Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 2
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Performing Race, Class, and Gender: The Tangled History of Drag / Bruce Drushel
<1> Representations of drag in popular media tend to be cyclical in their frequency but one constant seems to be their tendency to obscure its complicated past. This is especially true where transgressive gender performance is conflated with issues of race and class. Drag as a cultural practice steeped in critique of the gender binary and its role in reinforcing class-based power structures dates to at least the 16th century, when troops of primarily men in England and France satirically assumed female court personae as a form of protest against taxes and other perceived excesses of the monarchy (Ackroyd). Later, drag “balls” became a fixture of the Harlem Renaissance in New York of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as a safe space for lesbians and gay men and participants whose manner of dress, speech, and behavior blurred conventional boundaries between the masculine and feminine (Chauncey, Gay New York).
<2> But the balls also became a site of tense power relations between black and white and rich and poor, with blacks of varied economic status dependent upon the patronage of wealthy and bourgeois whites and the whites dependent upon blacks for cultural enrichment and diversion. Eventually, the tensions led to a schism in drag culture that saw a flight of whiteness and wealth from Harlem drag culture to the stages of vaudeville, film, television, and the nascent white gay club scene. Politics and pleasure continued to suffuse both traditions: the Harlem drag balls employed transgressive gender performance as a source of humor and spectacle but also of aspiration, with the performers bedecked in symbols of wealth, material success (and excess), while performances in venues more accessible (and acceptable) to the growing middle and wealthier classes parodied conventional gender roles in anticipation of both post-war suburban materialism and the eventual burgeoning feminist movement.
<3> In this essay, I argue that representations of popular drag culture continue to reflect this race and class divide, and simultaneously obscure its economically more marginalized stream by restricting drag performances to venues that are geographically isolated and all but unmediated, with the exceptions limited to forays by documentary films with small and specialized audiences (e.g., Paris is Burning) or to its more frequent co-opting by mainstream culture, which in the process also makes it more white and more middle-class (e.g., Madonna's “Vogue” music video and films such as To Wong Fu: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert).
<4> The result is the cultural annihilation of significant modern historical sites in which gender became a source for performative critique as well as a misrepresentation of the original strategies of drag as trenchant commentary on both gender as cultural construction and as bulwark against attacks on the structures of wealth and power.
Defining Drag
<5> As sociologist Irving Goffman has noted, among stigmatized populations there are two opposing roles: the socially acceptable deviants who try to prove they are equally competent despite their marginalization and those who flagrantly embody their stigma (111). If the suit-and-tie wearing gay males and blouse-and-skirt wearing lesbians of the homophile moment of the 1950s and 1960s typify the former, certainly drag queens and drag kings from the late-19th century forward exemplify the latter.
<6> The origin of the terms “drag” and “drag queen” is not entirely certain, though scholars do seem to agree on aspects of their lineage. “Drag” in this usage dates to at least 1887 (Baker 146) and perhaps to 1871 (Rupp & Taylor 180) or even late-1860s (Phelan 85) in England and probably originated as an analogy for the petticoats and long skirts of feminine dress of the period that would have slowed walking, much as the “drag” of a carriage that was used for braking. The term was a favorite of thieves of the 1850s and, according to Phelan, was adapted to the theatrical world (85). “Queen” seems to be derived from “quean,” is much older, and was adapted not from the customary term for female monarchs but from late-17th century slang for “whore,” likely in reference to “mollies,” or groups of excessively effeminate men. Rupp and Taylor believe the two probably weren’t used together until the 1930s and didn't appear in print together until about 1941 (180).
<7> There also is some disagreement as to their proper application. Though Newton does not distinguish between “drag” and “impersonation”[1] (3), other scholars believe impersonation is cross-dressing designed with the primary aim of deception, while drag is less concerned with absolute authenticity and is primarily concerned with entertainment, protest, and social comment. While at one time both drag and impersonation were the province of both those who would identify as gay and those who would identify as straight, as Newton puts it, the work today is defined as queer, and therefore most of its practitioners are as well (7).
<8> Drag, particularly, seems to have specific and identifiable functions in the lesbian and gay communities. One of these, according to Baker, is as a symbol of sexual uncertainty, “and in many ways an agent of release from it. She slips fluently between the assertiveness of women and passivity of men, creating the kind of balance which can make both men and women feel more secure” (156). Drag also seems to be a source of a number of cultural artifacts in the broader lesbian and gay communities, including terminology. Interviews done by sociologists with the University of Chicago indicate, for instance, that the term “coming out” did not originally mean “of the closet,” but instead alluded to debutante balls, which in mainstream society served as a social introduction of marriageable women and which drag culture appropriated (Johnson 104).
