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Dissecting the Chicken with Pollo Del Mar

By Jovan Rocha

Posted October 30, 2008

Glamazon Maneater Pollo Del Mar has delighted our community with her looks, jokes, and trivia questions, but who is behind the make-up? What makes Pollo del Mar such a prominent figure in the gay community, after all she has 445 friends on facebook.com, which means a lot of loving. We've all partied with her, had her mock us, and watch her eat like there's no tomorrow, so I set off on a quest to find out more about who Pollo del Mar is.

So after stalking Pollo del Mar one drunken night at club Adonis, I got her to agree for an interview. We met a crazy hot afternoon, and as I greet her on the sidewalk, two really hot guys are walking by, one of them shirtless and Pollo says, "I love the heat because I can check out guys" and then proceeded to whistle to one of the guys to which I cant stop laughing hysterically and this is how the mood was set for our interview. Now onto the dissecting.

JR: So to start off, tell me about Pollo Del Mar? What's the concept behind her?

PDM: Initially there was no concept because of the fact it was supposed to be a one-time thing. She was kind of loosely based on Anna Nicole Smith, who I just adore, you know big blonde, big tits, bimbo, white trash but beautiful and still think she [Pollo] falls along those lines because of the look of Pollo. One of the things I've really worked to is blend all the kinds of different drag that I've been exposed to, there is definitely a Trannyshack type of influence where a lot of what she does is very messy, performance wise, but her look can fall more along the lines of what you might imagine an imperial type of look: pageant hair, pageant make-up; a lot of my clothing is not quiet as extravagant or off beat as something you might see at Trannyshack so I think that a generalized idea.

JR: Talking about Trannyshack how was your experience as Miss Trannyshack Star Search and Miss Trannyshack 2007, what prompted you to run for both titles in the same year?

PDM: So the Star Search title is given to a person who is making their big solo debut at Trannyshack and I was really interested in that title and inspired to run for it because my drag mother Landa Lakes had won it in 2005 and at the time in 2006 when I first started performing one of the people who was very nice to me during that period of time and who inspired me as a performer was Holy McGrail, so for me the title was a way to make a big splash at Trannyshack right away. I remember a lot of people were putting a lot of pressure on me, Coco Canal who is my drag sister, was Miss Trannyshack 2005 and she was like "gurl you gotta win this!" and even though Landa Lakes wasn't putting a lot of pressure on me I felt a lot of pressure to win. So going into it I put a lot of pressure on myself and then I got to the competition and there was 16 other people competing, it was the biggest contest in Trannyshack's history, 17 of us, and I was like "this is never gonna happen" and the best I could hope to do was go out there and be memorable. The interesting thing was that I mentioned this Anna Nicole type of character; I say in my head that it was Anna Nicole but I know outwardly people were saying Divine or lots of influence from Peaches Christ, the look at that time was more extreme and then lots of big blonde her and pretty, that was my shtick and when I competed I went completely different, I was a corpse and the make-up was really stark and very different. One of the most memorable things that has happened to me was when I was done with that performance Heklina who does not doll out compliments at all, she is as cheap with compliments as she is with her money, said over the microphone "I think we've just seen the birth of a Trannyshack superstar" and I just got chills just remembering, it was huge for me and I've been performing since April of that year and that was in December and so it happen so quick but it felt like a long time in the coming because I had my eyes on that contest for a long time.

Fast forward almost a year when the pageant rolled around in 2007 and I knew that I was gonna do that pageant no matter what, its an old story now but its true, the first time I performed somebody looked at me and said "you know what with your look you can totally be Miss Trannyshack one day" and that never left my head. That was April 27th 2006 and from that day until November 17th 2007 when I competed in that pageant there was not a day that went by when I didn't think, "I'm going to compete for Miss Trannyshack". I didn't think I was going to win and when they announced the winner I was shocked, you can see it on my face, it didn't registered. I came off the stage that night after performing and I was sobbing, just sobbing and Putanesca said "gurl why are you crying? You just rocked it out there" and I said "because of the fact that whether I win or loose I've been looking to this night for a year and a half and my dreams came true, just competing" and its cliché to say that but it was just a huge honor to be in that pageant and the reason I'm so proud that I won its because the people who competed against me were amazing, performers of all styles and shapes and looks, and there was literally something for everyone in that pageant and that night out of those 8 girls the judges picked me and I still get chills.

