Not-so-tiny dancer: once you meet queer cross-dressing 6-foot-4 ballerina Joshua Grant, you'll never look at tutus the same way again.

Katerina Bychkova, the newest member of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the world-renowned and wildly popular all-male ballet company, is much sweeter in person than her name lets on. Perhaps that's because Katerina, her foreboding Slavic-sounding surname notwithstanding, has all the grace of a good Southern gentleman. In fact, Katerina is 23-year-old Georgia native Joshua Grant.

"What turned me on to Ballets Trockadero is that it combines three things that I love: ballet, drag, and travel," Grant says. "It also challenges me to do something completely different, to retrain my body to do feminine roles. I had to start looking at ballet from a whole new angle."

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, founded in 1974, is a globe-trotting company of professional male dancers that performs a full range of the ballet repertoire, with all the female roles performed by men--tutus, makeup, and curtsies included.

Having started ballet lessons at age 3, Grant was accepted at age 13 to the Harid Conservatory in Boca Raton, Fla., one of the country's premier ballet schools, where he danced in the afternoon after taking morning classes at a local high school. It was at Harid that Grant came out of the closet, which turned out to be a bit of a nonevent. "Being in ballet makes it pretty easy to come out," notes Grant. "Most of my friends were like, 'Yeah. And?'"

Before joining Trockadero this summer, Grant was dancing at the National Ballet of Canada in Toronto. At 6 foot 4, his impressive height actually worked against him. "I never really blended in there because I was twice the size of everyone else, and I started getting frustrated with ballet," Grant says. "Also, only a few of the other male dancers in Toronto were gay. To spice things up a little I started performing drag on the side at a local bar." His height, along with his flair for makeup, turned out to be an advantage at Ballets Trockadero, where he cuts a compelling figure as the tallest dancer in the troupe.

"We poke fun at ballet, but we are also very respected in the dance world," Grant says. "We're men dancing on pointe shoes, after all! And despite our big fan base in the gay community, our pieces aren't gay per se. In fact, the choreography is very traditional, very classical, not at all supercampy. The joke is in the presentation--in watching me, this tall guy, dancing the part of some tragic prima donna."