My take on drag as a gay man in my late 60s is that it is a vestige of pre-Stonewall gay bar culture that long ago outlived its usefulness.
It may be difficult even for middle aged people to grasp that as recently as the early 1960s gay men were marginalized second class citizens. Most had a choice between being closeted and enjoying the same rights and opportunities as their straight peers, especially if they were married to a woman, or being out and leading a demimondaine existence. Vocational choices were severely limited: florist, hairdresser, decorator, artist or entertainer was about it.
As oppressed minorities generally do, gay men developed a subculture that provided a sense of identity, belonging and shelter from a hostile world. Camp was part of that identity, a tacit way to signal one's sexual orientation to others. And drag queens had a key role in gay nightlife.
That was then, this is now, when gayness is so mainstream that the phrase "cisgendered gay white professional male" is one of the worst insults a queer can level at a gay man.
As far as I am concerned, drag queens are as archaic and gauche as those gay guys who have been referring to each other as "she/her" since before gender identity metastasized throughout society.
Though I have known a buttoned-down gay banker who did drag, my impression is that most drag queens are party boys and bad boys, maybe even bad party boys. Booze and drugs usually abound in venues where gay men congregate to recreate. Forget about calling most drag queens artists. An artist will leave a piece of their soul behind with the audience. The typical drag queen is a histrionic personality whose act screeches: "Look at me - aren't I fabulous?"
But Drag Queen Story Hour? The optics are terrible. A drag queen is not a variation on Snow White or Cinderella; he's an adult entertainer whose queerness is and should remain far beyond a child's capacity to understand.
That said, drag queens show no signs of going the way of Vaudeville. It is the queers' way of owning the TERFs.
The main performative objective of dragmen is blatantly obvious; that is, to mock, degrade and defame women - or those they refer to as "bleeders, breeders and b * tches." When impersonating women they usually refer to themselves as "b* tches also in case anyone hasn't grasped the fact that they consider women subhuman, animals i.e. dogs. Dragmen's speech is usually littered with misogynistic sexual innuendo, pandering to an appreciative audience who the dragmen try to sexually arouse with their autogynophilic antics. Their autogynophilic intentions have been explicitly explained by autogynophiles like Nina Arsenault and Andrea Long Chu.
While it's women who are the objects of ridicule in drag, it's men who use themselves to embody the crudeness, venality, enviousness, hypersexuality and stupidity they portray as being the characteristics of women. Drag minstrels have been around for probably hundreds of years, while racial minstrals were more varied and of shorter duration because of loss of public support for demeaning characterizations of racial and ethnic groups - but not for women. If you don't believe: Just observe.
Thank you so much for this. Almost everyone I know here thinks it's fine but I hate them. Also, I think the drag queen crap in this incarnation is relatively new. It was also a popular local event for tourists, but I never saw it in "Lesbian and gay" spaces until a few years ago, when the man was jumping around in a "fat women's suit" that was so female-hating in a Lesbian-owned bar.
I so hate that as Lesbians we are associated with these grotesque men who perv on childred. Not My Community!
Nice piece from your past. Hope you are thriving!Couple of observations:
I have never seen DQSH or anything even remotely similar appear on sex fetish written pornography sites. It may exist but if so it’s less visible than nullification or even more bizarre fetishes. There doesn’t seem to be the least erotic component to it, thankfully.
I don’t think it operates like grooming as in pedophile grooming - most pedophile grooming, the vast majority, seems to operate in the sphere of family, church, school, sport and youth programs. It is secretive, and is highly unusual to involve out gay men (and never involves Lesbians).
I have friends who defend the practice as “they are just clowns”, but I ask a few questions in response:
Why don’t we see clown story hour?
Why don’t we see stripper story hour?
Why don’t we see leathermaster story hour?
Why don’t we see porn star story hour?
As a brilliant writer noted recently on Substack, if we use Marx to analyze literature, why don’t we also use Milton Friedman? If drag queens are suitable then why not other adult performers?
And the follow-up long complicated question, Which drag is best for children?
Women are pathetic drag?
Women are hookers drag?
Women are immoral drag?
Men in women’s clothing in performance goes back thousands of years. Women were not allowed on the dramatic stage until relatively recently in human history - 16th century in Italy and France, 17th century in Japan and England for instance. You must keep in mind that all Ancient Greek dramatic writing was intended for men to play, masked; the spectacular revenge of Electra was for a man to play. That, as far as we know, is men treating the role of a women quite seriously. Patriarchy was in control, but women were dimensional.
As women took on roles to portray themselves in the 18th century there remained a revenant of Classical stage in men dressed as women performing in clubs where men met other men for homosexual sex and “underground” entertainment - in the UK there were the Molly houses, for homosexual sex, prostitution and travesti. (Molly - the word - is also an echo of Latin “mollis” or “soft” a classical period derogatory term for men who enjoyed passive homosexual sex. Molly is also a diminutive for Mary, another term for gay men. It all connects somewhere. Mollycoddle. So what we know as club drag is 18th century English, and persists primarily depicting women as figures of pathos and farce (vaudeville) figures, not serious. Electra extracting bloody revenge became a female impersonator, preferably pretending to be Judy Garland both drunk and on speed warbling “come on get happy.”