<9> Perhaps as often as with impersonation, drag is confused with “camp.” Indeed, in some English-speaking cultures, the terms are used nearly interchangeably. Medhurst most artfully has addressed the distinction between them: “Drag is merely one incarnation of camp, just one room in camp's mansion” (282). According to Babuscio, camp in the broader sense describes persons, situations, or activities that express or are created by a gay sensibility (122). More specifically, it is the irony inherent when a thing is removed from the original context in which its meaning and cultural significance were formed. As Chauncey (Gay New York) has noted in his comprehensive history of early lesbian and gay life in New York, the strategic use of camp in drag was subversive in that it allowed gay men to question the very premise of their marginalization (290). Later, African-American rock pioneer Little Richard would intentionally use camp effeminacy as a way to break through the racial divide in pop music. His elaborate coiffures and makeup sharply contrast with the undisciplined masculine gender performance attached to African-American male entertainment figures the white mainstream found threatening and made him, to use Baker's phrase, a figure of fun and not of fear (241). Later, the white British rock group Rolling Stones would use drag for the opposite purpose: to use the subversion of gender binaries to turn the docile acceptability of the white British invasion of western popular music into something more menacing.
<10> Among the most notable distinctions between drag and impersonation is in voice. For many drag queens, literal voice is expressed in ambiguous performance: they lip-synch recorded performances of iconic female performers but make no effort to change the pitch of their speaking voices. The well-known British performer Danny La Rue, in fact, used a voice much deeper than his actual one to make clear he was male (Baker 54-55) no doubt adding to the humor of his act. But “voice” in its political sense is a more complex matter. While a gay male – not female – sensibility infuses the discourse of many drag performances, Carroll has argued that drag in its broader sense also can include appropriation of the female voice in print, as the author Cotton Mather did in works from Puritan New England such as Ornaments for the Daughter of Zion in which he attempts to represent the female experience at a time in the late-17th century when public expression by women, even when it would serve to convey moral and spiritual instruction, was not accepted (18-20.)
<11> The role of modern drag as a potent form of social protest mostly is obscured by its functions as a form of musical and comedic entertainment and, for some, as a lingering but pernicious form of misogyny. Rupp and Taylor are among those who have argued for the protest motive. They see the performances of both drag queens and drag kings as transgressive action that destabilizes gender and sexual categories by making visible the social bases for gender and sexuality, rather than as reinforcement of dominant assumptions about gender and sexual dichotomies that owe to the appropriation of displays associated with traditional femininity and institutionalized heterosexuality (212). But they concede that not all drag reflects that strategy.
<12> Butler believed there must be a way to discover “what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony” (176-77). Rupp and Taylor have posited that the distinguishing criteria appear to be {1} the degree to which the performance is a site of contestation where symbols and identities are forged, negotiated, and debated, {2} the intentionality or deliberate strategic use of cultural entertainment as a medium for the expression of political ideas, and {3} the staging of the performance by those for whom culture serves as an arena for the enactment, reinforcement, or renegotiation of collective identity (217).
<13> The multi-functionality of drag appears to owe to its long and multi-faceted history, influenced by cultures eastern and western, cultures benighted and enlightened, and motivations that span the range of romantic, sexual, economic, political, desperate, and the simply practical. What follows is an attempt to capture a brief history of the practice of drag from the first recorded uses (that meet the criteria outlined in this section) to the present.
History of Drag
<14> The modern instances of drag performances by both males and females recognizable as such today seem to have made their appearance in the late-1800s (Phelan 83). While men dressing as women can serve as a safety valve especially in contemporary societies where gender roles are mutually exclusive and rigidly enforced, women dressing as men is tolerated only when it is considered inoffensive by the mainstream or in cases where feminine allure still is evident to them (81). Historically, the act of cross-dressing has been associated with special spiritual powers (Ramet), protests against the social structure (Cressy 109), and sexual desire (Rupp & Taylor 181). While the nature of these motives was, at best, contested, some temporary forms of drag appeared to enjoy wider acceptance: among men and women, these included carnivals and riots; among women, they included traveling (ease and safety), for erotic stimulation (of other men), and general carousing (Dekker & van de Pol 6).
<15> Baker has observed that drag historically has possessed two faces: the sacred and the secular. The sacred face includes the creation of dramatic traditions in Greece, where actors in masks played Hecuba and Clytemnestra, and the classical theatres of China and Japan (24) as well as the taking of women's roles by men in religious pageants in England, a practice that arose from women's absence from meaningful roles in the church (26). The theatres in China, Japan, and England all matured in late-16th and early-17th centuries and all three demanded women's roles be performed by men. The theatrical traditions of all three also seemed to grow out of acts of worship (66). Among the first comedic exaggerations of femininity in Europe was in the male stage portrayal of Gyll, the wife of a sheep stealer from the Old Testament Book of Genesis, who intimidates men and “others” women (28-29). The evolution of theatre from sacred to secular (and political) in Europe appears to have begun in the mid-to-late 16th century in spite of the efforts of the Puritans (31). Women's roles were sparse but tended to be played by young men and boys (35-36). In 17th century Europe, both men and women were playing women's roles on the stage. By the 18th century, women had taken on most of those roles in Europe (93) though the belief in Japan that only a man could successfully embody the idealized female persisted well into that era (70) and women were not accepted on stage in China until the early-20th century (72).