JR: Nice, that was very cool. I know you ran for Miss Gay San Francisco and Miss Desperate Diva, is there any other titles you plan to run for or run again for? Or are you done?

PDM: I'm definitely not done I can tell you that, that's very clear to me. I come from the Midwest and the pageant scene there is huge, there's a pageant every other week somewhere, and the bars have titleholders. There's every style of drag and they can all compete and its very competitive and, I'm very competitive to begin with, I like to push myself, to challenge myself and see what I can and cant do, that's where Heklina accuses me of being an old school pageant queen, she's like "you're nothing but an old school pageant queen" and maybe to some degree I am because I like competition it makes thrive and when I ran for Miss Gay, again, I had no expectation of winning. It was in August of 2006 and I've been performing for 3 months and I did it because I wanted to experience it and more than anything I wanted that community of people, the imperial council and the people who follow the Miss Gay title, to know who I was, to introduce myself in a very formal way and it did that. Through the pageant I met Mercedes Munroe, who won and blew out of the water, she's such a professional. She became such a close friend of mine, and my drag evolved so much from meeting her. A lot of the way I look now is from watching her paint her face, and asking, "how do you do that? How do you get those tits?" you know what I mean.

For Miss Desperate Diva I built my first year of drag on being Miss October 2007 for the Desperate Divas Calendar and with that you compete and I won Miss Congeniality. As much as for other titles I get asked at least four times a week if I'm going to run for Empress and that's not even until January of next year that the contest would take place and my public answer is this, and you can put this on you column, I know already whether or not I'm running for Empress and I think its great that people are asking me because it means that either they want to support me if I do run or that they're aware that I have at least the qualifications and ambition to do that, and I think they're right. My ego wants to say that if I choose to run I want it to be a competition so I really encourage them if they don't want me as Empress to keep me from it. I think a title is only worth as much as the competition that's put into winning it. I look at what Landa Lakes just did becoming Grand Duchess and that title is worth more now than it's been in a long time because people were talking about it and there was interest in that race and it made people come to the polls. Titles like Grand Duchess and Empress are both elected by the people in the community and if I chose to run for the title I think I'd be a fabulous representative of our community..

JR: How did you end up in the cast of "The Golden Girls: The Play" along side Heklina and Cookie Dough? I'm a huge fan of the Golden Girls and when I heard about the play being performed in drag and that it's coming back in December of this year I got really excited.

PDM: The Golden Girls has been one of the best experiences I've ever done. Because of the fact that prior to the Golden Girls I've never really done stage acting, I believe that yes I'm a drag queen but I'm also an actor because I play a role and the role of Pollo is very consistent. How I got involved is a couple of years ago when I was really new in the scene in December of 2006, Heklina called me completely out of the blue and said "hey gurl I've got this Christmas parties I wanna go to, would you be interested in going with me?" and I said sure. So we went to the parties and one of the venues that the party was being held at was a private home and they started talking about having done some kind of production in this home, like a play in this person's home a few years before for small audiences and I said to Heklina "what would you think if we did an all drag version of the Golden Girls" and she looked at me like I was an idiot and she was like "gurl we did that like 3 years ago or something, where were you? Were you under a rock?" and I was like "no I was in rehab I didn't know, I lost all touch with what was going on" and this planted the seed in my head that if you guys have done this before we can totally do it again. That night came to a close and I said, "If you ever decide to do this again I want to be involved in some way, shape, or form. I want to be part of it because it sounds so incredible" and as I said I tend to be a very tenacious, driven person so once a week for three and a half months, maybe twice a week sometimes, I sent Heklina and e-mail saying "hey have you thought about doing the Golden Girls?" "Hey gurl I'm really interested in doing the Golden Girls" so finally, literally, she was like "get off my back, we're going to do it and we'll put you in it" well when they told me that they wanted to make me one of the Golden Girls I was blown away because I was still very new in the scene, I thought I was going to be a secondary character or maybe like dressing them or whatever. When they cast me as Rose I was pretty overwhelmed, it was fantastic. Initially I was supposed to be Blanche, it's a funny thing because in the actual show they cast Betty White as Blanche and then they said no this is too much like a character she's played before so we're going to cast her as Rose and the same thing with me they were like we're gonna cast you as Blanche and then they said no we've decided this other person would be a better Blanche, you're going to be Rose, the dumb blonde, and its been amazing. We come back in December for another 3 weeks.

