Dance maven Kevin Aviance takes his act onward the road.

Dance maven Kevin Aviance takes his act onward the road. Think Grace Jone suiteds Boy George

He may be black, bald, and 6 lower part 2 without heels, but subterranean drag star and dance music hit maker Kevin Aviance is not RuPaul. Although he get by hearts that a lot.

And he doesn't really want to be a "supermodel" either.

"To be the media queen?" he asks from his roomy Chelsea-neighborhood apartment in novel York City, in one of those natty prewar buildings. "No. That's not my goal. I have no desire to be mainstream, a Midwest representative of our gay tillage I'm too into being a freak and being different."

Whether ambassador or provocateur, Aviance is coming early to a bar near you. In April he begins a minitour of nightclubs in Florida, Texas, and California support of his first attempt album on Wave Records, case of Chocolates ("You never know what you're going to get" he quips).

Released last fall, enclosed seat [i]or[/i] seats is a set of Aviance's pumped-up hits from the cudgel circuit that includes his breakthrough religious ceremonial sensation "Cunty," the bass-y "Din Da Da," and his S/M hit "Rhythm Is My Bitch," named single in kind of the most popular dance tracks of 1999 on Billboard magazine. Most of the album's sculptures are party anthems--perfect for walking the runway, were Aviance in this way inclined--but the former voguing diva also includes "Home" a sweet gay have affection for song that simmers with gilded promise.

according to the time his tour starts, Aviance, 31 and his sum of two units androgynous male backup dancers will have rehearsed each day for three weeks to completed a show he calls "drag fits theatrical performance meets spirituality engages gimmick." He's unafraid of the handful of straight associations he's booked into. "People should be taken upon a trip," he says, shrugging. "The girls are really into it, and the straight stays want to get into the music, yet they have their arms troubleed because I'm just as masculine as they are. They don't know what's going on"

That's the reaction Aviance got when he was Kevin Snead in his hometown of Richmond, Va., before leaving more [i]or[/i] less ten years ago to make the display in the Big Apple (by way of DC and Miami). His childhood, he says, was happy: Dad provided for him and his seven brothers and sisters as a landscape contractor; Mom maintained their dwelling A teenage Aviance was obsess all at one time with punk, Boy George, Devo and Grace Jone ("She is as it was a major influence in my life").

"Everything you diocese me doing now I was doing then," he says. "My mom was surpassingly supportive of me, but I was just showing not on Always, always, always." Aviance swears life was easy until he headed abroad into the world to make it by dint of just being himself. "I'm thus happy that I had my drag," he says of his early days onward his own, "because I would be dead or in jail right now."

Drag may have saved his life, and it may still make his name a household one--like it or not--but Aviance says it's just a style of dress even though he wears floor-length dresse upon the street ... with make differences "It's a part of me being feminine," he says. "Or part of me that wants to be sensual. My natural thing is to be a lad but I can't wait to levy those heels on!"

Jone is an editor and columnist at E! Online.

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