Vockah Redu — who lives in Houston now, having gone there six years ago to study performing arts in college — probably chafes at the “sissy bounce” label more than anyone. “My daughter’s gonna be reading that soon,” he told me with a tight laugh. “But I’ll be able to explain it to her. It’s just stardom, and I feel like it’ll die down eventually. Right now the media’s buying it, so ‘sissy bounce’ it is.”

Two nights after the Sports Vue show, Vockah and Katey Red traveled to Austin, Tex., to perform at a garagelike space there called the Beauty Bar. This was something of a return engagement: a couple of months earlier there was a bounce showcase at what is probably the mecca of American alternative music, the South by Southwest Festival, and Katey and Vockah made such an impression — despite being just two of the seven bounce artists on the bill, the rest of whom were non-sissies — that they were invited back as part of a subsequent festival called Chaos in Tejas, mostly a collection of hardcore bands whose connection to bounce music per se would normally seem tenuous if not hostile.

Vockah came onstage at the Beauty Bar looking like a latter-day George Clinton, with an Indian wig, a long brown lab coat, purple tights and a gold top hat. Those clothes, and most of the rest of what he was wearing, were shed by the third or fourth song. Vockah has the looks and the bearing (and the dancing ability) of a star; indeed, he really needs a bigger stage than a venue like the Beauty Bar provides. He puts on a very theatrical show, featuring tightly choreographed dancing (in unison with his backup vocalists/dancers, known as the Cru), scripted patter (“Thank you,” he told the audience more than once, “for being a reflection of my gift”) and medleys and reprises rather than a straight set list. Compelling as he was, at times he seemed to lose the audience a bit; they were looking to be related to more directly. “I am not here representing New Orleans, I am not here representing bounce music, I am not here representing gay people,” he said near the end of the show. “I am an artist.” Clearly he is constructing a persona, and it is the type of persona that would go down better in front of a crowd of 20,000 than it did among the 200 heavily tattooed, overwhelmingly white alt-kids who were there for the fickle buzz provided by the authenticity of the new, of the ephemerally romanticized fringe that defines alternative music in the first place.

Katey Red, on the other hand, needs no persona: just the sight of her is a whole narrative unto itself. Fensterstock had told me a story about Katey’s irritation with the reviews of her South by Southwest show, all of which seemed to lead with the fact that she is six feet two inches tall, as if that were somehow the most remarkable thing about her. True, it is probably only the seventh- or eighth-most remarkable thing about her; still, when she came onstage wearing sky-high heels and a Mohawk wig purchased for the occasion, it was literally impossible to see the top of her behind the stage lights affixed to the ceiling, and that says a lot about the way she dominates even a cruddy little venue like the Beauty Bar.

Nothing if not old-school, she led the crowd (and her two backup singers) through a series of shout-outs to the projects and neighborhoods of New Orleans, even though very few in the audience would have any reason to know their names or to distinguish one from the other; she led them in a chant that made “Katrina” and “FEMA” into rhyming objects of the same obscene verb. She did all her best-known songs, including “Punk Under Pressure” (“I’m a ho/You know I’m a ho”) and “Stupid” (“You are so stupid/For calling us guys/Please don’t knock it till you give it a try”). She prowled the stage with the sort of constrained grace Tina Turner used to display while wearing pretty much the same shoes. Once or twice she invited audience members onstage to dance in the classic, hypersexual bounce style, and they did so — men and women — with what might be described as labored un-self-consciousness.

A few hours before the show, Katey, barefoot in a simple blue dress, made macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets for three teenagers, two of them her children, in the kitchenette of her Austin motel room. The children were mostly silent; Katey’s demeanor, with showtime looming, was growing more combative, and they seemed to know that the smartest course was to try to make themselves invisible.

Katey now lives and identifies full time as a woman; her life and art are pretty much one, so it does not seem unusual that she doesn’t perform all that often these days. “One reason,” she said, “they ain’t paying like I want to get paid. Another reason: they changed bounce music. They made the beat faster. It’s all chop and cut, chop and cut. It’s not rapping. I don’t like that. I like to write. I like to sit down and write a song — this line goes with this line, this line goes with that line.”