<16> With women now more commonly on the stages of Europe, drag performance removed from either specific protest action or structured stage performance appears to have evolved in the late-18th and early-19th centuries and serious impersonation had given way to comic diversion (Baker 109). The German laureate Goethe wrote in 1786 of a carnival in Rome that included young men in the holiday clothing of lower-class women, who behaved as scolds and shrews (101). So-called “Molly Houses” – or self-organized drag queen collectives – were staging mock weddings, honeymoons, and christenings as criticisms of the new social order and evolving suburban lifestyles (107). Drag performers still were found on stage, doing broad comedy (145), frequently as middle-aged, intrusive, nagging, and derisive grande dame figures whose lineage could be traced to the early church pageants (162). Male impersonation in the form of women playing the roles of young boys was found in the supper clubs of England that served as an alternative to rougher public houses and taverns for middle-class men (168).
<17> The first documented instances of organized male drag performances in the Americas were not until the late-19th century and likely had a pair of antecedents: the centuries-old tradition of the masquerade ball, more modern iterations of which had become sites of the co-mingling of race, gender, and class and had become common in vice districts of larger cities (Chauncey, Gay New York, 292; Drexel 130-31), and the follies – themed entertainment revues that had originated in the dance halls and cafes of France and had been brought to New York by Florenz Ziegfeld (Newton, Margaret Mead, 53). Gays were banned from many of the early balls because their guise was seen as more of a true expression of their identities than a masquerade (Chauncey, Gay New York, 293) but were admitted to events in New York City and Washington, D.C., likely because they were staged on Halloween and New Year's Eve, traditionally-acceptable occasions for transgressive behavior (Drexel 130-31). Balls organized by groups of gays likely began around 1890 and were well established by the 1910s and 1920s (Chauncey, Gay New York, 293). Organizers found they could circumvent restrictions on public cross-dressing by registering their events with the police (295).
<18> As Chauncey (Gay New York) has observed, drag played a much larger role in the gay community in the United States of the 1920s and 1930s than in contemporary times (4). The figure of the “molly” had crossed the Atlantic from Britain and by 1920 was known to officials of the Navy (Newton, Margaret Mead, 55). At some venues, drag performances moved from the stage to the floor and became favorites of patrons who valued the intimacy and increasingly satiric nature of the performances (Newton, Margaret Mead, 53). Film and radio comedienne Mae West used drag queens in her controversial stage productions The Drag in 1926 and Pleasure Man in 1928 (56).
<19> Both the passage and repeal of Prohibition in the U.S. brought with them sea changes to drag as a cultural practice. During prohibition, drag became a popular entertainment form both for the proliferating “speakeasies” in cities nationwide that assumed the roles of liquor dispensers and the now-“dry” Times Square nightclubs that were desperate to maintain their clientele (Rupp & Taylor 183). By the late-1920s, half a dozen major drag balls were held annually in New York in upscale venues including Madison Square Gardens (Chauncey, Gay New York, 294). One of the largest was held on Thanksgiving and appeared to grow out of immigrant ragamuffin parades, in which children would dress in costume begging for pennies in middle-class neighborhoods (293-94). The largest ended with contests judged by literary or stage celebrities and cash prizes for the best outfits (297). The first documented performance by a drag king came in a 1932 stage revue in which one woman dressed as a female cowboy and delivered lines laced with “terse cleverness” (Newton, Margaret Mead, 54).
<20> The effects of Prohibition's end in the early-1930s are considerably more complex. Phelan credits repeal of Prohibition and the enactment of the motion picture industry’s Hays Code forbidding suggestions of sexual perversion on screen with forcing drag performance to go underground in the 1930s following two decades of increasing visibility (124). In San Francisco, new performance venues for both gay and straight crowds opened and one club added lesbian waitresses and drag kings by the close of the 1930s (Boyd 80-83). In Chicago, the first clubs exclusively for gays and lesbians opened (Johnson 104). But in New York, a “perfect storm” of a change in mayoral administrations (from the more laissez-faire Jimmie Walker to the more aggressive Fiorello LaGuardia), a shooting at a prominent drag club, and crusading newspaper editors combined with the legalization of alcohol to result paradoxically in the opening of more gay bars and laws forbidding gays in them (Chauncey, Gay New York, 18, 331-33), to banning drag queens from bars and effectively from all of the area between 14th and 72nd Streets, and to restrictions on the largest drag balls (Chauncey, Gay New York, 8; Rupp & Taylor 183). Washington, D.C., prohibited drag balls, though drag performers could perform for largely straight crowds, likely because the performances could be isolated and disciplined (Beemyn, “Queer Capital,” 192-94).
