La Cueva: the oldest Latino drag club in the country has done much to change attitudes in Chicago's Mexican community.

IT IS A.M. on a Saturday night, and the crowd at La Cueva is going wild. Lines form at the sides of the stage as adoring gay and straight men and women wait their chance to stuff bills in the gold-spangled bikini of a shapely transgender dancer gyrating and lipsyncing joyously to salsa music.

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La Cueva, a signless, inconspicuous club on a vibrant but gritty stretch of 26th Street--the main drag of Chicago's Mexican community La Villita--is by many accounts the oldest existing Latino drag club in the country. And the show "Miss Ketty's Latina Review," hosted by Puerto Rican transgender diva Ketty Teanga, is known as one of the genre's pioneering acts.

The room is packed late at night every Thursday through Sunday for Miss Ketty's shows. The crowd, mostly Latino, is a mix of slickly-dressed young professionals, older straight couples cuddling at tables, groups of lesbians on their weekly night out, gay couples who make out on the dance floor and some of the city's top salsa and cumbia dancers. Latino drag and transgender revues like Miss Ketty's are now popular throughout Chicago and other cities around the country. But in Chicago, most of them are on the whiter, wealthier north side of the city and draw an audience of that type.

La Cueva is right in the heart of the city's working-class Mexican community, and the wild popularity of the show demonstrates how things have changed over the past two decades, how many Latinos from all walks of life have dropped macho and homophobic attitudes toward transgender and gay Latinos and embraced scenes like that at La Cueva.

"We used to have to run from the cab to the club" because of intimidation and violence from homophobic gang members on 26th Street, says Teanga. "It was a taboo thing then," agrees Willie Gaitan, who has been with the show for 18 years and is known for wearing the skimpiest outfits. "You couldn't even walk around in a wig, or you'd be asking for trouble. So much has changed since then."

Teanga, now 59, grew up as a young man between Puerto Rico and New York, with parents who were factory workers on Coney Island. "At the time it was so hard for young boys" to come out, she recalls. "We suffered so much." She really found her stride around age 16 in Puerto Rico, where she (he at the time) started dancing salsa in drag at a club called The Little Parrot. Teanga returned to New York and danced in clubs including La Escuelita, the Jukebox Revue and the 82 Club several years later, bringing her Latin flavor to American drag shows. In both Puerto Rico and New York, she was adored inside the clubs but had to be constantly vigilant on the street because of harassment from police and bigots.

"If they found out you were a female impersonator they would be really mad," she reports. "The police would always bother us, stop us and ask for our IDs."

When she went to clubs as a patron rather than a dancer, she had to pass as either a straight man or a woman (something she was able to pull off even pre-surgery) or risk getting thrown out. There were not many clubs where openly gay men were welcomed in the 1960s.

But that's different now, obviously, and at least in Chicago, Teanga thinks she and her show have played a major role in changing attitudes in the Latino community.

"There used to be no acceptance of us in the Spanish community," she says. "But we showed them how much talent we have."

Teanga moved to Chicago in the 1970s, began surgery and hormone treatments, and asked the owner of a popular La Villita night club called El Infierno to take a chance on letting her host a show. It took off, and when it outgrew the space, the owner, Juan "Juanita Banana" Alanis, moved it to another club he owned--La Cueva.

Achy Obejas, a well-known Cuban-American author and journalist based in Chicago, remembers going to La Cueva as a teenager in the 1980s.

"I was experimenting with sexuality at the time, and this place had all the elements that would really draw me somewhere," recalls Obejas. "It was very much off the beaten path. Back then, it had a real sense of danger to it. And these are the most dramatic drag queens known to humankind."

Obejas is glad La Cueva has enjoyed a sea change in tolerance and community support while maintaining its edginess and unique character.

"It's become this zone of tolerance where you have gay people and straight people," she asserts. "Most of the downtown bars are geared toward straight people, they reaffirm straightness and gender roles, and it's a touristic experience for people, a safe experience cast as something exotic and gay that really reflects comforting (straight) gender roles. La Cueva is different. It's not a common place."

The experience of Ruben Lechuga, who took over the club after Alanis returned to Mexico to take care of his parents, is an example of how La Cueva and Teanga's show have increased awareness and understanding in the local community. Lechuga started coming to La Cueva in the early 1990s as a liquor distributor. He had heard about the club growing up as a teenager in the area and was always curious about it but afraid to venture in, "since I'm not gay, and I didn't know what went on there," he says.

During his frequent visits to sell liquor to El Infierno and La Cueva, he became friends with Alanis, Teanga and some of the dancers, and soon he was coming to La Cueva as a patron as well as a businessman.

"My wife knew that if I wasn't home at 2 a.m., I must be at La Cueva," he says. When Alanis asked him to take over the club and oversee Teanga's show, he was initially reluctant.

"I didn't know if they would accept me," he says of the transgender dancers. "But they were wonderful, they took me in. This place has changed my view of the gay community. Before (the liquor distributorship) assigned me here, I didn't know anything about the gay community except from TV and hearing people make fun of gays. This has opened my mind."

There is a long tradition of drag and transgender dance revues in Mexican cities. Many of the dancers in Teanga's show come from clubs in Mexico City or Acapulco, where there are drag shows throughout the night and day in some large clubs. As La Cueva and the show have gotten more popular, many of the performers have been able to stop working in factories or other grueling jobs that sustain working-class immigrants and focus on their art full time.

"Everything has changed in the scene and my personal life," reports Gaitan, who started dancing in Puerto Rico and had surgery after arriving in Chicago in the 1980s. "This used to be something we would do for fun, but now we can do it as a lifestyle. I've lived my life day by day and let things fall into place. When I come on stage and see their mouths just drop ... I love it."

Kari Lyderson is a staff writer at the Washington Post's Midwest bureau.