Drag queens and the long, vibrant history of drag in the US
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Written by Scottie Andrew, CNN
To many, the stereotypical image of a drag queen is one of a gay man dressed in exaggerated feminine getup, oversized wigs and heavy makeup. But drag’s image — and history — is far more complex.
“Drag is the theatrical exaggeration of gender,” said Joe E. Jeffreys, a drag historian and adjunct instructor at New York University, who noted that the artform constantly subverts “what people think they know about gender.”
Attendees enjoy New York’s Wigstock festival in 1994. Credit: Barbara Alper/Getty Images
Drag probes and questions gender and social norms, provoking audiences to do the same — and that is “inherently political,” Jeffreys said.
LGBTQ historians and performers say drag will endure in spite of any fearmongering and hate. Survival, they say, is baked into the art form’s long, defiant legacy.
The first ‘queen of drag’ was a formerly enslaved person
Drag is likely as old as gender norms — it’s a “part of the human condition,” said Larry La Fountain-Stokes, a professor of Spanish, American culture and women’s and gender studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who also performs in drag under the name Lola von Miramar.
“As long as people have been using clothes or marking gender in different ways, you’ve had people transgressing and challenging those conventions,” he said in a phone interview.
One of the first known people to call themselves a “queen of drag” was William Dorsey Swann. A formerly enslaved man, Swann in 1882 began hosting guests, many of them former slaves, for drag dances at his Washington, DC home.
Swann’s drag dances and subsequent arrests were some of the first recorded acts of resistance in the burgeoning queer liberation movement in America, in which drag has played an essential role for more than 100 years, said Nino Testa, an associate professor of professional practice in women and gender studies at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.
”The pleasure was the resistance,” Testa said in a phone interview. “The celebration of queer joy when it’s been denied in all these other spaces is activism.”
Julian Eltinge (right) performing in drag in 1917. Credit: Snap/Shutterstock
Drag queens have long been leaders in the queer liberation movement
Even after the counterculture movement took over the ’60s and sizable LGBTQ communities were forming in major cities, dressing in drag in public could still be dangerous. Police regularly raided gay bars in the US — until the late ’60s, Jeffreys said, it was illegal for bars in New York to serve a drink to a “known homosexual.”
Despite the pervasive danger of living authentically, drag performers in this era also experimented with the traditional drag format. Queens founded their own drag houses — and chosen families in the process; for many Black and Latino queer and trans people this was a reaction to the racism they faced within the gay pageant scene. This was also the era when lip syncing became the norm, Jeffreys said, and drag became less binary — “genderf**k” drag was used to describe some performers who weren’t easily defined as masculine or feminine.
Joan Jett Blakk, pictured during her San Francisco mayoral run in 1999, ran for US president in 1992. Credit: Adam Turner/AP
Blakk, then an advocate with AIDS grassroots organization Act Up and political group Queer Nation, never ran to win — she wanted to do “something different with drag and tie activism in,” she said in a phone conversation.
“It’s great to think that you made a little dent in history,” Blakk said. “But I’m surprised we have to get back out in the streets again and keep going.”
How trans performers contributed to drag history
Trans drag performers have played a key role throughout the history of the art form — “you can’t tell the story of drag without trans people,” Testa said.
As drag grew in popularity in the ’60s and beyond, many trans women found themselves performing because rampant transphobia and homophobia made it difficult to find other work. Drag was often a form of financial survival, said Testa.
Marsha P. Johnson, pictured in 1982, was an influential figure in the queer liberation movement. Credit: Barbara Alper/Getty Images
“People of our generation and after grew up in a realm where identity categories are very important and delineated,” Antheus said over the phone. “And for a lot of the girls, both queens who currently now identify as trans and those who don’t, back in the day, there weren’t such precise divisions when people were in internal spaces … they all rolled together.”
And yet, even within the LGBTQ community, trans women who performed in drag were often ostracized, particularly among some cisgender gay drag queens, according to Esther Newton, an anthropologist who authored the seminal 1979 book “Mother Camp” about Midwestern drag queens.
Some trans drag queens who received hormone injections were “strongly deplored by stage impersonators who (said) that the whole point of female impersonation depends on maleness,” Newton wrote.
“Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a big f-you to male-dominated culture,” RuPaul said in an interview with The Guardian, positioning the “trans movement” and the “drag movement” as two dichotomous groups.
Sasha Colby, pictured onstage in 2022, won the 15th season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and is one of the franchise’s first out trans winners. Credit: Santiago Felipe/Getty Images
Drag performers say it will survive
Drag’s growing popularity hasn’t come without challenges.
“As soon as anything gets that level of visibility, there’s going to be pushback,” he noted.
Drag performers and scholars said they believe drag is being scapegoated as a distraction from serious issues in the US, including gun violence, poverty and institutional racism, all of which disproportionately impact LGBTQ people, particularly Black trans women.
Pickle reads from a book during the Drag Queen Story Hour program at a Los Angeles library in 2019. Credit: David McNew/Getty Images
“Queer people have always found creative ways to resist the violence of their experience and norms that have tried to restrict our ability to live freely in the world,” Testa said. “Drag is a process of that resistance. These communities formed as a response to harassment, exclusion and violence. I’m hopeful in the sense that we’ve done this before — we never stopped doing it.”
Drag has survived for as long as it has because it’s always been a vessel for expression for queer and trans people who’ve had to carve their own paths. It’s why Alaska Thunderf**k, the blonde bouffanted winner of the second season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars,” first got into drag — to make art that wasn’t bound by rules. That, she said in an email, and to have pure, unadulterated fun.
“The great thing about drag is that the second you think you’ve got it figured out, it changes and turns into something else,” Alaska wrote. “That’s why we’ll always survive.”
Top image: An attendee at Wigstock, a festival that celebrates drag and queer and trans culture, poses for the camera.
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