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"Drag Queens and Beauty Queens is the portrait of the gay community in Atlantic City seen through the lens of two beauty pageants, the iconic Miss America Pageant and its drag counterpart, the Miss'd America Pageant. Both originated and evolved in this oldest of America's resort towns. Beauty pageants are anything but trivial. As public spectacle, pageantry allows for the expression of oppositional values in a context that appears inconsequential, but they are actually highly charged performances of gender, deeply rooted in the social, political, and economic ideals contested within the culture of the time. Both the Miss America pageant and the Miss'd America pageant lie at the heart of gay life in Atlantic City, which centered around the once vibrant and now abandoned New York Avenue. The book contends that the Miss America pageant is admired by the gay community there in general and the gay male and drag community in particular because of its long-standing social and economic interactions with the town, and is understood by gays as essentially a camp performance. Drag Queens and Beauty Queens illustrates the immense influence that the Miss America Pageant had on the construction of gay identity in Atlantic City, and how gay Atlantic City has in turn "queered" the Miss America Pageant"--

Beauty contests --- Gay community --- Drag shows --- Drag balls --- Drag queens --- Drag kings --- Miss America Pageant. --- Miss'd America Pageant.