Drag queen

thumb|A drag queen performer

thumb|[[Pabllo Vittar, Brazilian drag queen, singer, and performer]]

thumb|[[RuPaul, American drag queen, actor, and musician]]

A drag queen is a person, usually male, who uses drag clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate female gender signifiers and gender roles for entertainment purposes. Historically, drag queens have usually been gay men and have been a part of gay culture.

People do drag for reasons ranging from self-expression to mainstream performance. Drag shows frequently include lip-syncing, live singing, and dancing. They typically occur at LGBTQ pride parades, drag pageants, cabarets, carnivals, and nightclubs. Drag queens vary by type, culture, and dedication, from professionals who star in films and spend a lot of their time in their drag personas, to people who do drag only occasionally. In most cases, women who dress as men and entertain by imitating them are called drag kings.

Those who do occasional drag may be from backgrounds other than the LGBT community. There is a long history of folkloric and theatrical crossdressing that involves people of all orientations. Not everyone who does drag at some point in their lives is a drag queen or a drag king.

Terminology, scope, and etymology

thumb|Drag queens from [[Buenos Aires advertising a nightclub, 1995]]

Drag term

The term drag may date as far back as the Elizabethan era in England, whereas the first recorded use of drag in this context is from 1870. There are several other possible origins.

Traditionally, drag involves cross-dressing and transforming one's sex through the use of makeup and other costume devices. However, under newer conceptions of drag, conceivably performing an exaggerated and heightened form of one's own gender could be considered a drag performance.

Female impersonator

thumb|John Hunter, State Theatre, Sydney, May 1952

The term female impersonation refers to a type of theatrical performance where a man dresses in women's clothing for the sole purpose of entertaining an audience.

Female impersonation can be traced back at least as far as ancient Greece. There was little to no gender equity then, and women held a lower social status. This meant male actors would play female roles during theatrical performances. This tradition continued for centuries but began to be less prevalent as motion pictures became popular. During the era of vaudeville, it was considered immodest for women to appear on stage. Due to that circumstance, some men became famous as "female impersonators", the most notable being Julian Eltinge. At the peak of his career, he was one of the most sought-after and highest-paid actors in the world. Andrew Tribble was another early female impersonator who gained fame on Broadway and in Black Vaudeville.

In the twentieth century, some gender impersonators, both female and male, in the United States became highly successful performing artists in non-LGBTQ nightclubs and theaters. There was a concerted effort by these working female and male impersonators in America to separate the art of gender impersonation from queer identity, with an overt representation of working gender impersonators as heterosexual. Some of the performers were in fact cisgender heterosexual men and women, but others were closeted LGBTQ individuals due to the politics and social environment of the period. It was criminal in many American cities to be homosexual, or for LGBTQ people to congregate, and it was therefore necessary for female and male impersonators to distance themselves from identifying as queer publicly to avoid criminal charges and loss of career. The need to hide and dissociate from queer identity was prevalent among gender impersonators working in non-LGBTQ nightclubs before heteronormative audiences as late as the 1970s.

Female impersonation has been and continues to be illegal in some places, which inspired the drag queen José Sarria to hand out labels to his friends reading, "I am a boy", so they could not be accused of female impersonation. American drag queen RuPaul once said, "I do not impersonate females! How many women do you know who wear seven-inch heels, four-foot wigs, and skintight dresses?" He also said, "I don't dress like a woman; I dress like a drag queen!"

Drag queens and kings

The meaning of the term drag queen has changed across time. The term first emerged in New York City in the 1950s, and initially had two meanings. The first meaning referred to an amateur performer who did not make a living in drag but may have participated in amateur public performances such as those held at a drag ball or a drag pageant. This was meant to draw a line differentiating amateurs performing in drag for fun from professional female impersonators who made a living performing in drag.

In 1971, an article in Lee Brewster's Drag Queens magazine described a drag queen as a "homosexual transvestite" who is hyperfeminine, flamboyant, and militant. Drag queens were further described as having an attitude of superiority, and commonly courted by heterosexual men who would "not ordinarily participate in homosexual relationships".