By contrast, Hooker drag, or what I think of as travesti or what came to be called clinically AGP, has always been visible in its own right from classical periods - men dressed as women, acting effeminate, and not infrequently prostitutes. An example is Neapolitan “femminiello” - “little woman man”, which has ancient roots. Ray Blanchard in the 1980’s tried to rehabilitate prostitute drag with clinical nomenclature but men on a stage collecting dollar bills in their underwear is not a subtle message. And equating women with the prostitutes these men play is more revealing of Blanchards take on female than anything.
While part of ancient actor drag persists as vaudeville farce animated (if I can use the woe) with pathos, part of it morphed into what I consider Kabuki drag. Kabuki (which can be loosely translated as “bizarre”) drag has in the west slowly metastasized into a virulently misogynistic contemporary form in which “fabulous” as pure luxurious sensation disconnects from fable (moral lessons for children) and exists to celebrate anti-moral lessons of envy, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony, sloth, and above all pride - consider all the words used in Kabuki drag: fierce, proud, shade, fabulous, … you could do a masters thesis on the inversion of the 7 deadly sins (assuming “work it” refers to turning and not anti-sloth industriousness). I find Kabuki drag astonishingly misogynist, Electra not as hooker or sad clown, but as a vengeful harpy of unreconstructed lust, avarice, narcissism and barely concealed raging contempt for others. You know, like Cinderella’s stepmother and sisters.
There are other drags. Erotic furries culture which probably evolved out of mascots, and commedia dell’arte; leather drag, straight out of WWII with a hint of Nazism walked through endless Eagle bars; and the sub-species of cosplay and Hentai, cartoons and further.
I don’t think DQSH is grooming, and I certainly don’t think it’s transgressive culture. It’s just that the impressive thousands-year-old history of drag is drag we see on stage. And it is mind-numbingly regressive and conservative in the repetition of female stereotypes.
And I think discovering and playing with camp - so bad it’s good - as well as confronting sex and misogyny is something best left to adults, along with confronting prostitution, degradation, and shattering stereotypes, because you have to understand the past to avoid repeating it.
My take on drag as a gay man in my late 60s is that it is a vestige of pre-Stonewall gay bar culture that long ago outlived its usefulness.
It may be difficult even for middle aged people to grasp that as recently as the early 1960s gay men were marginalized second class citizens. Most had a choice between being closeted and enjoying the same rights and opportunities as their straight peers, especially if they were married to a woman, or being out and leading a demimondaine existence. Vocational choices were severely limited: florist, hairdresser, decorator, artist or entertainer was about it.
As oppressed minorities generally do, gay men developed a subculture that provided a sense of identity, belonging and shelter from a hostile world. Camp was part of that identity, a tacit way to signal one's sexual orientation to others. And drag queens had a key role in gay nightlife.
That was then, this is now, when gayness is so mainstream that the phrase "cisgendered gay white professional male" is one of the worst insults a queer can level at a gay man.
As far as I am concerned, drag queens are as archaic and gauche as those gay guys who have been referring to each other as "she/her" since before gender identity metastasized throughout society.
Though I have known a buttoned-down gay banker who did drag, my impression is that most drag queens are party boys and bad boys, maybe even bad party boys. Booze and drugs usually abound in venues where gay men congregate to recreate. Forget about calling most drag queens artists. An artist will leave a piece of their soul behind with the audience. The typical drag queen is a histrionic personality whose act screeches: "Look at me - aren't I fabulous?"
But Drag Queen Story Hour? The optics are terrible. A drag queen is not a variation on Snow White or Cinderella; he's an adult entertainer whose queerness is and should remain far beyond a child's capacity to understand.
That said, drag queens show no signs of going the way of Vaudeville. It is the queers' way of owning the TERFs.
The main performative objective of dragmen is blatantly obvious; that is, to mock, degrade and defame women - or those they refer to as "bleeders, breeders and b * tches." When impersonating women they usually refer to themselves as "b* tches also in case anyone hasn't grasped the fact that they consider women subhuman, animals i.e. dogs. Dragmen's speech is usually littered with misogynistic sexual innuendo, pandering to an appreciative audience who the dragmen try to sexually arouse with their autogynophilic antics. Their autogynophilic intentions have been explicitly explained by autogynophiles like Nina Arsenault and Andrea Long Chu.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/05/19/a-pornified-view-of-womanhood/
While it's women who are the objects of ridicule in drag, it's men who use themselves to embody the crudeness, venality, enviousness, hypersexuality and stupidity they portray as being the characteristics of women. Drag minstrels have been around for probably hundreds of years, while racial minstrals were more varied and of shorter duration because of loss of public support for demeaning characterizations of racial and ethnic groups - but not for women. If you don't believe: Just observe.