JR: Talking about projects you're currently in, you are also in two upcoming movies, "The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Starr" and "Devious, Inc", can you talk to me a little about each and your involvement in them?

PDM: They're both very different, "The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Starr" the lead actor in that is Suppositori Spelling, another Miss Trannyshack, and she plays a drag personality who is discovered, rises to prominence very quickly and then feels lost because the person he really is kinda is playing second fiddle to the character that he's portraying on stage. It was written by David Lassman, who is former Empress Chablis and I think that its certainly a story that any drag queen can relate to because there are days when I ask "who am I? Who is behind the make-up? Do I matter?" sometimes my friends are like you've got a split personality issue going on because I refer to my drag in third person like "Pollo does this and Pollo has this", I know a lot of bankers who if they were to loose their job they would lose their identity because that's who they are, or mothers who's children go away and then they have the emptiness of "who am I without my children" so in that way its kind of a universal story.

The other one "Devious, Inc" I love it because in the first one I play this moral conscious, established drag queen who says look this is what you have to do it if you want to survive in the scene, but in "Devious, Inc" I get to play a much more frivolous character, I am a dominatrix and escort and that film is fantastic, it's got a stellar cast too, Michael Soldier aka Precious Moments who had a major role in "The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror" which was a huge runaway hit at Frameline last year. One of the other leads is Monique Jenkinson, or Fauxnique, and she plays the female lead. It's a fantasy based film and its gonna have a lot of special effects. This weekend I'm getting ready to got off for two days far, far in the east bay where were gonna do a film shoot at dawn where we're mud wrestling and its gonna be grotesque and hilarious I'm sure all at once.

JR: Any other upcoming projects, movies, T.V. shows?

PDM: I just shot a television appearance on "OUT Spoken" with Tim Gaskin and Donna Sachet, that'll be airing mid November. There is also a new show called "The Drag Show" hosted by LayBelline and Wanda Lust. Its an interesting concept in which they bring in drag performers and they talk about what drag means to them and what it means to their community and how it has influenced their ability to interact with people. Also a friend of mine who helped me shoot the introductory video for my Miss Trannyshack Pageant, this 2-minute film, and I talked a couple weeks ago at Charlie Horse and said we need to do more films, it was so much fun. They'll be short films, but ideally I would love to do a couple of those and submit those for consideration for Peaches Christ Underground Film Festival.

JR: You are a big journalist yourself

PDM: I don't know about big but I'm a journalist

JR: Interviewing celebrities, writing blogs, so I want to know how did it all start? How did you end up writing for Gloss magazine and Gay.com and writing your own blogs The Glamazon Diaries and Promosexual?

PDM: I came home from school when I was 8-years-old and we had read one paragraph about journalism in my English class and I told my mom when I grow up I want to be a journalist, the drag thing came later. There's not a lot of money in this industry so I did a lot of other things first, but I never felt fulfilled, professionally, I was a publicist for a number of years, and I booked TV shows and radio shows and stuff like that, so a few years ago when I made some significant life changes, meaning when I got sober, I decided to pursue my dream of journalism. At first I wanted to keep drag and journalism very separate, then I realized that it was a very unique combination to some degree and very marketable, people enjoy it, so as I said I'm driven and I had some ideas. My connection with Gloss magazine I owe completely to Heklina, she came to me and said "Pollo I know you're a writer, we're gonna do a cover story on the 2006 Miss Trannyshack Pageant, can you write it for me? Can you interview me and write it for Gloss?" and I said sure. So my first article for Gloss was my first cover story with them. That was in November of 2006 and I went back to them later and said this is what I do in my daily life and I have contacts with celebrities and I can start bringing in interviews and Bevin Shamel I think almost challenged me, he'd be "Well do you think you can get this person? Can you get Vanessa Williams?" and I was like "Let me get Vanessa Williams for you" and he was really impressed by that and that started my relationship with that publication.

Through involvement in the community I meet people and opportunities spring up, if I see an opportunity that's worthwhile I'm not going to let it go by, so one of the things I noticed that seemed to be lacking in our community, in gay publications, is that we don't have a lot of columnist, there's a lot of journalist, but I thought of a column that'd be really interested and I pitched the idea to my editor at the Bay Times and said "I'm out 6 nights a week sometimes and I meet some of the most incredible people and get to experience a lot of fun stuff that I think people might be interested reading about, would you take a look at something I've written?" and that's how the Glamazon Diaries started. It started as a name-dropping, I was here, here and here, and it's recently gotten fairly personal, I talked about dating recently which I never imagined.

