Sequined dresses, blond wigs and gaudy jewelry are the tools of the trade and they are musts for any successful drag queen.

But why do these men, performers who double as waiters and bartenders, choose to spend more than eight hours a day dressed as women?

For most, money is the main motivator. When Melody Kool first started performing as a drag queen he was offered $200 a song, enough, he says, to get over his initial embarrassment. However, take away the money and many of these men would still continue to work as drag queens.

"At first I found it a challenge," says Ginger Snap, a performer at Lips who also spends much of his personal time in drag. "Now, I love it."

Unlike many of the other drag queens at Lips, Frankie Cocktail Fioravonti will not leave the restaurant dressed as a woman. "This is my profession, not a lifestyle," Fioravonti says. For Fioravonti, dressing in drag is an artistic outlet, a way to express creativity while making money. This career as a drag queen started two years ago when as a bartender at Lips he felt left out. After receiving makeup tips from a friend and buying the necessary accessories, he began performing.

"It started my career all over and made it fresh and interesting," says Fioravanti, 47, while applying black eyeliner.

Transforming into a successful drag queen takes time, and in the dressing room makeup and dress tips fly back and forth between the performers.

"Do you use mascara with [fake] lashes?" asks Ginger Snap of Fioravonti.

"Yes, that’s how you blend them together."

"Can I wear this bra with this dress?" shouts Rejene Contour, a tall thin man who has been doing drag for five years, as he modeled a long silver dress with a cut-out back.

"No, it shows too much in the back," answers Fioravonti.

The performers in the dressing room agree that it took months to learn how to make themselves look like women.

It took Punani, who does not use a last name, two years to get the perfect look.

Rejene Contour answers the phone before her performance as Cindy Lauper. PHOTO: Rachel Elbaum

Short, with long blond hair and large (fake) breasts, Punani has been dressing in drag for six years. "It started off as a gag, I wanted to see how good I can become," says Punani, 26, who says his name means flower in Hawaiian. "I’m interested in the visual aspect, the illusion, the image."

But for many, keeping life as a man separate from life as a woman is not always possible.

"It tends to rule my social life," says Kool, 25, whose birth name is Lamont Mondell. "If we all go out we’ll leave straight from here and go in drag. Then when I am dressed as a boy, I am so tired that I don’t want to go out as Lamont. Or I don’t want to go to nightclubs as a boy because I was there last night as a woman."

Kool wants to stop performing as a drag queen in the near future, though he has set no exact date, and work instead as a male performer.

Peppermint Stick, 22, whose birth name is Kevin Moore, has been working as a drag queen in New York for three years and is one of the few performers to come to work and leave work dressed as a woman.

"My first taste of the scene was as a woman. I’m out of practice being a boy," says Peppermint Stick.

But unlike Mondell, Moore is not looking to end life as a drag queen anytime soon. "It’s too much a part of my life to cut out."