Drag queen
A drag queen is a person, usually male, who uses drag clothing and makeup to imitate and often exaggerate female gender signifiers and gender roles for entertainment purposes. Historically, drag queens have usually been gay men and have been a part of gay culture.
People do drag for reasons ranging from self-expression to mainstream performance. Drag shows frequently include lip-syncing, live singing, and dancing. They typically occur at LGBTQ pride parades, drag pageants, cabarets, carnivals, and nightclubs. Drag queens vary by type, culture, and dedication, from professionals who star in films and spend a lot of their time in their drag personas, to people who do drag only occasionally. In most cases, women who dress as men and entertain by imitating them are called drag kings.
Those who do occasional drag may be from backgrounds other than the LGBT community. There is a long history of folkloric and theatrical crossdressing that involves people of all orientations. Not everyone who does drag at some point in their lives is a drag queen or a drag king.
Terminology, scope, and etymology
Drag term
The term drag may date as far back as the Elizabethan era in England, whereas the first recorded use of drag in this context is from 1870. There are several other possible origins.Traditionally, drag involves cross-dressing and transforming one's sex through the use of makeup and other costume devices. However, under newer conceptions of drag, conceivably performing an exaggerated and heightened form of one's own gender could be considered a drag performance.
Female impersonator
The term female impersonation refers to a type of theatrical performance where a man dresses in women's clothing for the sole purpose of entertaining an audience. The term female impersonator is sometimes used interchangeably with drag queen, although they are not the same. For example, in 1972, Esther Newton described a female impersonator as a "professional drag queen". She considered the term female impersonator to be the one that was widely understood by heterosexual audiences. However, feminist and queer studies scholar Sarah French defined a clear separation between these two terms. She defined drag as an art form associated with queer identity, whereas female impersonation comes from a wide range of gender identity paradigms, including heteronormativity. Additionally, many drag artists view drag as a lived form of self-expression or creativity, and perceive drag as something that is not limited to the stage or to performance. In contrast, female impersonation is specifically limited to performance and may or may not involve an LGBTQI point of view.Female impersonation can be traced back at least as far as ancient Greece. There was little to no gender equity then, and women held a lower social status. This meant male actors would play female roles during theatrical performances. This tradition continued for centuries but began to be less prevalent as motion pictures became popular. During the era of vaudeville, it was considered immodest for women to appear on stage. Due to that circumstance, some men became famous as "female impersonators", the most notable being Julian Eltinge. At the peak of his career, he was one of the most sought-after and highest-paid actors in the world. Andrew Tribble was another early female impersonator who gained fame on Broadway and in Black Vaudeville.
In the twentieth century, some gender impersonators, both female and male, in the United States became highly successful performing artists in non-LGBTQ nightclubs and theaters. There was a concerted effort by these working female and male impersonators in America to separate the art of gender impersonation from queer identity, with an overt representation of working gender impersonators as heterosexual. Some of the performers were in fact cisgender heterosexual men and women, but others were closeted LGBTQI individuals due to the politics and social environment of the period. It was criminal in many American cities to be homosexual, or for LGBTQI people to congregate, and it was therefore necessary for female and male impersonators to distance themselves from identifying as queer publicly to avoid criminal charges and loss of career. The need to hide and dissociate from queer identity was prevalent among gender impersonators working in non-LGBTQ nightclubs before heteronormative audiences as late as the 1970s.
Female impersonation has been and continues to be illegal in some places, which inspired the drag queen José Sarria to hand out labels to his friends reading, "I am a boy", so they could not be accused of female impersonation. American drag queen RuPaul once said, "I do not impersonate females! How many women do you know who wear seven-inch heels, four-foot wigs, and skintight dresses?" He also said, "I don't dress like a woman; I dress like a drag queen!"
