at times be less than welcoming. In a society where gender roles are heavily defined, the tendency is to look away from the interests of the transgendered community, resulting in a sense of social isolation. “Certainly there are some people (in the Czech Republic) who still don't get it,” Janata says.
Enter Transforum —the first official organization for transgendered people in Central and Eastern Europe, which was founded in 1998. Transforum's mandate is to “break the isolation within the society” for transgendered people and to “explain to broad audiences the problem of transsexuality and transvestism.” The group organizes political action initiatives and a support network for transgendered people. Transforum also picks up where the travesti performances leave off by working toward a political and social space for transgendered people within the Czech community. But the gender-bending performances at Tingl Tangl have their own function in promoting the rights of transgendered people. The larger-than-life drag personalities that bring the space to life on Wednesdays and weekends proclaim loud and clear that drag is an in-your-face presence in Prague. “It's an interactive show,” Janata says. “You never know what to expect.”
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