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Galanes, the Floridian pageant mogul and self-styled "King of Queens," feels that almost all of the media exposure that child pageants have received has been unfair. "People see a four-year-old child in excessive hair and makeup and immediately conclude that that's wrong," he explains. "But that's a very shallow interpretation. These girls grow, become more articulate, make friends, and come out of their shy shells."

Addressing what is the long-lived elephant in the room in any serious conversation about pageants—the 1996 murder of JonBenét Ramsey—Galanes makes a point: "If JonBenét had been a Brownie, would the Brownies have gotten all the bad press that pageants did?"

Casting aspersions on child pageants and the adults who make a living from them is shooting fish in a barrel. It is so easy that it has become boring—and it is indeed in many ways unfairUltimately, casting aspersions on child pageants and the adults who make a living from them is shooting fish in a barrel. It is so easy that it has become boring—and it is indeed in many ways unfair. As alien as they may seem to coastal sophisticates—the same people who look down their noses at NASCAR and Billy Ray Cyrus—children's pageants have served an important role in the lives of Southerners of a certain class, people whom Los Angeles television producers and New York journalists tend to mock. "There are a lot of tacky redneck people in this business," admits Michael Booth, the makeup artist. But in truth, many of the participants have been short of educational opportunities, and also have had a hard time finding another venue in which their supersized personalities are accepted.

I meet Ray Smith at the Louisville Clarion, where several dozen girls are competing for $15,000 in prize money offered by the Enchanting Stars pageant. We speak in my hotel room, discussing the pageant world above the din of children squealing and stampeding in the hallway outside. It is the night before competition, and excitement is in the air.

Smith, 41, has judged children's pageants in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Indiana for close to a decade, and was briefly featured in the VH1 special. With a mustache—and without industry-standard blond highlights—he is somewhat more sedate in appearance than his colleagues in pageantry, perhaps because his role is not to promote or glamorize, but instead to evaluate.

When Smith was 19 years old, he was a high school dropout with few prospects, having grown up the youngest of four in Portland, a Louisville neighborhood that was very much on the wrong side of the tracks. "It was no place for a young gay man," he recalls.

His mother worked a minimum wage job to support her children, and his father was out of the picture. Through a friend's lesbian sister, Smith heard that a Louisville gay bar, the Downtowner, was searching for a male performer to complement its revue of female impersonators. "I was interested, considering that my family was pretty destitute and I had no education," he recalls. "I thought, Well, I can sing. That is one thing I can do." For two years Smith belted out numbers on stage, his act climaxing in a killer George Michael impersonation.