La Cueva: the oldest Latino drag club in the country has done much to change attitudes in Chicago's Mexican community.

IT IS A.M. on a Saturday night, and the crowd at La Cueva is going wild. Lines form at the sides of the stage as adoring gay and straight men and women wait their chance to stuff bills in the gold-spangled bikini of a shapely transgender dancer gyrating and lipsyncing joyously to salsa music.

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La Cueva, a signless, inconspicuous club on a vibrant but gritty stretch of 26th Street--the main drag of Chicago's Mexican community La Villita--is by many accounts the oldest existing Latino drag club in the country. And the show "Miss Ketty's Latina Review," hosted by Puerto Rican transgender diva Ketty Teanga, is known as one of the genre's pioneering acts.

The room is packed late at night every Thursday through Sunday for Miss Ketty's shows. The crowd, mostly Latino, is a mix of slickly-dressed young professionals, older straight couples cuddling at tables, groups of lesbians on their weekly night out, gay couples who make out on the dance floor and some of the city's top salsa and cumbia dancers. Latino drag and transgender revues like Miss Ketty's are now popular throughout Chicago and other cities around the country. But in Chicago, most of them are on the whiter, wealthier north side of the city and draw an audience of that type.

La Cueva is right in the heart of the city's working-class Mexican community, and the wild popularity of the show demonstrates how things have changed over the past two decades, how many Latinos from all walks of life have dropped macho and homophobic attitudes toward transgender and gay Latinos and embraced scenes like that at La Cueva.

"We used to have to run from the cab to the club" because of intimidation and violence from homophobic gang members on 26th Street, says Teanga. "It was a taboo thing then," agrees Willie Gaitan, who has been with the show for 18 years and is known for wearing the skimpiest outfits. "You couldn't even walk around in a wig, or you'd be asking for trouble. So much has changed since then."

Teanga, now 59, grew up as a young man between Puerto Rico and New York, with parents who were factory workers on Coney Island. "At the time it was so hard for young boys" to come out, she recalls. "We suffered so much." She really found her stride around age 16 in Puerto Rico, where she (he at the time) started dancing salsa in drag at a club called The Little Parrot. Teanga returned to New York and danced in clubs including La Escuelita, the Jukebox Revue and the 82 Club several years later, bringing her Latin flavor to American drag shows. In both Puerto Rico and New York, she was adored inside the clubs but had to be constantly vigilant on the street because of harassment from police and bigots.