Men in Skirts

“MEN IN SKIRTS”

Monday of the Festival of Games in the highland Maya community of Chenalho’ there comes a sudden explosion of men dressed as women. Essential characters in the fiesta drama, they pray with the town’s religious officials, offer parodies of curing ceremonies, parade with figures of the saints brought from the church. “Blackmen,” adults and boys, their faces blackened with pine soot, portray many of the forces of disruption which have beset the town through centuries. When the cross-dressers flee, the Blackmen attempt to tangle them in ropes, lie down in the street in front of the church to trip them up.

Early in this century, poet Ambar Past took writer Carter Wilson along to see the holy clowns in drag of Chenalho’. Over eight years there together, Wilson and Past were prompted by actors like the Jungle Woman and the Mother of Mothers to take photographs and were assigned bit parts in a bawdy little play that comes along late in the day. In prose and pictures “Men in Skirts” offers readers a version of Wilson and Past’s experience and some strong suggestions about what the extraordinary events of Monday might mean,

In this lovingly told memoir, Carter Wilson evokes the sights, sounds, and flavors of the Festival of Games, an annual festival celebrated by Mayan villagers in the highlands of Chiapas. Based on repeated visits and friendships with the villagers, Wilson describes the days' long revelry in which men dressed as a cross between monkeys and French soldiers, evil spirits called the Blackmen, and figures named the Jungle Mother, the Abductress, and the Guatemalan Woman, all men wearing skirts, make appearances, and a procession of the saints is followed by a bawdy sexual burlesque in which genders and sexualities are flipped. Wilson offers keen insights into this criss-crossing of cultures and genders without resorting to the clotted jargon of today's "queer theory."