I host a weekly trivia show, Brain Farts, at the Lookout and one night my now editor, Riley, came in and was just enjoying the show and said "Hey contact me some time I work at the Bay Guardian" and I immediately contacted him and said "I'm a journalist as I'm sure you might now, I would love to do something with you guys" and now there it is, Promosexual. Like I said life is about seeing opportunities and seizing opportunities.

JR: is that how you ended up working for Gus Presents?

PDM: I started with Gus because I went to The Crib one night as a special guest for an event and I walked in and he was like "Peaches!" and said "I'm not Peaches Christ I'm Pollo del Mar" and shook his hand and said "I came to your parties for years before I ever started performing drag and I like your audience, I think your audience likes me, you need to make me a superstar" and then months passed and I saw him at another event at the Lookout and I said "remember me? I told you months ago you need to make a star and I think now's the time". It might've not been that bold but it was pretty much to the point. So I started working with Gus and it has been nothing but fantastic, his whole team and him are so nice to me.

JR: What are your favorite parties in the city?

PDM: My favorite party in town to go to is Charlie Horse, and I will tell you that most of the time I don't even watch the show, I watch my friends when they perform of course, but for me its all about the crowd, the crowd is so much fun, always packed with cute boys and they all like drag queens, which makes it easy because, often I don't go in drag, but just that whole thing if I'm gonna pick somebody up and they're coming home with me there's a wall of wigs honey so you better like drag queens if you're coming to Casa del Mar.

JR: What is your funniest experience in drag?

PDM: Omigosh, what is my funniest experience in drag? The funniest actual experiences I've had in drag have not been in the public eye; they've all been backstage in the Golden Girls. There's a lot of time I've spent with those girls and a lot of crazy shit happens. The kind of one liners that make the show so funny are happening constantly in the back, I mean you have four drag queens and its like non stop. One experience that happened not that long ago, I think it was during our last run, we were at Mama Calizo's Voice Factory, which is where we are coming back to in December, and the restrooms are on the front, pass the stage, pass the audience, through the lobby, there's nothing for us to go pee in the back, so we're all in drag, golden girls drag nonetheless, and we're like peeing into bottles and into whatever you can find, so somebody had brought a tin of biscotti and I had to go to the bathroom so bad so I grabbed the biscotti tin and peed in the biscotti tin and didn't think anything of it but I didn't want anyone to knock it over so I put it on the table, so that night we all had to rush to different shows after the Golden Girls, so I'm getting ready to run off and all of the sudden Mathew is like "oouugh, oh my god, who pissed in my show?" and what had happened was apparently biscotti tins are not water tight so during the whole show the urine was licking out of the tin and running off the table and dripping into his boy shoes, his sock was completely soaking wet and the saddest part for me was that I was in such a rush, I had to get out of there and be on stage somewhere I didn't even have the time to stop and apologize to him I was just like over my shoulder "sorry gurl" and then ran out the door. That was a pretty funny experience.

JR: Contrasting the last question, what has been some of the most difficult parts about being Pollo?

PDM: Well, there is obviously a time constraint issue. I have my own career and own life that I try to maintain and initially Pollo was like once every two weeks but now Pollo has a full time career, she is more in demand than I am out of drag and it makes it really hard to balance any kind of a social life. Also I think that on some level being a drag performer makes dating difficult because I think a lot of men have a mistakenly misconceived notions about what it means to be a drag queen, I mean no I don't want to get the snip, no I'm not wearing woman's panties, any number of things and its not erotic to me, I'm too tightly bound to get sexual, there's too many layers between me and genitals to even go to the bathroom much less contemplate anything fun happening.

JR: So how do you manage life between Pollo and Paul?

PDM: I barely do and in 30 minutes I have therapy appointment to bring it all together.

JR: So now moving onto some fun facts:

Favorite drink?

Sugar Free Red Bull

Favorite Movie?

Clueless, but I'll tell you this yesterday I saw the screener version of the movie Milk, which is coming out in a month and I've never felt so inspired or proud to be a gay man in my life.

Favorite Dish?

Nachos from Chevys

Kind of Guy?