Thank you so much for this. Almost everyone I know here thinks it's fine but I hate them. Also, I think the drag queen crap in this incarnation is relatively new. It was also a popular local event for tourists, but I never saw it in "Lesbian and gay" spaces until a few years ago, when the man was jumping around in a "fat women's suit" that was so female-hating in a Lesbian-owned bar.
I so hate that as Lesbians we are associated with these grotesque men who perv on childred. Not My Community!
Nice piece from your past. Hope you are thriving!Couple of observations:
I have never seen DQSH or anything even remotely similar appear on sex fetish written pornography sites. It may exist but if so it’s less visible than nullification or even more bizarre fetishes. There doesn’t seem to be the least erotic component to it, thankfully.
I don’t think it operates like grooming as in pedophile grooming - most pedophile grooming, the vast majority, seems to operate in the sphere of family, church, school, sport and youth programs. It is secretive, and is highly unusual to involve out gay men (and never involves Lesbians).
I have friends who defend the practice as “they are just clowns”, but I ask a few questions in response:
Why don’t we see clown story hour?
Why don’t we see stripper story hour?
Why don’t we see leathermaster story hour?
Why don’t we see porn star story hour?
As a brilliant writer noted recently on Substack, if we use Marx to analyze literature, why don’t we also use Milton Friedman? If drag queens are suitable then why not other adult performers?
And the follow-up long complicated question, Which drag is best for children?
Women are pathetic drag?
Women are hookers drag?
Women are immoral drag?
Men in women’s clothing in performance goes back thousands of years. Women were not allowed on the dramatic stage until relatively recently in human history - 16th century in Italy and France, 17th century in Japan and England for instance. You must keep in mind that all Ancient Greek dramatic writing was intended for men to play, masked; the spectacular revenge of Electra was for a man to play. That, as far as we know, is men treating the role of a women quite seriously. Patriarchy was in control, but women were dimensional.
As women took on roles to portray themselves in the 18th century there remained a revenant of Classical stage in men dressed as women performing in clubs where men met other men for homosexual sex and “underground” entertainment - in the UK there were the Molly houses, for homosexual sex, prostitution and travesti. (Molly - the word - is also an echo of Latin “mollis” or “soft” a classical period derogatory term for men who enjoyed passive homosexual sex. Molly is also a diminutive for Mary, another term for gay men. It all connects somewhere. Mollycoddle. So what we know as club drag is 18th century English, and persists primarily depicting women as figures of pathos and farce (vaudeville) figures, not serious. Electra extracting bloody revenge became a female impersonator, preferably pretending to be Judy Garland both drunk and on speed warbling “come on get happy.”
By contrast, Hooker drag, or what I think of as travesti or what came to be called clinically AGP, has always been visible in its own right from classical periods - men dressed as women, acting effeminate, and not infrequently prostitutes. An example is Neapolitan “femminiello” - “little woman man”, which has ancient roots. Ray Blanchard in the 1980’s tried to rehabilitate prostitute drag with clinical nomenclature but men on a stage collecting dollar bills in their underwear is not a subtle message. And equating women with the prostitutes these men play is more revealing of Blanchards take on female than anything.
While part of ancient actor drag persists as vaudeville farce animated (if I can use the woe) with pathos, part of it morphed into what I consider Kabuki drag. Kabuki (which can be loosely translated as “bizarre”) drag has in the west slowly metastasized into a virulently misogynistic contemporary form in which “fabulous” as pure luxurious sensation disconnects from fable (moral lessons for children) and exists to celebrate anti-moral lessons of envy, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony, sloth, and above all pride - consider all the words used in Kabuki drag: fierce, proud, shade, fabulous, … you could do a masters thesis on the inversion of the 7 deadly sins (assuming “work it” refers to turning and not anti-sloth industriousness). I find Kabuki drag astonishingly misogynist, Electra not as hooker or sad clown, but as a vengeful harpy of unreconstructed lust, avarice, narcissism and barely concealed raging contempt for others. You know, like Cinderella’s stepmother and sisters.
There are other drags. Erotic furries culture which probably evolved out of mascots, and commedia dell’arte; leather drag, straight out of WWII with a hint of Nazism walked through endless Eagle bars; and the sub-species of cosplay and Hentai, cartoons and further.
I don’t think DQSH is grooming, and I certainly don’t think it’s transgressive culture. It’s just that the impressive thousands-year-old history of drag is drag we see on stage. And it is mind-numbingly regressive and conservative in the repetition of female stereotypes.
And I think discovering and playing with camp - so bad it’s good - as well as confronting sex and misogyny is something best left to adults, along with confronting prostitution, degradation, and shattering stereotypes, because you have to understand the past to avoid repeating it.
Clearly we are not understanding it yet.