One thing I noted (and even admired) about the big time drag queens was their choice of feminine names often displayed great humor and/or quite a bit of panache - Mistress Formica, Champagne Showers, and Hedda Lettuce spring to mind. The process of attempting to choose and use a feminine name was quite difficult for me for a very long time. In the first place, I tried very hard over the years to incorporate these desires into my life a way that did not seek to create a separate and discrete fantasy life based on some "secret" self, and using another name seemed to me to be going in the wrong direction, heading to an incorrect destination. Having always valued integration of self, and incorporation of that self into the real world, I sought on a personal level bring this into my life, rather than isolating myself from it. I didn't want to be someone else, but for obvious reasons it's much safer not to use your real name when you're a guy out and about in San Francisco in a miniskirt.
Moreover, everyone else (both the queens and the straights) seemed to be playing out the illusion at that level, and so not to use a feminine name would make me stand out. (Darn! There is that being afraid of standing out at a gathering of crossdressers thing again.) Moreover I've never been real happy, fond or thrilled with my real name and this provided me an opportunity to create for myself a name I could really groove on. So I figured that I should just lighten up a little bit - you know stop taking myself too damn seriously - and just go with the flow. After all, I've always wanted an alias so that I could be just like the rest of the people on the FBI's Most Wanted List. AKA, ... Besides, would it really be all that different from having a nickname?
At first I used Vicki, a direct derivation of my nickname, Vic, which is probably a common method of choosing femme names. When I went out with Kacy, my high school girlfriend, on our little sojourns thorough Sonoma Country, she always called me Leslie and I saw no reason to change that then. Matter of fact, the thought never even occurred to me. But I didn't like Lester, so Leslie didn't seem that much more attractive. Anyway, when I started going out in San Francisco the very first thing someone asked me was my name. In all the flush and rush that is that unique mix of excitement and fear that accompanies the "first time out," I hadn't even considered anything along the lines of a name. I guess that it just never occurred to me that people might be friendly and willing to strike up a conversation. By that point in my life, most of my friends were calling me Vic, and I was using it as my "nightclub / showbiz name" so I just stumbled and blurted out Vicki, and that was that, at least for the San Francisco years.
After a while however I decided I needed a surname too, particularly for presentation and correspondence, and I couldn't find anything I liked that went with either Vicki or Victoria. Not only that, but the popularity of the Victor/Victoria thing made that name seem so obvious by that point. So I began to very consciously design a name for myself. Of course, like most things in my life I completely over intellectualized it - which is my own personal field of excellence - as I'll explain in painstaking detail.
I want to stress that all this is a matter of extremely my own personal taste. I don't want to offend anyone, and if your name is somehow on the list that follows, I want to assure you that it's just my own individual taste reflecting 30 some years of experiences with various people. So I don't mean anything personal by it, I'm just trying to demonstrate the workings of my mind, such as it is.
As I thought about all this I arrived as a set of criteria that succeeded in ruling out about 95% of the available female names, which made the final selection process much easier. First I eliminated the names - and as a general rule, the variations thereof - of people in my family. So Jean, Patty, Helen, Ann, Mary/Marie/Maria, Ann, Crystal, Marcia, Candice, Marion, Liz/Elizabeth, Jessica and Laurie were off the list. Second, I did not want to take the name of any of my close friends like Eve, Rebecca and Margaret. Though several had names I liked a lot including Carol, which also unfortunately also ruled out Caroline, even though that's not her name, still ... it seemed too much like theft in some sense, stealing a personality or a persona from someone I loved. Hell, I didn't even want to use the name of anyone I knew even fairly well, so out went Joan, Annette, Cindy, Julie, Robin, Emily, Jan, Maureen, Karen and a host of others.
