The New York Times – Manny Fernandez
It’s tough being a drag queen. It’s even tougher being a drag queen in the Bronx. You’re outnumbered. You get no respect. You can count the gay-friendly bars on one hand. But at least one night a week, at precisely 11 p.m., you have one thing to call your own.
A soap opera.
Every Saturday evening, one of the longest-running programs on Bronx public access television entertains and confounds viewers with a 30-minute burst of gender-bending camp and low-budget intrigue. The television show is called “Strange Fruits,” and it is everything the Bronx is not ? flamboyantly irreverent, unabashedly gay and teeming with men in high heels and pantyhose. It is like “Dynasty,” if “Dynasty” starred mostly untrained, unpaid actors and followed the exploits of a transsexual Southern belle turned Bronxite with a knack for stealing babies, poisoning people and cursing.
“Strange Fruits,” which first went on the air in 1997, has become one of the few public displays of homosexuality in a blue-collar borough that is a bastion of Latin machismo. None of the borough’s movie theaters bothered showing “Brokeback Mountain.” There has not been a gay pride parade here in years. Yet, each Saturday on Channel 68 on BronxNet, the public-access station, “Strange Fruits” pops up on television screens, courtesy of Eric Stephen Booth.