<21> Ironically, drag experienced something of a renaissance during World War II, where it frequently was employed in touring shows for the troops, particularly Irving Berlin’s This is the Army (Newton, Margaret Mead, 56). Berube has identified three types of drag in these shows: comic cross-dressing routines and “pony ballets” of husky men in chorus lines played for comedic effect, skilled impersonation of dancers and singers, and illusionists/caricaturists who did convincing impersonations of female stars (71). Many of the shows featured gays from New York theatre either as performers or as part of the production crew (67). The military and critics were ever-watchful and prepared to react decisively if the shows became overtly queer (72). Some of the ex-GI performers helped launch the “glamour drag” era in the immediate post-war period, ultimately replaced by non-GI gay men (Baker 188, 237). The “glamour drag” era in the U.S. and Britain waned in the 1950s, largely because of the cultural strictures of the anti-communist and anti-gay witch-hunts of the 1950s (197-98).
<22> Baker notes that as the play and film M Butterfly attest, in China cross-dressing survived the arrival of the same communist takeover that prompted its persecution in the West, though drag in China largely disappeared with the Cultural Revolution of 1966 (79-80). In the U.S., drag survived the McCarthy era by appealing to straight spectators and by transitioning from live performances to lip-synching. Drag balls, then, became the only protected spaces for the practice (Rupp & Taylor 184) though reactions in the gay community were at best mixed. Chauncey (Gay New York) compares in-community reception to that of second-generation immigrants to ethnic celebrations: a mix of pride, embarrassment, and self-recognition (298). Given the emphasis of the Homophile movement on assimilation and acceptance by mainstream culture, Rupp & Taylor would characterize the reception primarily as embarrassment (184).
<23> The political image of the drag queen largely was rehabilitated in the immediate pre-Stonewall period when drag queens figured prominently in at least four significant uprisings: the May 1959 rebellion against Los Angeles police at Cooper's Donuts (Stryker 60-61), the protest against the management of Dewey's coffeehouse in Philadelphia in April and May 1965 (62-63), the riot against police and management at Gene Compton's cafeteria in San Francisco in August 1966, and the three-night stand-off with New York police outside the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 that marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement (Rupp & Taylor 185). Drag, too, rebounded with a proliferation of new gay clubs in the aftermath of the protests (Baker 199). A form of “radical” drag evolved in the 1970s as a political performance (239). Drag queens, for instance, would take the lead in very public “zapping” [2] actions and groups such as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence[3] protested the anti-gay pronouncements of the Christian Right and inactivity on HIV/AIDS research and treatment in the 1980s (Rupp & Taylor 186).
<24> In addition to their prominence in broader actions in the LGBT communities, drag performers organized internally. In 1965, Jose Sarria formed the Imperial Court System in San Francisco as a means for charitable fundraising and community-building for gays and respect-building for drag queens (Rupp & Taylor 185). Today, the organization has expanded to dozens of chapters throughout the U.S. and functions as a sort of professional and fraternal organization for the gay community. The Queen's Liberation Front (QLF), inspired by the activist group Gay Liberation Front, was founded by drag queen Lee Brewster and heterosexual transvestite Bunny Eisenhower in the early 1970s. According to Stryker, its most lasting contribution was publication of Drag Queen (later Drag) magazine, which covered both drag and transgender issues and activism (87)
<25> As Baker (1994) has observed, much of immediate post-Stonewall drag was less about how queens looked but what they said. Drag gave men permission to talk publicly about other men, including their appearance, social behavior, and sexual prowess (238). At Key West's 801 Cabaret of the 1980s and 1990s, gender, race, ethnicity, and class all were satirized. Performers made references to trailer parks, “white trash,” and being “from Texas” (Rupp & Taylor 114). In an echo of mostly bygone Hollywood casting practices, an Asian-American performer not only had Japanese and Thai personas but also portrayed an African-American, and a performer from Puerto Rico also had Cuban and “wetback” (Mexican) personas. The tone of the social commentary was closer to in-group ribbing than to external criticism and condemnation. Or, as Christopher Isherwood deftly put it, “You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it” (Baker 238).
Drag on Film
<26> Given its potential to entertain and the seemingly universal nature of the visual humor and irony inherent in a performer whose appearance blatantly transgresses gender norms, it should not be surprising that drag has been a frequent device in stage, film, and television narratives. Even among the “fine” arts, Baker (117) has observed that the excessive nature of operatic storytelling creates a perfect arena for explorations of illusion, disguise, and gender confusion of which drag is a prime example.
<27> In Britain, The Two Ronnies, Benny Hill, John Inman from the long-running situation comedy Are You Being Served, and the male cast of Monty Python's Flying Circus all frequently assumed female personae. In fact, male drag performances on stage and television in the U.K. were at one time so commonplace that cross-dressing was jokingly referred to as an essential skill for English actors. Among the first legitimate American television stars in the 1950s was Milton Berle, who frequently donned make-up, handbag, and frock as a comic foil for his male co-stars. Tom Hanks first came to the attention of American audiences in the early-1980s as one of a pair of male roommates forced to dress as a woman as a condition for living in an inexpensive female-only rooming house on the ABC-TV series Bosom Buddies. African-American comedians Flip Wilson in the 1970s and Martin Lawrence in the 1990s both made sassy, extroverted female characters staples of their television series. And most recently, drag queen RuPaul Charles has hosted the reality series RuPaul's Drag Race, a competition to identify upcoming drag superstars, on MTV Networks' LGBT-focused Logo channel.
