[Times photos: Stephanie Boyar] Randy Constan likes looking like Peter Pan, even though he is a 47-year-old man. His outfits are brightly colored, and he favors tights; his selection of loafers reflects all the hues of the rainbow..

Once, a Tampa man’s Peter Pan predilection would have been a peculiarity only to neighbors and co-workers. But the Web has made him something of an international celebrity.

By LANE DeGREGORY

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 7, 2001

TAMPA -- Peter Pan sits at his computer, clicking away.

He's tall and lanky, with Beatle-mop hair and dark eyes. His green tunic is cinched tight at his waist. His green shorts are bordered with triangular points he hemmed himself. His green tights are stuffed into black Capezio flats, women's size 11-1/2.

It's Saturday night.

Soon, he'll fly down to Ybor City, pirouette around his favorite bar.

First, he's answering a few e-mails.

Never grow up. And don't let your in-box get cluttered.

Randy Constan is 47, a divorced computer programmer who lives in Tampa, works in St. Petersburg.

For more than two decades, this 6-foot man with the deep voice and Staten Island accent has been dressing like a pixie. For work, play and partying. For church services and shopping at Kash n' Karry. He has outfits in purple, blue and pink, but he likes green the best.

He also likes attention.

This fairy tale is about fame and the Internet.

To see Randy Constan's Web sites and his Peter Pan home page log on to www.pixyland.org.

In January, Constan created Peter Pan's Home Page, http://www.pixyland.org, and started posting pictures of himself. Web surfers saw him stag-jumping in front of a fence, posing coquettishly in his "Little Lord Fauntleroy" knickers, curtseying in his satin Blue Boy suit.

Word, as you can imagine, got around. Two weeks after it made its debut, the site was named one of the Top 10 Personal Home Pages by Yahoo! Australia and New Zealand. Within two months, a half-million people had visited. Researchers at MIT downloaded the photos and passed them around.

These days, Constan gets calls from Howard Stern, appears on radio shows and strangers' screen savers, and receives more than 200 e-mails a day.

On July 19, organizers of the fifth annual Webby Awards flew him to San Francisco. The international contest is like the Grammys or Oscars for Internet sites. Constan won two awards for the "Weirdest" site -- on the judges' vote and in the People's Choice category.

Don't even try to fathom why a middle-aged man who says he is heterosexual dresses like a pixie and refers to himself as "a boy fairy." Constan isn't sure himself. (And no, he doesn't have a rap sheet.) Instead, consider how such a person came to be featured in the mainstream media, from National Public Radio to the New York Times.

Once upon a time, a guy like Constan would have lived all but anonymously, wearing his tights and tunic to clubs, where he would be known only to a few other fringe dwellers.

Today, the World Wide Web lets people promote themselves with nothing but a PC. (All it takes is faith and trust. And a little bit of pixie dust ... ) Want to be famous? Boot up, log on, post a jpeg. The Internet has given us Cindy Margolis, Matt Drudge ... and now Peter Pan, who is looking for his Tinkerbell.

[Times photo: Stefanie Boyar]

It’s Saturday night, time to leave the computer and go out on the town. At Ybor City’s lesbian bar La Femme Buvette, Randy Constan dances with a woman he admires. He says women are often more tolerant of his differences than are male patrons.

Constan grew up in New York, the only child of a toy designer and stay-at-home mom. Like other kids, he heard the story of Peter Pan when he a small child. Unlike other kids, he never stopped dreaming of Never-Never Land.

His mom died when he was 12. Living alone with his dad, hearing his friends brag about sexual exploits, he was unsure whether he was gay or asexual or what. He thought of himself as a mixed-gender person but wasn't sure what that meant. He tried the New York club scene, dropped some acid, fell in with a cult and finally went to the Identity Help Center in Greenwich Village looking for answers.

"I had on this real short shirt, tied around my midriff, and velvet hot pants," Constan says. "I walked into this place and said, "Hey! I like girls. But I like to dress like this.'

"The counselor looks up and says, "New York is a big place, Buddy. The world is even bigger. You'll find somewhere you'll fit right in."'

Constan decided God liked him the way he was. He hasn't seen a therapist since.

He met Patricia when he was 22. She saw him in an alternative club and said she liked his outfit. "She sort of had her own gender issues going," Constan says. "She admired the childlike qualities in me."

They married on July 4, 1976. They were bi.

Bicentennial.

Somehow this union lasted 23 years, the last four in Florida.

"But as we both grew older, she was progressing toward greater normalcy. And I was getting more and more outlandish," Constan says. "She'd get mad if I was wearing tights and someone called me Robin Hood. She got tired of the negative attention, I guess."

Patricia moved out of their north Tampa ranch in December 2000. Constan kept the house, the cat -- and his computer.

He took out an In Search Of ad in the Weekly Planet. It said he has a childlike outlook on life, plays jazz guitar and enjoys long walks.

"If you too fancy yourself in whole or part a pixie, elf, fairy or similar creature, I hope to hear from you," he wrote.

The ad was a long shot, he admits. Most women aren't attracted to a man in tights, a man who spends 20 minutes curling his bangs each morning and sews satin ruffles onto his Wal-Mart shirts. "But it's better they find out about me up front," Constan says.

Constan created four Web pages to go with his personal ad. The first, Through the Cracks Ministries, explores why people turn away from God (and qualified him for .org Net status). The second, Elfin Technologies, publishes electronic schematics and computer articles. The third, My Music, showcases songs Constan composed.

Peter Pan's Home Page is the fourth. The New York counselor was right; there is a place where he fits in. The Web.

His site has elicited thousands of comments, from a female nursery-school teacher, an Australian father of four, the lead singer in a feminist punk band.

