Drag queen

A show is built from lip-sync, live vocals and dance, and turns up in nightclubs, cabarets, carnivals, pageants and pride parades. The commitment varies as widely as the settings: some performers spend most of their working lives in the persona and star in films, and others do it occasionally and come from outside the queer community altogether. Wikipedia is careful on that last point, since doing drag once does not make somebody a drag queen or a Drag king.

How the meaning of drag queen shifted

Drag in this sense may reach back to Elizabethan England, and the earliest use anybody has recorded is dated 1870, with several rival origins in circulation and none settled. Wiktionary builds the compound simply, from drag, women's clothing worn by men, plus queen, and files transvestite above it as a hypernym, female impersonator and the dated street queen beside it as synonyms, and butch queen and fishy queen under it. Its earliest illustrative quotation is much later, from Robert Rodi's 1996 novel Drag Queen. Traditionally the practice meant cross-dressing and transformation through makeup and costume, and newer accounts loosen even that: on some readings a heightened performance of a person's own gender counts as drag, which cuts the tie to clothing the word was built on.

The term itself arrived in New York in the 1950s carrying two meanings at once, and neither was flattering. The first marked an amateur, somebody who earned no living from drag but might turn up at a ball or a pageant, and it existed to keep such people separate from the professionals who did earn one. The second was used of men who wore women's clothes on the street, which was against the law in the city at the time.

Two further pieces of slang sat under that second sense. Square drag queens meant men who looked like women but were known not to be, and street queens meant homeless and near-homeless queer men who did sex work and dressed as women. The distinction was doing protective work for the professionals: by naming the amateur and the street, it let the working female impersonator keep his distance from queer culture and from sex work in front of the heteronormative audiences who employed him. The word began as a boundary and not as a title.

That use held through the 1960s. A 1971 article in Lee Brewster's magazine Drag Queens gave the definition as a homosexual transvestite, hyperfeminine, flamboyant and militant, with an attitude of superiority, and recorded that queens were sought out by heterosexual men who would otherwise have taken no part in homosexual relationships. The definition as a homosexual Transvestite persisted through the 1970s, parsed literally: drag for changing into the clothes of a different sex, queen for a homosexual man. The clothing word carried none of those connotations on its own.

Why female impersonator is not the same word

Esther Newton, in 1972, called the female impersonator a drag queen who had turned professional, and thought that was the term heterosexual audiences of the day actually understood. Sarah French, who works in feminist and queer studies, draws the line differently and more sharply: drag is an art form tied to queer identity, while female impersonation grows out of many gender paradigms, heteronormative ones included, and stops at the edge of the stage in a way drag does not. Many drag artists describe what they do as lived rather than staged.

Female impersonation as a theatrical practice runs back at least to ancient Greece, where male actors took female roles because women held a lower social status, and continued for centuries before motion pictures thinned it out. In vaudeville, where it was considered immodest for women to appear on stage, some men became famous as female impersonators. Julian Eltinge was at his peak one of the most sought-after and highest-paid actors in the world; Andrew Tribble made his name on Broadway and in Black vaudeville.

The separation between impersonation and queerness was partly a legal necessity. It was criminal in many American cities to be homosexual or for queer people to gather, so working impersonators in mainstream nightclubs presented themselves publicly as heterosexual, some of them genuinely so and others closeted, and that pressure lasted into the 1970s. Female impersonation has itself been illegal in places, which is why the drag queen José Sarria handed his friends labels reading that they were boys, so that the charge could not be brought. RuPaul's version of the same distinction is that he does not dress as a woman but as a drag queen.

Why drag queens were at Stonewall

Arrests of drag queens were routine before June 1969. Britannica records that gay men in the United States had themselves often expressed prejudice against drag queens, for appearing too gay or for giving gay people a bad name, and that the gay and lesbian movements in the United States are nonetheless widely traced to the night of 28 June 1969, when the Stonewall riots began in Greenwich Village with a group of drag queens resisting arrest.

The historiography of that night has been argued over ever since; the outline the sources agree on is routine harassment and police surveillance, and drag queens credited with being on the front lines of what followed.

How drag reached a wide audience

Britannica's account is that drag has never enjoyed mainstream appeal and that drag queen is nonetheless a common term in popular culture, largely through entertainment. RuPaul reached the charts with a hit single in 1992. The Birdcage followed in 1996, the movie musicals Rent and Hairspray carried the image further, and ball culture reached a wide audience through Paris Is Burning in 1990 and the television series Pose from 2018.

The stage lineage behind that is much longer. Britannica traces the drag queen back to Shakespearean comedy, where Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede in order to court Orlando as one man to another, and draws a line from there to Some Like It Hot in 1959, where Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis join an all-woman band as Daphne and Josephine, and on to Tootsie in 1982. Neither pair of actors was a drag queen, and the argument is that gender norms come undone either way. Marilyn Monroe, the third lead of the 1959 film, became an icon many drag queens emulate, alongside Cher, Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton and Bette Midler. Against the comedies sits Dial M for Murder, made in 1954, where a chief inspector warns a subordinate that he will be arrested if he leaves a flat looking as he does.

Britannica breaks doing drag into three components. The queen takes a stage name, and an illustrated field guide to the drag queens of New York, published in 1996, lists Hedda Lettuce, Miss Understood, Mighty Afrodite, Mona Foot and Perfidia among the mainstays of the scene. Then comes taking the stage, with heavy makeup, padding and the technique known as tucking. The third component is the premise underneath the other two, that gender is fluid, and that performance is what makes the fluidity visible.

How researchers have explained the drag persona

Esther Newton's 1972 study is the one the later literature answers. She described conspicuous, confrontational, territorial and effeminate behaviour, and the discrimination and harassment performers faced from inside the gay community as well as from outside it. She also noted what the subculture offered in return: for young, poor and jobless gay men it was a way of distinguishing themselves from lower-status positions, and for the most successful, a route to something close to celebrity within the community.

Michael Moncrieff and Pierre Lienard, writing in Evolutionary Psychology in 2017, proposed a signalling account of the same features. Publicly wearing extravagant women's costume attracts harassment and carries financial, mating and opportunity costs, which is exactly the condition under which a signal is hard to fake; performers who withstand those costs signal something about themselves to the gay community, and their participants, gay and straight alike, agreed both that successful drag queens incur costs and that they gain specific social benefits.

The same literature carries some plain description. Performers are generally in their late teens to their forties, with an average age in the late twenties; the available research rests on small samples and reports low educational attainment and earnings at the lower end of the distribution. Ethnographers repeatedly note how subdued the same performers are out of costume. Drag queens in this literature also distance themselves from anyone using hormones or undergoing surgery, and such performers have been banned from drag competitions on the grounds of not competing fairly.

Who else performs as a drag queen

The composition has changed and the vocabulary has not caught up. Cisgender and trans women and non-binary people now perform as drag queens, and Psychology Today in 2018 described the typical drag queen as a gay cisgender man while noting the range of orientations and gender identities present. Monica Beverly Hillz and Peppermint are named in the record as trans-feminine queens, sometimes called trans queens.

The words for cisgender women who perform are disputed. Faux queen and bioqueen are both in use and both are objected to: faux implies the drag is fake, and reserving bioqueen for cisgender women misdescribes trans-feminine performers, who have gynomorphic features of their own. The objection is about accuracy rather than offence, and no replacement has settled.

A drag queen's counterpart is the drag king, a performer, usually a woman, who dresses in exaggeratedly masculine clothing, and trans men who perform that way are sometimes called trans kings. Some drag queens prefer she while in drag and stay in character, and the persona has a name of its own.