<28> The cinematic construction of the drag performer delivered by major film studios with amazing consistency has been the white, non-hispanic, middle-class man whose barriers to self-actualization, if there be any, are both temporary and soluble. Beginning with 1959's Some Like it Hot and especially the 1990s trio of Mrs. Doubtfire, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and The Birdcage,film distanced the popular vision of drag from its roots among the racially-diverse working-class and poor of the drag balls of Harlem and Chicago's south side, the protesters in front of the Stonewall Inn, and even the majority of itinerant performers of bars and cabarets across the country. A fourth film from the mid-1990s, To Wong Foo: Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, did include an African-American and a Latino in its cast, but only John Leguizamo's Chichi Rodriguez character appeared as anything other than safely middle-class or upper-middle class.
<29> These decidedly upscale representations of drag stand in sharp contrast to those of the 1990 film Paris is Burning, an award-winning documentary steeped in the Harlem drag ball circuit of the 1980s. Nearly all of the performers represented in Paris is Burning were people of color, either African-American or Latinos/as, and most, with the possible exceptions of the older more established queens such as Dorian Corey and Pepper LaBeija, were working-class or poor. An even more striking distinction from studio representations was the murder of one of the performers, Venus Xtravaganza, who was found strangled in a hotel before filming had been completed (Green 9-1).
<30> Most of Paris is Burning was shot in the Imperial Elks Lodge in Harlem between 1987 and 1989. In adapting the corporate name of expensive fashion designers as their own, according to Phelan, participants both appropriate and mock the intended exclusiveness of the labels (160). Similar to studio drag films, the competitions emphasize “realness” and place a premium on “passing” in reality. But unlike the studio representations in which appearance is a focus for humor and a marker of camp, ability is irrelevant, and opportunity is assumed, in Paris is Burning appearance is equated with ability and opportunity. The role of aspiration is made clear in the representation of drag as not merely a performance of gender, but also of vocation, avocation, and lifestyle.
<31> Critical reaction to the film was predictably mixed. It was awarded a Grand Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival, along with a number of awards from other major competitions. It did not take the Best Documentary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, nor was it nominated. Several African-American film critics, including Essex Hemphill, praised the film for allowing the authentic voices of people of color to be heard (10-11). But Jesse Green noted that although the documentary had made director Jennie Livingston a filmmaker, it accomplished little for its subjects, several of whom already had died young, other than leave them behind (9-1).
<32> But as Phelan has argued, “The appropriation of woman at the heart of male cross-dressing cannot simply be declared 'celebratory' or 'misogynist' without accounting for the role of race, class, sexuality, economics, and history which determine that appropriation” (159). In Paris is Burning, she contends, the figure of the woman is appropriated and her actual presence is unnecessary (161). As illustration of her claim that the represented woman in the film is a “copy of a copy” (162) she points to a scene in which dancer Willie Ninja teaches women to walk so that male drag performers can imitate them. As for the performers' admiration of “whiteness” (159), Phelan argues it is the escape from political surveillance they truly admire and that while some of them may wish to pass as white, they do not want to be white (163). Ultimately, drag balls are the manifestation of the distance between symbolic identification and identity (164).
<33> Other documentaries on drag queens with more limited distribution have offered insights into a whiter, more economically upscale representation more familiar to audiences for Hollywood's fictional narratives. The Rubi Girls revealed a troupe of white, gay, middle-aged, and middle-class performers for whom drag was an avocation benefiting local HIV/AIDS charities, not a source of income. And Cover Girl Don't Cover Boy followed four drag queens (three of whom are white and all of whom appear to be from middle-class backgrounds) as they prepare for a show at a gay nightclub in Columbus, Ohio. An extended segment of the film focused on Rob Harper, whose character Dee Ranged conjures memories of the Gay Liberation Front's Michael James, who famously appeared in drag as half-masculine and half-feminine, a crisp, vertical line on his body marking the boundary between male and female (Baker 239).
<34> It may be worth noting that one facet of the identities of drag performers all three documentaries got right – but that most television representations and many Hollywood films have gotten very wrong – was that most drag since the 19th century, and certain postwar-era drag, is a largely queer practice. Impromptu impersonations in films such as Some Like it Hot, Tootsie, Victor/Victoria, Bosom Buddies, and Mrs. Doubtfire as well as the personae deployed by the likes of Milton Berle, Flip Wilson, and Martin Lawrence may characterize the strategy behind Hollywood drag but it bears little resemblance to its practice in the unmediated world. Mainstream representations of drag, in fact, tend to obscure a number of truths about identities represented in drag, most especially gender, race, and socioeconomic class.
