Leslie Einhorn doesn’t look like a man. Not even a little bit. By day, she directs a children’s theater program in San Francisco. By night, she sometimes transforms her 31-year-old femme self into Arty Fishal, a drag king alter ego who, at times, is so convincing that she has felt compelled to confess her true identity to cab drivers who address her as “sir.”

An actor and director, Einhorn has frequently performed at clubs in San Francisco, and she’s even taken her act to daytime television. She also teaches gender-bending classes at sex shops and theater companies. This summer, Einhorn is directing an all-drag production of the musical Bye Bye Birdie, starring the drag-king band The Woodyz, and someday she’d like to turn her act into a one-woman show.

Growing up in Indianapolis, Einhorn was a tomboy wannabe. “I was always really girly, but I loved tomboys and tried to be really tough,” she said. “But I couldn’t really pull it off, because ultimately I didn’t have the personality to back it up.” She later attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., where she was a theater major. “I wrote a paper on women who fought in the Civil War who passed [as men],” she said. “I was really more than interested — I was deeply titillated by it. It was probably the only thing I was drawn to besides acting.”

The first time Einhorn did drag, she had an epiphany of sorts. After college, she had moved to San Francisco, where she attended a “come as you’re not” party dressed as a man. “I hadn’t heard the term ‘drag king’ before,” she said. “I remember putting the mustache on in the bathroom mirror and just being so excited that my face could transform like that, and I felt completely different. I could just completely let go of who I was.” After that, she put her acting skills to work and began entering drag contests, where she was often one of the few nonbutch performers. In 1998, Einhorn won San Francisco’s Drag King title.

“The thing that I loved was what I got, being a man — the sense of entitlement and a sense of freedom from letting go of my own gender,” she said. “I’m really interested in how much we perform our genders and how, as women, we’re expected to behave in certain ways. You can realize so much about how you are socially, the ways you accommodate people, the ways you don’t get your needs met, and with men, it’s a whole different thing. That’s what feels so powerful to me.”

Einhorn also enjoys the funny aspects of drag. “I love camp,” she said. “Lesbians can be really serious, and gay men really know how to embrace kitsch and camp, though unfortunately so often I feel like with drag queens there’s this element of men making fun of women. Then here are these dykes that are dressing up as men and they say they feel so powerful and hot. It felt bad to me for a little bit, but gender is performative and funny. It’s always funny to let go of your gender — how could it not be funny?” she asks, noting that gender can be less humorous for people who feel they’ve been born into the wrong body.

Einhorn has worked her magic to turn women into men at Good Vibrations, the San Francisco Bay area sex-toy shop; through Women’s Will, an all-women’s Shakespeare company; and at LYRIC (Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center) in San Francisco. The Good Vibrations classes primarily target butch or transgendered lesbians who want to pass as men, while the Women’s Will classes are mostly directed at straight female actors playing male roles in one of the group’s shows. Her classes vary based on the audience; at Good Vibrations, Einhorn has taught an “arts and crafts” class that focused on the physical mechanics of passing. At Women’s Will, Einhorn helps her actor students get in touch with times when they’ve felt masculine, come up with words to describe those feelings and then create and get into male characters.

After Hilary Swank won an Academy Award for her performance as Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry, media interest in transgendered people surged, and Einhorn’s drag act started attracting mainstream attention. “It was really weird to me that popular media was making that jump,” she said. Einhorn was profiled in a newswire story sent out to media outlets, and then the television producers started calling. After a spot on Roseanne Barr’s talk show fell through, she was asked to appear on the Maury Povich show.

“That was when I learned that producers will be really big liars,” she said. “I was just so naïve about everything.” Einhorn was told she’d be featured on the program, but when she arrived in New York to film the episode, there were several other drag kings there, the gown they’d promised her didn’t fit, and everything was disorganized. When the drag kings went on (in drag), their microphones were modulated to disguise their voices and genders. But when Povich asked Einhorn a question, he put his nonmodulated microphone in front of her, and she blew her cover. “It was a really big mess. Of course, no one asked me any questions, like my philosophies, and it was very misrepresented — which, you know, I should have known,” she said.

But the experience taught Einhorn something. “I realized that every producer will say, ‘We are working on a very small budget,’ and they’re always doing things at the last minute, and you can always get more money.” When she got a call from The Other Half, a daytime talk show that pitches itself as portraying “the world of women through the eyes of men,” Einhorn had to draw on the entitlement talk she’d given to her students.

“At first, they were asking if I would do it for free, and they said, ‘It’s a new show, and it’ll reach thousands of people and it’ll be great publicity for you,’” she said. (The Other Half’s hosts include Dick Clark and Danny Bonaduce.) “But I was like, publicity for what? My goals in life are not to be a drag king, and you’re not going to let me promote anything that’s important to me.” She insisted the producers treat her like any other performer and pay her accordingly. “After teaching these classes where I say ‘Learn to take up space and feel entitled,’ I think it was really important just feeling, believing that you’re worth it,” she said. “If you believe it, they believe it.”

During her two appearances on The Other Half, Einhorn appeared as herself, although she was heavily preppified and de-tattooed by the show’s costume crew. “They made me look as heterosexual as possible. They did my hair and makeup like I was just a nice Jewish girl,” she said. “They even said they didn’t want to alienate women in the Midwest. My hair looked so pretty, even though I would have preferred to have been wearing glitter and fur. I still am big and Jewish and have colored hair, and I’m never really going to look normal.”

During the Other Half segments, Einhorn transformed a female actor into a man. “They wanted it to look like I teach these classes for women that are basically like Tupperware parties,” she said. The show’s producers also gave her a list of words she couldn’t say: it included gay, queer, homosexual, transgendered, transsexual, and drag. When she protested, the producers reminded Einhorn of her contract. “I really wanted to try to have some sense of myself and still work within the contract, and I feel like I succeeded more or less. I feel like I still look like a big freak, and much as I think they try to normalize it, I’m still talking about women dressing up as men,” she said.

Even when the TV shows haven’t gone exactly as she might have liked, Einhorn said they’ve allowed her to publicize a distinctly nonmainstream point of view. “I used to have a much more punk rock attitude about things, and now I can really be myself and work within the system and make things happen,” she said. “That’s what doing these mainstream television shows have been about. It’s not about furthering my drag career. It’s really about spreading freakiness out there, and gender play, and all that edginess and campiness, and doing it in a way it is not going to be dismissed because it’s so freaky.

“How do you make Dick Clark understand drag kings?” she asks. “I feel like I’ve done that,” she said. “I feel good about that.”

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