When did cross-dressing sexual theater, drag, transvestite fetishism, transexualism, transgenderism, gender fluidity, and all manner of gender whorls emerge from the kinky underworld to now being all the rage?

Those of us at a certain age remember the sensation that erupted with the song "Lola," by the Kinks in 1970, written by the Kinks' founder and lead singer, Ray Davies (now Sir Ray Davies).

The Kinks, the hard-edged British rock band, were more likely to be found in the off-beat bars and clubs in London's SoHo, rather than in Liverpool-bred teen dance venues that catered to the Beatles' vanilla-esque semi-urban pop style — at least according to Davies.

Just line up the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" against the Kinks' "You Really Got Me": soft and non-threatening versus atrophic acne-scarred socio-sexual adventuring.

But the Kinks' "Lola" was something else.  Read the backbeat, here.

While "Lola" begins with a minor ode to cocaine, camouflaged by a trademark dustup with Coca-Cola, the primary theme of "Lola" unfolds as the narrator, clearly a full-blooded guy, tells of being smitten by Lola at an underground nightclub.  More than smitten, he is sexually swept away by Lola's beguiling charms.

The lyrics:

Well, I'm not the world's most passionate guy
But when I looked in her eyes, well, I almost fell for my Lola
Lo-Lo-Lo-Lo-Lola
Lo-Lo-Lo-Lo-Lola

Except the narrator discovers, soon enough, that Lola is a man, thus reacts with bemused fascination and regret.

But when she squeezed me tight, she nearly broke my spine
Oh, my Lola
Lo-Lo-Lo-Lo-Lola
Well, I'm not dumb, but I can't understand
Why she walks like a woman and talks like a man…

... Lola smiled and took me by the hand
She said, "Little boy, gonna make you a man"
Well I'm not the world's most masculine man
But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man
And so is Lola

The spectacle of a man pretending in earnest to be a woman is quite different from the oddball British risqué humor of cross-dressing theater.  And such a spectacle is wholly other than a man never concealing his manhood, discretely seeking love with another man.

The encounter with Lola, upending traditional roles and violating normative behaviors, has this clinical subversive allure, like all sexual deviancy.  Yet it is still an extended play act — perhaps the forbidden encore — from the theater of the absurd, where the audience, spellbound spectators, reveling and simultaneously repelled, never consummating the suggestion, knowing all shall return to normal once the show has ended while walking back out into the street, hopefully incognito.

But "Lola" is not play-acting.  "Lola" invites gender identity provocation — a deliberate fraud, a deceitful appropriation, beyond cultural misplacement, even a subversion of homoeroticism — to squeeze into a place within the normative world, where exaggerated impersonation isn't a fabulous flirtation, instead an everyday construct, carrying an expectation of just enough novelty and naughtiness to be the shock of the new, yet acceptable enough to avoid prison time.

But fifty years later, the shade-drawn gender-fluid eroticism has escaped the confines of cellar cafés, dim wine bars, and other obscure and secluded havens for discomfiting if not illicit encounters.

This gender dysphoria labeled as sophisticated art, a relief from denial of free expression, now alights amid the classrooms of elementary students, waiting rooms of woke pediatricians, and fully endorsed in the Oval Office by the president of the United States.

How fitting that CCP COVID-19, a respiratory disease escaped from an experimental bio-weapons lab that exploded into a worldwide pandemic changing Western civilization forever, has also been accompanied by a sexual perversion pandemic celebrated in painted images on pedestrian crosswalks, to month-long government sponsored carnivals, to presidential executive orders.

But not to worry.  Lola will become me too, nothing special in the Lola's "mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, where girls will be boys and boys will be girls, except for Lola, Lo-Lo-LoLo-Lola."

Gender manipulation and sexual dyslexia are the most virulent version of Narcissus.  You will recall Narcissus, unable to return the affections of the nymph Echo, was consigned to forever seek the embrace of his own reflection and be captive to an illusion.  So what becomes of the illusion of gender exhibition?

Throughout the ages, the celebration of a lifelong union between a man and a woman has been a life-affirming festivity with primordial hopes of reproduction and immortality.  Instead, the festivity surrounding a gender mishmash is merely an intellectual dissembling, applauding a linguistic cul-de-sac.

Until trans-humanism cum artificial intelligence subsumes human biology, don't fret over "Lola."  Meanwhile, you can find Lola squeezing Disney CEO Bob Chapek on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyworld.