Gay men are the unsung heroes of the child beauty pageant circuit

Swan Brooner, featured in the controversial documentary Living Dolls: The Making of a Child Beauty Queen

From the outside, the Clarion in Louisville, Kentucky, seems like any other chain hotel in a midsize Southern city: The parking lot, dotted with minivans, abuts a Dairy Queen Grill & Chill restaurant on one side and a Hummer dealership on the other. But for a few days each year, the Clarion's doors are a portal to another world, that of the Enchanting Stars National.

Enchanting Stars is a children's beauty contest—part of a storied and robust Southern tradition incomprehensible to outsiders, who have called kiddie pageants everything from weirdly inappropriate to downright perverse.

For some gay Southern men, child pageantry has offered them a livelihood, acceptance, and a venue in which to practice their considerable talents. It has also brought them excessive amounts of scornAfter years of media scrutiny, pageant people are press shy in the extreme. Parents have been known to go berserk at the sight of alien cameras, and ballroom doors like those at the Clarion are checkpoints impassable to all but registered contestants and their families. It is, of course, a form of show business, but unlike most in entertainment, pageant professionals fight their flashbulb-seeking impulses and tend to shun publicity. And though they are the most influential figures in this rarefied world of spray-tanned toddlers and sequined seven-year-olds, gay men are far and away pageantry's most elusive breed.

When veterans of the pageant process talk about its merits, they emphasize the gains to the young girls who compete: poise, confidence, and sociability are just some of the many dividends (not to mention wicked expertise with hair curlers and eyelash glue). But some gay Southern men have benefited in equal measure from child pageantry: It has offered them a livelihood, acceptance, and a venue in which to practice their considerable talents. It has also brought them excessive amounts of scorn.

The men of the Southern pageant world live out loud, as I found when I first tried to contact them. Nashville resident and emcee extraordinaire Tim Whitmer (also known as the Voice of Pageants) doesn't have voice mail—at least that's not what he calls it. "You've reached Tim's hotline!" he exclaims on his phone's message, outgoing in more ways than one. Michael Butler, one of the circuit's most sought-after makeup artists, doesn't even speak on his machine in Alabama; instead, an extended cut from Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" plays before the beep.

And callers are encouraged to "Have a winning day!" when they reach the voice mail of Florida's Michael Galanes, pageantry's hardest-working multihyphenate. (He coaches more than 300 title-seekers, produces a full slate of contests throughout the country, and also appears a "den mother" on MTV's Making the Band.)