"Dear Peter," one woman wrote, "when i first found your website, i was overly joyed that i had found my soulmate. i am a 40 year old woman from So. Carolina. never been married, no kids, no one can seem to accept my alternative lifestyle ... till there was you. ... Love, Tink!"

Constan also got hate mail. Gay men urged him to come out of his lace-filled closet. Lonely women were sure they could cure him of his fetish. He didn't respond to the negative messages. Spent three hours a night replying to the nice ones.

Then the media started calling.

The Weekly Planet featured a one-page story and picture under the headline "Eat His Fairy Dust." The Fredericksburg Freelance-Star in Virginia ran an article a few weeks later. The overgrown elf showed up on Fox 13 news, in Stuff magazine and on radio station WFLZ.

"He was an honest, intelligent, real nice guy," disc jockey MJ Kelli said. "He really doesn't care what people think. You know, maybe that's the ultimate in self-confidence. ... More power to him!"

Most people were laughing at Constan, but he didn't care. "If you're going to hate someone," he says, "have a better reason than because they look funny or dress different."

Last month, he had to add another digit to the counter on his computer. More than 1-million people had seen his Web site.

He started getting royalty checks for Deb's Move and Mercy for Madness, two original songs he sent to MP3 -- tunes no one had paid attention to before he added links from the Peter Pan pages. He started getting hundreds of hits on his ministry site, a place few folks had ventured before. He turned down interviews with Howard Stern and on Comedy Central's The Daily Show because he was afraid they might be too mean.

"I'm super silly," Constan says. "But I'm not stupid."

The Webby Awards were the crowning glory. So what if he won for being the weirdest? He got international attention -- plus a free trip to San Francisco.

He got thousands more hits on his Web site and hundreds more e-mails.

"Who would have ever thought," he says, "that such an oddball as me would have such an honor happen to him?"

A sampling of Randy Constan’s pixie pages

The Blue Boy.

The Fairy Princess

The Purple Pixy.

Peter Pan.

Constan says his dad always accepted him but wouldn't let him wear his elf shoes to Christmas dinner.

His co-workers are amused. They post his Peter Pan articles on the company bulletin board. Some neighbors snub him; others snicker, point and stare.

Wouldn't it be easier just to pull the tights on at home? Or slip some sweat pants over them when he goes grocery shopping? Wouldn't it be better to tone it down than to be cussed and spit at by strangers?

"No," Constan says. "It would be worse not to be myself.

"Some men wear cowboy boots to show they're rugged. Some wear suits to seem important. I enjoy dressing like Peter Pan."

He believes his Web site teaches people tolerance and encourages others to be themselves.

"Sometimes God sends strange people to spread his message."

Constan's site is receiving 10,000 hits a day now. More than 1.4-million people have seen it.

So far he's heard from 400 wanna-be Tinkerbells, some as old as 70. He prints out each e-mail, separates them into stacks. The T-files, as he calls them, fill 40 folders. He has talked to three potential pixies by phone.

"I'm looking for a woman who is unencumbered by gender boundaries, who is both passive and aggressive. Someone with a playful approach to life," Constan says.

You have to wonder what he's really looking for -- besides hits on his Web site. You'd think one or two of the 400 Tinks would have suited him. But somehow they haven't, or they live too far away. Could he be attracted to a man? "He'd have to be cuter than me," Constan says. "And there aren't any." Whatever. For now, his keyboard is his only companion.

It's a happy relationship. Without the Internet, Constan would have been just another guy in green tights. With it, he has become a cult hero of sorts, an icon of self-expression.

And the Web is so much safer than reality. You can delete those unkind messages, post photos only after you've erased the dark circles under your eyes, be anything you want to be. And no one can really check to see if you're what you say you are.

The Internet -- the ultimate Never-Never Land.

On Saturday nights, Constan turns off his computer. You can't go dancing on the Internet. You have to put yourself out there sometimes.

Peter Pan prances into the upstairs bar at La Femme Buvette about 10 p.m. Red and green spotlights are beaming through the smoke. Techno music is thunking around the mirrored walls.

Constan skips to the center of the shiny dance floor, raises his long arms, starts gyrating his hips.

The women at the bar don't seem to mind his costume, or his goofy ballet, or that he's the only guy in this lesbian nightclub.

"I think it's neat that he does whatever he wants to," says bartender Stacy Freeman, 29. "I try not to judge people. We all should be more free."

Constan finishes his dance, downs a Michelob, sets it on the bar. An even louder tune starts thumping. He bounds across the room, deerlike, smiling at his reflection in the mirrored walls.

He goes to lesbian clubs because most straight bars won't admit a middle-aged man wearing tights and pointy shoes. At gay bars, "I'm the super fairy," he says. "Besides, Tinkerbell has got to be a girl."

He has met one woman he's attracted to, a lesbian with four kids. She's here tonight, leaning against the long bar, wearing a slinky sundress and high-heeled sandals. She has dark, wavy hair and black eyes like a cat's.

Constan watches her for a while, then walks over, asks her to dance. A few times during the song, she lets him put his hands on her shoulders. Mostly, she dances on her own as he leaps around.

He tries to buy her a drink after the dance, but a blond woman in a flowered sarong beats him to it. She leans over and whispers something to Constan's friend. Both women laugh and head for the dance floor.

The music is pumping. What a girl wants, what a girl needs. . . . The women are shimmying close, lip-synching their theme song. Constan ups his order to a rum and Coke.

The women lock eyes, wrap their arms around each other. Constan stares from his stool. Whatever makes you happy and sets you free. . . .

He finishes his drink, pulls up his saggy tights, pays his tab.

Just after midnight, Peter Pan heads home alone.

Before going to bed, he'll check his computer again.

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