Gender
<35> It is difficult to overstate the salience of gender in any discussion of identity and particularly identity as expressed in drag performance. As Dekker and van de Pol have observed, the difference between a man and a woman is the primary and most essential delineated in society (1). Strategically, drag queens use their art both to express the incongruity of the feminine man and to achieve higher identity synthesis (Newton, Margaret Mead, 22). In her seminal work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Butler wondered, “Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established?” (p. x).
<36> In queer communities, perhaps no subcultural legacy is more fraught with divisiveness than drag queens. They are for some a cultural force gays have made their own: whatever their lineage, they are today largely a queer form inflected with a camp sensibility that is itself inherently queer. While first appearing unmistakably misogynistic, it is a longstanding actually parody of a society that dictates older and less conventionally attractive women are undesirable and unmarriageable (Baker 163). For others they are a historical symbol of defiance against the mainstream bulwark of homophobia that enacted laws to marginalize or annihilate part of the citizenry. For still others, they are an archaic attack upon the feminine – one particularly offensive because it comes from within – a cousin of minstrelsy that has been legitimized by its claim to critical insight into the very thing it appears to defame. While the drag queens of Stonewall and the less publicized uprisings that preceded it have been lionized by a new generation (and some might argue, revisionist generation) of queer historians, their very presence at a rally after the first San Francisco gay pride parade in 1972 was enough to prompt feminists and their gay male supporters to refuse to participate in future parades in which drag queens were permitted to “mock” women (Stryker 87).
<37> Criticism of the drag queen's parodic counterpart in lesbian culture, the drag king, has been less in evidence, no doubt in part owing to the differing meanings that attach to gender parody in a culture of asymmetric gender relations, but also in part owing to the comparatively sparse amount of scholarship on the history and traditions of drag kings. Troka, Noble, and LeBesco note that, prior to 1996, drag kings were mentioned only in passing in scholarly writing, when they were mentioned at all (4). There even seems to be no agreement on how old the practice is. As noted earlier, male impersonation has been documented as early as the 16th century in Europe and, according to Halberstam, it has been a theatrical genre for at least two hundred years (232). Sennett and Bay-Cheng believe it may be much older, citing the prominence of a drag king performance in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, in which the female character Viola dresses as the male Cesario to woo Olivia on behalf of Viola's master, Orsino (42-43).
<38> In any event, the drag king seems to be a more recent phenomenon and, unlike the drag queen in gay male bars, never developed extensively within lesbian bar culture (Halberstam 234). Volcano and Halberstam have traced the first modern recognizable drag kings back to at least 1985 but believe they did not become popular until the 1990s (32). Piontek believes the drag kings he studied in Columbus, Ohio, to differ markedly from those Halberstam had written about in New York. While kings both perform a version of what Halberstam called “female masculinity,” there was more interaction among the kings in Columbus, particularly between those of differing races (128). Also, the kings in Columbus made great use of the gay male strategy of camp than did those Halberstam studied (140).
<39> As Newton (Mother Camp) has argued, drag symbolizes two conflicting statements about sex-roles, the first of which naturalizes them because the performer violates their assumptions and the second of which de-naturalizes them by emphasizing the ease with which they can be achieved (103).
<40> Prominent and influential scholars of gender, sexuality, and culture may be found in both the camps that praise drag and those that abhor it. Butler finds drag to be a subversive political act because it shows gender to be fundamentally performative (25). Garber would agree adding that “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – and its contingency” (151). Montero justifies the parodic nature of the funhouse mirror that drag places before women, arguing that drag interrogates the very limits of representation: “The imperfection of her imitation is what makes her appealing, what makes her eminently readable. Foolproof imitations of women by men, or men by women, are curious, but not interesting” (41). Paglia explicitly takes drag's detractors to task by contending that “The drag-queen defies victim-centered feminism by asserting the dominance of women in the universe” (99).
<41> Conversely, Phillips concedes Butler's claim of drag's performativity, but finds that “drag is equally a parody of femininity, a male joke for other men, that far from subverting masculinity, reinforces gender polarity through caricature and excess” (128-129). And Esther Newton, whose Mother Camp in 1972 pioneered the serious sociological study of drag and queer subcultures and whose ethnographic approach set the standards for rigorous historical study of LGBT persons in the U.S. at a time when such work was not considered academically viable, seems to concede the role of drag in the marginalization of both women and gays, claiming that the stigma of homosexuality cannot be eliminated so long as the asymmetric relationships between men and women persist. As long as women are degraded yet powerful enough to be a threat, gays will be considered “traitors” to their sex and effeminacy will be stigmatized (Margaret Mead, 32).
Race
<42> In many respects, venues featuring drag performances were a microcosm of the complexities of race relations in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century. Clientele at bars and cafeterias that served as meeting places outside of larger cities frequently were divided along race, class, and gender. In Washington, D.C., drag balls were illegal, so white and black gay and bisexual men drove to Maryland in the 1940s and 1950s to be in drag events (Beemyn, “Queer Capital,” 192). Bars and restaurants in the nation's capital were segregated by race until the early-1950s and by practice after that, so black working class gays and white lesbians and bisexual women found outlets other than bars for their socializing (Beemyn, “Introduction,” 3). In Flint, Michigan, bars could have mixed (straight and gay) clientele but were race-segregated (Retzloff 232). Black lesbians in Buffalo in the 1930s and 1940s met through church groups, which were racially mixed, as well as at parties (Kennedy & Davis 35). Lesbian bars in Buffalo were racially segregated (42) and lesbian parties and bars were segregated by class (43).
