DRAG NOSTALGIA

Because of our forefathers, we in the LGBTQ community are fortunate enough to live in a more tolerant world. “Queens,” or men who defy gender norms and dress as women, have always been present in the LGBTQ community and pop culture, even as far back as Roman plays: Straight men like Flip Wilson and Milton Berle used them as punch lines in their humor; Divine created a media sensation when she burst onto the scene; and RuPaul began to break down barriers with her mainstream pop hit, “Supermodel (Of the World),” and a cheeky VH1 talk show. RuPaul’s popular reality competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race helped bring drag queens further into the mainstream consciousness. Starbucks even had a LGBTQ-driven commercial featuring drag queens; the Tony-winning musical Kinky Boots, about a factory that manufactures shoes for drag queens, is a popular Broadway show; and even Ru herself calls drag “mainstream” now.

While all the men pictured below  might not acknowledge being a “drag queen,” and that there’s a big difference between a transgender person, a transvestite, and a drag queen: A transgender person is someone who does not identify with their assigned sex and would most likely not want to be referred to as a “drag queen.” A transvestite is a cisgender male who enjoys wearing women’s clothing. A drag queen tends to be someone who dresses in women’s clothing more so for performance or entertainment purposes, or as the character Noxzema Jackson said, "When a gay man has WAY TOO MUCH fashion sense for one gender, he is a drag queen." I tend to agree.

Late 1800s: The etymology of the phrase “drag queen” is debatable, but many scholars believe that the phrase was coined in the 1800s as a reference to the hoop skirt. As seen in this photo, hoop skirts would “drag” along the ground.The term “queen” was used as a derogatory slur towards homosexuals.

 Brigham Young’s son, Brigham Morris Young, made a career in drag performing as Madam Pattrini. Supposedly, his falsetto was so convincing that many audiences did not know he was a man. It’s hard to believe early LDS audiences responded so positively to such a concept, but it was quite popular at the time.

Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton shocked Victorian London when they dared to leave their home as “Fanny and Stella.” They were the first men to openly walk through the streets in women’s clothing and shocked society so much that the police launched investigations that were normally reserved for extreme criminals.

In the 1800s, the term “drag queen” becomes more specific, referring to any man who dresses as a woman in a theatrical and professional setting.

Because no law specifically forbade “cross-dressing,” men found in women's clothing were usually arrested for “the abominable crime of buggery” or for prostitution.

1883: Drag was perfectly acceptable as a theatrical device. In fact, it was still more respectable for a man to play a woman in drag (such as these three Yale students) than for a woman to pursue a career as an actress.

This photo features a 19th-century student dressed in drag for pure amusement.

You may think that he’d have been punished for such behavior, but this man went on to become a well-respected Estonian judge and held rank in the Livonian Knighthood.

 And times started to change a little when in 1915 around the turn of the century, drag performance became its own phenomenon with the likes of one of the most famous vaudeville performers Julian Eltinge, who would eventually change things up.