Added to that list were all the names I didn't like because they were attached to someone or some image that I didn't like. This included both real people and fictional characters, names that came from songs I hated - Beth I here you calling, but I can't come home right now - and in one case, a bad snack food cake: Little Debbie, Little Debbie, I'm a comin home. Some names fell into several categories, like Claire, a name tainted by association with the most miserable creature I ever met in graduate school and also the subject of that really annoying song by Gilbert O'Sullivan back in the early 70's. So all told that took care of Shelly and Shelia, Sue/Suzy/Susan, Heather, Louise, Janet, Lisa/Liza, Sonya, Brooke, Ellen, Nancy (the cartoon strip, Hated It!) and Jen/Jenny/Jennifer.
Moreover, I wanted to avoid the male/female pairs like Robert and Roberta, Andy/Andrae, Bob/Bobbie, Dennis/Denise, Eric/Erica, Glen/Glenda or Samuel and Samantha. That seemed so obvious. Its not much of a concealment or an alias and way too much like Lester and Leslie. Names that sounded butch, or were ambiguous and Trans or cross gender like Pat, Rusty, Lindsey, Ashley, Terri, or Morgan were also right out.
I didn't want something I associated with frumpy or dumpy or some waitress working the late shift at a truck stop out on the Interstate City, like Betty, Ethyl, Dotty, Mae, Flo, Zelda, Martha or Bertha. No two-parters like Mary Lou, Betty Sue or Billy Jo either - that whole concept is far to country for my taste. I also really didn't really want one of those Christian biblical type names either. Oh yeah, I really didn't like the names that ended with the IE and Y sound like Keri, Brittany, Tammy, Muffy, Sherry, Annie, Hillary, Dolly or Christi.
Not that all of this was a matter of negative thought or a simple process of elimination. There were several criteria that I tried to meet in order to come up with something Crazy, Sexy Cool. So in conformance with my tastes I tried to think of something pretty and extremely feminine, yet leaning toward tough rather than fluffy - more Nikki than Angelica. So I played around with Sharon, Veronica, Rachel, Renee, Megan, Kathleen/Katherine, Valerie, Michelle and Stephanie, all of which I liked for various reasons, but none fit just the right combination and look, and the overall design of the name was important. Others just didn't seem right. What ever I am, I really don't think I'm much of an Amanda, Evangeline, or Gwen.
Even outside events conspired in strange ways. The OJ murders happened about the time I was thinking this through, so Nicole was right off the table. Too bad, I do like the name, but it seems permanently tainted now with a stigma of "The Eternal and Archetypal Female Victim" after that. As for Nikki, I know it violates at least three of the rules. Exceptions happen.
I sought something classy, with style and sophistication - European-ish.
And unique. So Tekla was the name of my best friend in my hippie days, a girl who helped me understand who I was, and that it was OK. She died in car wreck at an early age, so I took it to honor her.
However, most people call me Kat, and I really like the K sound and the general look of the letter from a graphic design standpoint. So eventually I settled on Katrina. In the 1980s a New Wave band called Katrina and the Waves, had a minor hit entitled "Walking On Sunshine," which is probably where the name stuck in my head. I liked it because it had that sort of Eastern European/Russian thing going on, and as a child of the Cold War who grew up on a steady diet of James Bond films, those Slavic names sound real sexy in a certain forbidden way, exuding the sinister danger of being a spy in the house of love perhaps, which is strange in and of itself because if I'm not mistaken, Katrina is a Dutch name.
Also by choosing Katrina I thought I could honor a couple of real cool and totally sexy woman who I have always really admired. I have a real thing for winter sports. The Summer Olympics bore the hell out of me, but I don't miss much of the Winter Olympics and I'm a pretty devoted follower of the World Cup (skiing, not soccer, which I am told also holds some sort of World Cup.) So Katrina evolved out of derivations and variations of Katerina and Katja, after Katerina Witt and Katja Seizinger, Olympic Gold Medal winners in skating and skiing respectively. It somehow seemed different, more proper even, to use the name of someone I didn't actually know, but really liked, making it more of a tribute than a theft, borrowing or appropriation. Also, I really liked Kat as a shortened version, and one should always think of the nicknames as well as the full names.
West, I explained in another post, so tekla katrina west, it became.
