When we got upstairs and climbed out the window she immediately perched on a thin, rusting rail, nothing but the air vivid with piss and subway steam at her back, and told me her name was Lyca. She stretched her legs out, like a dreaming cat, to rest her feet on a rung of the escape ladder. A carnival of drag queens gathered below, mingling with female starlets -- all of them background scenery for the film, a diva rainbow of sequins and feathers, teal and magenta and diamond white. "They're so beautiful," Lyca said. "The men even more than the women. You can tell the men because they're so exaggerated, they're too feminine to be real. If a woman made herself that fabulous, she'd just look cheap and fake." She spoke with a slight lisp that gave her speech a quality of daffy innocence. "I admire them. Drag queens, fashion models, people like that," I said. "Maybe it's shallow, but they're searching for beauty like anyone else. They don't know what it is or where it is, but until they find it they're just going to make themselves as beautiful as they can."
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