She had cleaned houses seven days in a row. Her knee ached from falling, and she couldn’t afford a garment bag to carry her costumes from Fresno, California, to Los Angeles, but Elsie Saldaña had waited decades for her big break, so she packed her clothes in white trash bags, and headed into the Silver Lake bar where she was the night’s headline performer.
Earlier that week, Saldaña had received a letter from the Guinness Book of World Records, officially naming her the world’s oldest drag king. She was 81, decades older than the other women who would perform as men that night. But her hips still moved well enough that an audience member had asked a month earlier if they were surgically enhanced.
Saldaña wore a little makeup to hide her wrinkles, and she dyed her hair black, but the hips were natural. If she swiveled them right tonight, she thought, maybe she’d charm a few women.
She climbed a flight of stairs to the dressing area, and hung her trash bags on a metal shelf. Saldaña had been in Los Angeles for less than 24 hours, and already she had missed her nap and tripped face-first into a sidewalk curb, scraping both her nose and her knee. The fall had zapped her confidence and her energy, and she worried she would let the crowd down that night.
“I’m nervous,” she told another king. “My knees are shaking.”
The show was a gay bar revue — “The History of Drag Kings,” dating back to, well, Saldaña herself. Downstairs, the night’s emcee played a song written for the show’s finale. Saldaña leaned over the railing to listen to the lyrics — “from drag to gender free and now we’re on TV!”
Saldaña had never been on television. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” didn’t premiere until Saldaña was in her mid-60s, and even then, it was all queens and no kings. The first show for women like her debuted last year. Saldaña worried she was running out of time. She was born too early to have the life she longed for, but desire didn’t disappear with age.
She untied the first trash bag. In her regular life, Saldaña filled similar bags with other people’s refuse, but tonight she pulled out a royal blue western suit — a gift from another drag king. It was gorgeous, newly pressed and more vivid than anything else Saldaña owned.
She slipped it on, and the sad, exhausted woman that was Elsie Saldaña began to transform. She was El Daña now.
“Okay,” she said to her own reflection. “I’m ready for my number.”
Frank Sinatra in the fields
Saldaña became a male impersonator without ever having seen one. It was 1965. She was a month shy of her 21st birthday, and as soon as she heard there was a gay bar in Fresno with lip sync shows, she begged the owner to let her audition with Richie Valens’s “La Bamba.”
There were no drag kings in central California then, no nearby gay role models at all, unless you count the boys in San Francisco who considered themselves female impersonators. But Saldaña did not need a guide to become herself. She had four brothers, and as long as she could remember, she’d worn their clothes and mimicked their movements. In the fields where she and her family picked figs and cotton, she imagined herself as Frank Sinatra crooning for a crowd.
Her throat tightened as she climbed the stage that first time, but once the record started, her hips took over and soon, the bar owner had guaranteed her a monthly performance.
The six decades that passed between Saldaña’s first performance and her most recent were, on balance, more depressing than joyful. She fell in love and raised a son, but he died in his 20s. She worked blue-collar jobs nearly every day of the week, and lip-synched on weekends. When she reached her mid-60s without having found fame, she decided to take a break from the thing she loved most. Saldaña worked and she grieved, and she tried not to think of the acclaim she didn’t have.
But fortune doesn’t always favor the young. In 2020, when Saldaña was 75, she talked about her life in drag on NPR’s podcast “StoryCorps.” All of a sudden, people were more interested in her than they’d ever been before. Out Magazine named her to its list of the 100 most influential gay people. New booking offers arrived. The career she thought was over suddenly flourished.
In costume, Saldaña becomes herself
While Saldaña waited for her turn onstage in Los Angeles, she looked around the dressing room. So much had changed since she first did “La Bamba.” The show’s organizer, Mo B. Dick, had appeared in drag in a John Waters movie. And Buck Wylde, a king in town from Dallas, had competed in the first drag king reality show. The other performers had contoured their faces into masculine looks. They’d glued on mustaches and outfitted themselves in ornate costumes — matadors, the pope. Saldaña didn’t draw on sideburns or facial hair. She looked, mostly, like a fancier version of herself.
“I don’t know if I can compete,” she said to herself. “I hope I do good.”
She adjusted her cowboy hat with a sigh, and Buck Wylde stopped to tell Saldaña how great she looked.
“We’ve got to get you down to Texas,” Wylde said. “They would love you there.”
Saldaña perked up.
“I would love to perform in Texas,” she said.
For just a moment, Saldaña couldn’t help but imagine a life where she traveled the country and entertained full time. She received regular Social Security checks and worked nearly every day, but the money never went far enough. Most mornings, she cried on her way to clean houses. Saldaña wasn’t sure she’d ever earn enough to stop scrubbing other people’s floors.
Downstairs, a drag king named Malcolm Xtasy finished a set, and the organizer told the crowd that a very special headliner was up next.
“This Mexican American male impersonator has been performing since 1965. That was the year I was born, actually, so it’s pretty cool,” Mo B. Dick said. “Please welcome to the stage El Daña!”
The Glen Campbell ’70s honky-tonk tune “Bonaparte’s Retreat” played, and Saldaña bounced out like it was 1965. She snapped. She spun. She boot-scooted across the stage, and the crowd threw fistfuls of dollar bills at her feet. They whooped when she blew kisses, but she couldn’t help feeling like her performance wasn’t up to par. Could the audience tell how tired she was?
She allowed herself a half bow, and during intermission, she mingled. Nearly everyone there was a man — either cis or transgender — but she flirted with a handful of women who’d filled a table near the back, and chatted with a pair of TV executives who created the drag king reality show. She gave a card to everyone whose eye she caught, certain that somehow tonight would make or break her.
By the time intermission ended, Saldaña felt energized. She slid the western suit into its trash bag, then untied the other bag and pulled out a pair of fake leather pants. She was doing Tom Jones next.
He was her favorite singer, flashy and sexy, all the things she still wanted to be. Saldaña shimmied into the pants. Usually, she wore a pair of heeled boots for her Tom Jones numbers, but she worried she might fall again, so she opted for black “comfort shoes.”
“Tom Jones wears these kinds of shoes sometimes,” Saldaña said to herself. He was 85 now, and women still found him sexy, no matter the shoes he wore onstage.
“I can still swoon women,” she said, and for the first time all night, she sounded as if she believed it. Saldaña wiggled her hips, then said a short prayer.
“Good lord, give me strength,” she whispered. “Send me a couple of angels to help me with my dancing.”
“Love Me Tonight” started just as she said amen. She slid toward center stage, and for three minutes, everything else disappeared. Her knee didn’t hurt. Her energy didn’t flag. She forgot the trash bags and the grief and the money she didn’t have. The crowd stood and cheered, and Saldaña knew she was a star.
Half the audience wanted a selfie or fashion advice, and by the time she made it back to the dressing room, it was three hours past her normal bedtime.
“I’m so happy,” she told the other kings. “That’s all I want. I want to have happiness in my life.”
She nestled her outfits back into their trash bags. In the morning, she would catch the train to Fresno, and she would once again be Elsie Saldaña, the house cleaner. But maybe — just maybe — someone else would call to book her. She’d be El Daña again, for a minute or as long as she had left.
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