Posted 4/26/2008 @ 12:44:00 PM by aerosmithrock.com

Steve Tyler wears tight pants and scarves. Sometimes he wears poofy shirts to maximize his sexual mystique. His studied androgyny makes up a crucial part of his appeal to the rock masses. He's just masculine enough to rope in the crucial screeching young female demographic while and just enough like a woman to draw in the massive, hardly tapped latent homosexual market. The exuberantly prancing Tyler consciously plays upon this tension with his faintly absurd array of colorful panchos and scarves generally favored by overweight and aging women.

The song Dude (Looks Like a Lady) isn't really about a transvestite that Tyler nearly became intimately involved with backstage. It's clearly about him and his rock image. He keeps his face shaved to a soft shine, like that of a boy or a woman. His heroin carved body lacks a noticeably male muscle build, and he favors the higher, more feminine vocal tones. Even if they didn't quite realize it while they were writing up the song, in such a popular multi-million dollar band, every single aspect of their performance is studied down the the smallest detail.

The lyrics are passive aggressive towards transsexuals. He expresses shock in the second stanza:

"Backstage we're having the time
of our lives until somebody say
Forgive me if I seem out of line
Then she whipped out of her gun
tried to blow me away"

By the end of the song, he's accepted his transgendered object of affection as a worthy partner:

"What a funky lady
She like it like it like it like that
He was a lady"

The mass success of Aerosmith and many other bands demonstrates that drag acts can accumulate mass success if they avoid branding themselves as such. Steve Tyler dresses like a woman, but never wears lipstick or exclusively identifiable feminine clothing. He draws his performance energy from the tension of the Dude / Lady dichotomy.

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