Drag Queen

The drag queen, who is a fundamentally theatrical figure, relishes the prospect of playing the woman. Drag shows (typically staged in nightclubs and Gay Pride festivals) are largely a subcultural phenomenon. Though drag has never enjoyed mainstream appeal, drag queen is a common enough term in popular culture, partly because of recording-artist RuPaul, who hit the charts with her hit-song “Super Model (You Better Work)” in 1992. Such hit films as The Birdcage (1996), and the recent popularity of movie-musicals such as Rent and Hairspray have also made the image of the drag queen a familiar cultural icon.

By definition, a drag queen is distinct from a cross-dresser (sometimes called a transvestite) because the motivation of dragging is typically not sexual. Although the two are often conflated in popular cultural representation, cross-dressing commonly involves a high degree of secrecy and is associated with sexual or gender-related fetishes. Both drag queens and cross-dressers have experienced a history of persecution, as has the drag queen's antonym (the drag king), which refers to a woman in man's clothing, or a male impersonator. Unlike the secrecy of cross-dressing, in which the attempt is often to pass as a woman, dragging involves outlandish performance whereby the intent is an undoing of gender norms through doing (or dressing) the part of the opposite sex. However entertaining it might be, this flamboyance can also be difficult to accomplish in a culture of homophobia. In 1810, for example, members of the White Swan (a house of ill repute in London's West End) wound up in the pillory, where they were then pummeled with rocks and excrement. The group's performances included an athletic bargeman posing as “Fanny Murray,” a brawny coal-heaver as “Lucy Cooper,” a butcher as “Pretty Harriet,” a waiter as “Lady Godiva,” a country grocer as “Miss Sweet Lips,” even a police officer as “Miss Selina.” Most Londoners were outraged by the apparent mismatch between the men's private and public selves. One pamphleteer (who excoriated the White Swan's patrons as “reptiles” and “wretches”) gives us a glimpse into drag queen culture in early 19th-century England: living in fear of police raids and state surveillance, men in drag shut themselves in the closet.

There is a rich literary tradition of men taking stage in women's clothing. In this sense, drag is as old as Shakespeare's romantic comedy As You Like It, in which Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede to woo Orlando, and by doing so, she gets to know him “man” to man. One can draw a “straight” line from Shakespeare's gender-swapping to the 1959 hit comedy Some Like It Hot, in which Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis disguise themselves as “Daphne” and “Josephine” and join a traveling, all-girl jazz band to escape the mob. The film also features, as the band's singer, Marilyn Monroe, an icon of femininity whom many drag queens emulate, alongside Cher, Madonna, Aretha, Dolly, Bette, and other show-biz queens. That Lemmon and Curtis did drag on-screen hardly makes them drag queens, though the effect is the same: gender norms are radically undone when drag takes place. As with Tootsie (1982), one Hollywood theme that allowed for the popularization of drag queens is the idea that dudes only dress like ladies to get the girl. In contrast, a film like Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954) reminds us that drag remains, in many circles, no laughing matter. The chief inspector in that film sends his underling out of Grace Kelly's apartment with a piece of evidence (her handbag), only after warning that the underling will be arrested if he walks out in the open looking like that.

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