<43> African-American drag queens actually enjoyed more acceptance in black working-class and poor communities prior to the 1960s than after Stonewall (Drexel 127), which may owe in part to well-paid drag performers' fulfilling the masculine role of financial provider, even if their careers were unconventional and unstable (129). And while white gays usually had to leave their families to be themselves, Beemyn (“Queer Capital”) found that black gays, even drag performers, found acceptance in their families as long as they stood up for themselves (203).
<44> In Chicago, as in other cities large enough to have one, the black press, including Chicago Defender, Ebony, and Jet, all covered drag balls. The white press largely did not, though the balls attracted as many whites as blacks (Drexel 134). Coverage in the black press emphasized the luxurious trappings similar to straight middle-class black debutante events (136) and varied in tone from the positive to the condemnatory (139).
<45> As an example of how well integrated drag performances were into the pre-war African-American community in New York, Chauncey (Gay New York) notes that Harlem's best-known photographer did a portrait of a drag performer (xii). That a cultural practice that by the 20th century was closely associated with the nascent gay subculture would be embraced by African-Americans perhaps is not surprising, given the resonances among blacks and gays and their respective cultures scholars have identified, in spite of the many distinctions in their experiences with marginalization.
<46> First, as Gross has noted, both blacks (as slaves) and gays (particularly prior to 1969) were subjected to “symbolic annihilation,” meaning they never were allowed to represent themselves from a subjective viewpoint and, to use Goffman's terms, either were “minstrelized” (represented in parody by others for the enjoyment of others) or “normalized” (stripped of their cultural distinctiveness.) Both also were constrained in their ability to socialize or act in concert to promote their own interests (Newton, Margaret Mead, 264).
<47> Second are the similarities in the places held by soul in African-American culture and camp in gay male culture (Newton, Margaret Mead, 23). Each has a particular set of discursive functions that are integral in the culture's negotiation of identity. Soul, which Keil has defined as the “the ability to communicate something of the (African-American) experience” (43) assists in the creation and maintenance of in-group solidarity. Camp, as noted, is performance of the incongruity of gender binaries and the transgressive sexualities of queers. If, as Newton suggests, soul and camp share certain functions, then what Keil (1996) has identified as soul's “appropriation-revitalization” process, in which each form of African-American pop music has become “more African in its essentials” in response to the previous style's appropriation into European-American pop (43), may explain camp's role in drag's evolution as a gay cultural artifact.
<48> According to Drexel, these cultural resonances occasionally led to unexpected intersections and influences. In Chicago's South Side, where working class butch lesbians and gay blacks were visible participants in an evolving tradition of performative transgressions of gender and sexual norms (123), jazz and blues clubs drew lesbians and gays and a number of songs featured themes of unconventional sexuality. Some even had drag chorus lines and allowed same-sex and interracial dancing (126). In addition, Newton (Margaret Mead) found similarities in the interactions between performers and audience in black gospel shows and drag performances (11). Key to the similarities was the intimacy created by the intermingling of performer and audience, which in drag's case became more possible when the shows moved from the stage to the floor.
<49> Despite these resonances, Harlen drags balls were sites for tensions between whites and African-Americans. Many Blacks saw the racial integration of Harlem, which had become a center for African-American (including lesbian and gay African-American) settlement in the early years of the 20th century owing to gyrations in the real estate market and the “Great Migration” of blacks from the post-Reconstruction south, as an “invasion” by whites that threatened both the affordability of housing and the unique cultural flavor of the enclave. Some in the community began to associate the Hamilton Lodge drag ball, the largest of the drag balls and racially diverse, with the introduction of homosexuality to the community by whites and to see white drag queens at a venue in a black neighborhood as a reversal of the usual social structure, in which black entertainers were a source of spectacle for whites (Chauncey, Gay New York, 260-61). In the 1930s, the tense interracial fabric of the balls ruptured in a controversy over the prevalence of whites among ball winners, with at least one African-American contestant complaining of rigging and an absence of black judges (263).
<50> In what was the most extreme case of racial tension over drag performance, the ultimate demise of the Jewel Box Revue, which for decades had been the premiere national touring company of drag queens, was prompted by violent homophobic boycotts staged by black nationalist groups in the early-1970s. As had been the case in Harlem, the troupe, which featured performers of varied races and a black lesbian drag king as master of ceremonies, was accused of undermining black males and the black family and promoting homosexuality in the black community (Drorbaugh 132).
