![]() “The pleasure was the resistance,” Testa said in a phone interview. 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. When Swann confronted police in a cream satin gown after they raided one of his parties in 1888, he was arrested and charged with “being a suspicious character.” He was arrested several more times throughout his life after protecting queer friends during raids, according to Channing Gerard Joseph, an LGBTQ historian and Princeton University instructor who has said he’s the first academic to highlight Swann’s contributions to drag history. A formerly enslaved man, Swann in 1882 began hosting guests, many of them former slaves, for drag dances at his Washington, DC home. One of the first known people to call themselves a “queen of drag” was William Dorsey Swann. (One theory about the origin of the term “drag” is that it referenced the way gowns “dragged” across the floor another is that it derived from Polari, a slang-y language used frequently by queer British men, Jeffreys said.) There, Black queer and trans residents donned dresses and wigs to perform in a safe, creative environment. ![]() New York’s Harlem neighborhood is thought by many to be the birthplace of drag balls in the 1860s. “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. The first ‘queen of drag’ was a formerly enslaved personĭrag 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. Survival, they say, is baked into the art form’s long, defiant legacy. ![]() LGBTQ historians and performers say drag will endure in spite of any fearmongering and hate. And all of these bills are being introduced amid a wider campaign in many states to roll back the rights of queer and trans people.ĭrag probes and questions gender and social norms, provoking audiences to do the same – and that is “inherently political,” Jeffreys said. Outside of the impact recent legislative measures will have on drag performers, many fear that trans people could also be wrongly criminalized for expressing their gender in public. Barbara Alper/Getty Imagesĭrag has become increasingly visible in recent years through mainstream shows like “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and popular public events such as drag brunches, drag bingo and drag queen story hours, in which drag performers read children’s books to young audiences, often at libraries. (The ban was temporarily blocked hours before it was expected to be implemented.)Īttendees enjoy New York's Wigstock festival in 1994. In Tennessee, where the most restrictive measures to date were passed in March, people who perform in drag in an area where children could see them could be charged with a misdemeanor or felony. But this year in particular, some US states have attempted to impose legislative measures that would impact where and when drag can be performed. 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.”Īt its core, drag is an art form that for over a century has affirmed and uplifted LGBTQ people who perform and enjoy it. ![]() “Drag is the theatrical exaggeration of gender,” said Joe E. It’s masculine and feminine it’s neither or both. ![]() It’s cisgender and trans men, trans and cis women and nonbinary people. Dick in a firetruck-red pompadour and drawn-on goatee. It’s a queen named Meatball dressed as a ghoulish exaggeration of George Santos, singing the “Greatest Showman” anthem “This is Me,” and a king named Mo B. It’s the glitzy cast of “RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars” and small-town performers with dedicated local followings. Drag is also an underground performer twirling onstage to Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.” But drag’s image – and history – is far more complex.ĭrag is a grand dame in a glittering gown, commanding the stage with a power ballad or disco classic. 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. ![]()
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