Think back to the original The Poseidon Adventure, from that halcyon year of 1972, and what images pop into your mind? Shelly Winters’ death scene, probably. Or maybe one of hipster priest Gene Hackman’s speeches exhorting his band of survivors not to just lay down and die because God isn’t going to help them? Or New York cop Ernest Borgnine reassuring his wife Stella Stevens that no one on board is likely to recognize her from her former career as a hooker. Or Roddy McDowell mooning over Carol Lynley (it’s called acting, folks).

Oh, the plight of the poor drag queen in recent motion pictures. She’s been pressed into service over the last decade or so as the central figure in a pulp mythology of self-sacrificial but transgressive heroism. New York Times writer Stephen Holden not long ago pointed out that drag queens seem to have replaced that old cinematic cliché of outsidership, the whore with the heart of gold, whose wit, wisdom, tolerance and, ahem, generosity, were always available for a movie’s hero when he was down on his luck—a woman like Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind.

“What you should be doing,” says teacher and struggling artist Sandy Sandiford (John Malkovich) to his student Jerome Platz (Max Minghella), “is experimenting. At your age you should try as many different things as you can.”