Eligible, or to be perfectly honest "emotionally unavailable" because that's all I seem to be attracted to right now. I like all, I find something attractive about any man but if I'm searching for a husband I like a very nice, butch, African American husband who likes to carry drag bags and doesn't mind synthetic hair around the house.

Favorite Sexual Position?

Omigod, in drag I'm completely asexual but out of drag my favorite position is…um…now that's some serious personal shit right there. Next!

Favorite Drag Queen?

This is probably gonna piss of somebody no matter what. Locally I admire a lot of drag queens, I admire Heklina's business sense, Peaches Christ's ability to parley drag into something that is not distinctively drag related like midnight mass. My favorite drag queen invariably is Ru Paul, she's a personal friend of mine and she also had the balls and ambition to break the door open 15 years ago when she became super model of the world and challenged people to look at drag queens the same way and say "you tell me that I'm not beautiful" and challenge homophobia.

JR: As a journalist, if you could interview anyone in the world who would it be and why?

PDM: Someone asked me this not too long ago and at the time I said Britney Spears and the reason is because that is when she was going through all her really trouble face and struggling with a lot of things that I as an outsider would look at and probably think are alcohol and drug related and a lot of self destructive behavior. I still would like to talk to her about that because of the fact that that's a place I've been in my life, really, deeply addicted to drugs and alcohol, struggling with a lot of self destructive behavior and I think sometimes its just finding somebody who can relate to you and understand what you're going through without any real motive behind it can make a huge difference and now specially as she is starting to come out on the other side of that I think it would make it even more interesting.

JR: Now you are a recovering alcoholic and crystal meth addict, can you tell me more about how your addiction affected your life, how you've come out of it? Is this an issue you bring more awareness to the community?

PDM: I can only really talk about my personal experience, coming out as a gay man at 22 I've always been struggling for acceptance in my community, and then when I came out to some degree I still felt invisible and still struggling even then for acceptance to find a place I fit it. Ultimately, for some reason, maybe through my twisted perception or maybe its just the way it happened, I felt that acceptance the first time this group of really gorgeous men in Cleveland invited me to go with them to their private party and we were doing cocaine and then I moved to San Francisco and I have to say that I didn't have the avenues for meeting people, didn't know one person when I moved here in 1999, and the only way I knew to do that was to be in the bar scene and even then it got really lonely because even then I wasn't making any deep connections and I ended up falling in. Someone invited me to a "party" and it turned out to be that everybody was just basically having sex and doing meth. That kind of combination became my way of life for a number of years. The one thing I will say we are becoming aware, finally, of what meth is doing to our community and I'm really grateful on April 20th 2004 I had a moment of clarity, where I realized what I was doing to my life, what I was doing to myself and how I hadn't done anything productive, useful, hadn't don't anything I could possibly be proud of in 5 years for the most part and I woke up to that. I went to rehab and taking positive action to maintain both abstinence from drugs and alcohol and to give myself the moral, emotional, mental support that I needed to maintain that sobriety. Do I think that more people in our community need to pursue that path? That's not for me to say, all I know is that's the path I need to be on and its brought some amazing people into my life and in the last four and a half years everything that we've talked about happened during that time and I can imagine what my life would be if I went back to that way of life and its nothing I ever need nor want to experience. I think all of the things I've accomplished would be gone in very short order if I didn't stay true to my beliefs and myself.

JR: Thanks you so much for sharing this, I feel it's important for people to know because people fall in that path.

PDM: Well the reason why is so important is the fact that when that was my way of life I can tell you I could not imagine a day without getting high because that's what I did every day. Jovan I would promise myself every night before I go to bed I'm not getting high tomorrow and then I would get up and the first thing I would do is get high and I was so discussed with myself I couldn't look myself in the mirror and anyone that knows me now can tell you I can definitely look at myself in the mirror in fact I can barely pry myself away.

JR: And just to wrap things up, are there any upcoming parties or events where our readers can come see you and party with you?

PDM: Many Wednesday I'm at Brain Farts, Bebe and I both take a week off a month. Gonna be hosting the Crib, Adonis, and Halloween Hangover back to back the 30th, 31st of October, and 1st of November, and of course my Thanksgiving leftovers party. So yeah plenty of opportunities for people to come hang out.

JR: Thank you very much for your time gurl, I really appreciate it!

PDM: Thanks to you honey.