Drag queens and kings
The meaning of the term drag queen has changed across time. The term first emerged in New York City in the 1950s, and initially had two meanings. The first meaning referred to an amateur performer who did not make a living in drag but may have participated in amateur public performances such as those held at a drag ball or a drag pageant. This was meant to draw a line differentiating amateurs performing in drag for fun from professional female impersonators who made a living performing in drag.The second original meaning of drag queen was applied to men who chose to wear women's clothing on the streets, an act which was at that time illegal in New York City. Of this latter type, two additional slang terms were applied: square drag queens which meant "boys who looked like girls but who you knew were boys," and street queens who were queer male sex workers, often homeless, who dressed as women. This second use of the term was also layered with transphobic subtext, and the term drag queen was again meant to protect the professional female impersonator by allowing them to dissociate themselves from both aspects of queer culture and from sex workers to maintain respectability among the predominantly heteronormative audiences who employed them. This understanding of the term drag queen persisted through the 1960s.
In 1971, an article in Lee Brewster's Drag Queens magazine described a drag queen as a "homosexual transvestite" who is hyperfeminine, flamboyant, and militant. Drag queens were further described as having an attitude of superiority, and commonly courted by heterosexual men who would "not ordinarily participate in homosexual relationships". While the term drag queen implied "homosexual transvestite", the term drag carried no such connotations.
In the 1970s, drag queen was continually defined as a "homosexual transvestite". Drag was parsed as changing one's clothes to those of a different sex, while queen was said to refer to a homosexual man.
For much of history, drag queens were men, but in more modern times, cisgender and trans women, as well as non-binary people, also perform as drag queens. In a 2018 article, Psychology Today stated that drag queens are "most typically gay cisgender men ".
Examples of trans-feminine drag queens, sometimes called trans queens, include Monica Beverly Hillz and Peppermint. Cisgender female drag queens are sometimes called faux queens or bioqueens, though critics of this practice assert that faux carries the connotation that the drag is fake, and that the use of bioqueen exclusively for cisgender females is a misnomer since trans-feminine queens exhibit gynomorphic features.
Drag queens' counterparts are drag kings: performers, usually women, who dress in exaggeratedly masculine clothing. Examples of drag kings include Landon Cider. Trans men who dress like drag kings are sometimes termed trans kings.
Alternative terms
Some drag queens may prefer to be referred to as "she" while in drag and desire to stay completely in character. Other drag performers are indifferent to which pronoun is used to refer to them. RuPaul has said, "You can call me he. You can call me she. You can call me Regis and Kathie Lee; I don't care! Just so long as you call me."Drag queens are sometimes called transvestites, although that term also has many other connotations than the term drag queen and is not much favored by many drag queens themselves. The term tranny, an abbreviation of the term transvestite, has been adopted by some drag performers, notably RuPaul, and the gay male community in the United States, but it is considered offensive to most transgender and transsexual people.
Many drag performers refer to themselves as drag artists, as opposed to drag queens, as some contemporary forms of drag have become nonbinary. In Brazil, androgynous drag performers are sometimes called drag queer, as a form of gender neutrality.
Among drag queens and their contacts today, there is an ongoing debate about whether transgender drag queens are actually considered "drag queens". Some argue that, because a drag queen is defined as a man portraying a woman, transgender women cannot be drag queens. Drag kings are women who assume a masculine aesthetic, but this is not always the case, because there are also biokings, bioqueens, and female queens, which are people who perform their own biological sex through a heightened or exaggerated gender presentation.
History of drag
Canada
In the 1940s, John Herbert, who sometimes competed in drag pageants, was the victim of an attempted robbery while he was dressed as a woman. His assailants falsely claimed that Herbert had solicited them for sex, and Herbert was accused and convicted of indecency under Canada's same-sex sexual activity law. After being convicted, Herbert served time in a youth reformatory in Guelph, Ontario. Herbert later served another sentence for indecency at reformatory in Mimico. Herbert wrote Fortune and Men's Eyes in 1964 based on his time behind bars. He included the character of Queenie as an authorial self-insertion.In 1973, the first Canadian play about and starring a drag queen, Hosanna by Michel Tremblay, was performed at Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal.
In 1977, the Canadian film Outrageous!, starring drag queen Craig Russell, became one of the first gay-themed films to break out into mainstream theatrical release.