Class
<51> Scholarly research into drag has confirmed what films with characters of socioeconomic status as diverse as Paris is Burning and The Birdcage have hinted: cross-dressing can be found in all strata of society at large (Dekker & van de Pol 7) and at all status levels in gay male culture (Newton, Margaret Mead, 23). The latter – whether one is, as Newton (Mother Camp) (1972) put it, a stage queen or a street queen – in particular impacts living arrangements (where and with whom) and economic status (22). Perhaps surprising for a group that historically has found itself marginalized from mainstream culture and which first found grudging acceptance among the urban poor and working class, age, race, and social strata (as opposed to class) distinctions are important to the gay community (27). Indeed, Beemyn (“Queer Capital”) has observed that the post-war opening of a large number of gay bars in Washington, D.C. that excluded women, blacks, and the working-class has contributed to a climate of race, gender, and class segregation in the gay community that continues to persist (188).
<52> Gay men at drag balls were able to cross the customary class divides [5], with middle-class gays more likely to be observers and working class gays more likely to maintain a gay identity at the balls and as performers but ostensibly be straight at home (Chauncey, Gay New York, 266). This identity duality often led working class gay men to seek out drag queens as sex partners because it enabled them to retain their masculine identities while still having sex with men (47-48).
<53> Among women, socioeconomic status frequently colluded with gender performance to dictate the degree of social freedom enjoyed. Lesbians from both the upper-class and working-class traditionally were best able to perform a “butch” persona, though each paid with a relatively predictable level of social ostracism or unemployment. Working-class butches especially risked social sanctions for usurping male privilege in both appearance and sexuality (Kennedy & Davis 6). Middle-class women, lacking both the financial independence of the wealthy and the expectation of the limited means of the working-class and poor, must be employable if they are to remain independent of their families, which traditionally has meant conforming to gender expectations (Newton, Margaret Mead, 206). And since middle-class lesbians depended upon their images as morally upstanding women for their security and status, it was difficult for them to make lesbianism visible and a viable option for others.
Conclusions
<54> The symbolic annihilation of working-class gay men of color and lesbians as drag performers appears to have its antecedents in a complex of social, political, and economic circumstances that rendered middle-class, white, and, occasionally, straight men more visible. So long as drag balls were multiracial affairs staged in the neighborhoods of the working-class and the minority, they were as unfit subjects for mainstream media coverage in the first half of the 20th century as most people of color and most poor. When racial schisms driven by the reactions of African-Americans to perceived white privilege, coupled with the new visibility of post-Kinsey and post-Stonewall gay liberation, split the drag community in the second half -- white, middle-class performers (and, to be fair, people of color willing to risk the stigmatization of their minority status) effectively became drag for mainstream media, including those queers unfamiliar with their own history or willing to disregard it. Drag performers who once congregated in very urbanized areas because that's where the jobs were (Newton, Mother Camp, 5) now disaggregated, with the more socially (and literally) mobile using their financial means (including the omnipresent automobiles of post-war America) to flee to new gay enclaves, including, in some places, the suburbs (Retzloff 228).
<55> And what of the lesbians who crossed gender barriers on the streets and stages? They were there, though perhaps mostly later and in numbers not so great. In a perfect world, gender symmetry would suggest that a parallel history of drag kings would exist alongside one for drag queens and there would be an equally rich mediated record. That, of course, would disregard the cultural traditions in the representations of the genders as well as historical realities in the structure and control of the newspaper, broadcasting, and film industries. Drag queens were accepted, though denigrated, because they largely were gay men performing femininity and, as such, judged as a limited threat to patriarchy. Drag kings, on the other hand, were lesbians performing masculinity whose very possibility, let alone potential for satirization of the heterosexual male, made them a threat to be contained where they existed and discouraged when they didn't. Baker has argued that, in film, women as men have worked less well than men have as women (227). This reality, which anecdotal evidence suggests is true for television as well, may owe less to the results of fair trial than to production influences on the efforts that were straight and male, as the upper echelons of the film industry (and, in fact, most of the entertainment industry) have been.
Author Notes
[1 ]Newton does make other distinctions, however. She describes two “patterns” of drag – street, which involves lip-synching, and stage, which is live (7) – and specialties, which include dance, singing, comedy, or glamour (41-43). Street queens (which seem to share much in common with what others describe as “drag”) are never “off-stage”; stage queens (which seem similar to others impersonators) are. She believes most drag performers tend to begin as glamour queens before specializing in the others.
[2] “Zapping” is a public, frequently mediated, act in which attention is called to mainstream players or institutions for their unfair treatment of lesbians and gays (e.g., infiltrating the studio audience of a live television broadcast, and interrupting it with the unfurling of a banner.) Frequently, those engaged in “zapping” were in drag.
[3] A troupe of drag performers in nuns' habits and on rollerskates whose very appearances were a potent visual form of protest.
[4] Curiously, at some of the Harlem drag balls of the era, black queens would appear as whites but white queens never would appear as blacks (Chauncey, Gay New York, 263).
[5] This observation led led Newton (Mother Camp, 28) to assert that class distinctions were nonexistent among them.
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