OCWeekly.com – By Daffodil J. Altan
Hail to the Queen! In the proud California tradition of talking to pageant winners about gay marriage, a conversation with the bloodied-but-unbowed (and actually gay) Frida Marin
Felix Ayala, a.k.a. Frida Marin, is sitting pretty in his new role as a beautiful, bedazzled pageant queen. The winner of this year’s Hermosa y Protegida (see “There (S)He Is,” March 27, 2008) beauty pageant—put on in Spanish by the Center OC each year to promote sexual-health awareness and whose contestants either dress in drag or live as transgender women—Ayala says he’s out to revolutionize the role beauty queens play by becoming as active a fund-raiser and health educator as possible within the entire Latino community (gay, straight, religious and otherwise). Although he’s gay and had only dressed in drag once in his life before this year’s pageant, he says his focus is on his new role as a positive role model within the Latino community.