In the 1970s, drag queen was continually defined as a "homosexual transvestite". Drag was parsed as changing one's clothes to those of a different sex, while queen was said to refer to a homosexual man. In a 2018 article, Psychology Today stated that drag queens are "most typically gay cisgender men (though there are many drag queens of varying sexual orientations and gender identities)".

Examples of trans-feminine drag queens, sometimes called trans queens, include Monica Beverly Hillz

Drag queens' counterparts are drag kings: performers, usually women, who dress in exaggeratedly masculine clothing. Examples of drag kings include Landon Cider. Trans men who dress like drag kings are sometimes termed trans kings.

Alternative terms

thumb|[[Khookha McQueer, Tunisian drag queen]]

Some drag queens may prefer to be referred to as "she" while in drag and desire to stay completely in character. Other drag performers are indifferent to which pronoun is used to refer to them. RuPaul has said, "You can call me he. You can call me she. You can call me Regis and Kathie Lee; I don't care! Just so long as you call me."

Drag queens are sometimes called transvestites, although that term also has many other connotations than the term drag queen and is not much favored by many drag queens themselves. The term tranny, an abbreviation of the term transvestite, has been adopted by some drag performers, notably RuPaul, and the gay male community in the United States, but it is considered offensive to most transgender and transsexual people.

Many drag performers refer to themselves as drag artists, as opposed to drag queens, as some contemporary forms of drag have become nonbinary. In Brazil, androgynous drag performers are sometimes called drag queer, as a form of gender neutrality.

Among drag queens and their contacts today, there is an ongoing debate about whether transgender drag queens are actually considered "drag queens". Some argue that, because a drag queen is defined as a man portraying a woman, transgender women cannot be drag queens. Drag kings are women who assume a masculine aesthetic, but this is not always the case, because there are also biokings, bioqueens, and AFAB queens, which are people who perform their own biological sex through a heightened or exaggerated gender presentation.

History of drag

Canada

In the 1940s, John Herbert, who sometimes competed in drag pageants, was the victim of an attempted robbery while he was dressed as a woman.

Separately from kids watching drag, the phenomenon of drag kids is relatively recent, The New York Times in September 2019, published a guess that there are about a hundred children who do drag in the U.S., with Desmond is Amazing being the one with the most followers. The mainstream access to drag queens on television exponentially increased in 2009 when RuPaul's Drag Race started airing.

However, as of 2022, exposing kids to drag has become somewhat controversial. Lawmakers in states such as Arizona, Florida, and Texas are attempting to ban minors from attending drag shows and punish parents who expose their kids to drag. These attempts to ban minors from watching drag are based on allegations of drag being a form of perversion and hyper-sexualization. Those who disagree with the accusations have argued that drag queens provide a safe and creative environment for young children, especially LGBTQ+ children, and are a source of both education and entertainment. Launched at the San Francisco Public Library, Drag Queen Story Hour was adopted by the Brooklyn Public Library in the summer of 2016, and has since traveled to various libraries, museums, bookstores, recreation centers, and parks across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Such events sometimes prompt opposition against the libraries and organizers. In one instance in California, men belonging to the far-right group known as the Proud Boys arrived in a group and disrupted the event by shouting homophobic and transphobic phrases at the crowd. The County Sheriff's Office opened a hate crime investigation into the incident due to the nature of the disruption. Some leftist groups, such as the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, organize armed counter-protests to keep protesters out of the building. This usually leads to the presence of police to ensure that both groups don't harm each other.

Societal reception

Drag has come to be a celebrated and important aspect of modern gay life, In the era of second-wave feminism some women "were angry and appalled by what they perceived as the charade of femininity expressed by some drag queens and transsexual women." These critics compared drag to blackface and saw it "as a kind of gender minstrel." In 2018, the show became the first show to win a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program in the same year.

RuPaul received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the television industry on 16 March 2018, making him the first drag queen to be given such an award.

Moral panic

A moral panic called drag panic has emerged in the United States in relation to drag queen performers. It alleges that contact between children and drag queens would involve drag queens attempting to molest them or indoctrinate them into the "queer way of life". This moral panic has also been linked to the LGBT grooming conspiracy theory, also from the United States.

Notes

References

External links

Drag Artist Discography (information and discography with historical references and photos) of drag artists & female impersonators
The Pink Mirror – a film on Indian drag queens