Drag (entertainment)

Drag is a performance of exaggerated femininity, masculinity, or other forms of gender expression, usually for entertainment purposes. Drag usually involves cross-dressing. A drag queen is someone (usually male) who performs femininely and a drag king is someone (usually female) who performs masculinely. Performances often involve comedy, social satire, and at times political commentary. The term may be used as a noun as in the expression ''in drag'' or as an adjective as in ''drag show''.
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Etymology

The origin of the term ''drag'' is uncertain; it may date as far back as the Elizabethan era in England, where it was used to describe male actors playing female roles in theaters where cross-dressing was the norm. The first recorded use of ''drag'' in reference to actors dressed in women's clothing is from 1870. One suggested etymological root is 19th-century theater slang, from the sensation of long skirts trailing on the floor. Another possible origin is the Yiddish term meaning "to wear", from the German . It may also have been based on the term ''grand rag'', which was historically used for a masquerade ball.

In folk custom

Men dressed as women have been featured in certain traditional customs for centuries. For example, the characters of some regional variants of the traditional mummers' play, which were traditionally always performed by men, include Besom Bet(ty); numerous variations on Bessy or Betsy; Bucksome Nell; Mrs Clagdarse; Dame Dolly; Dame Dorothy; Mrs Finney; Mrs Frail; and many others.

The variant performed around Plough Monday in Eastern England is known as the Plough Play (also Wooing Play or Bridal Play) and usually involves two female characters, the young "Lady Bright and Gay" and "Old Dame Jane" and a dispute about a bastard child. A character called Bessy also accompanied the Plough Jags (also known as Plough Jacks, Plough Stots, Plough Bullocks, etc.) even in places where no play was performed: "she" was a man dressed in women's clothes, who carried a collecting box for money and other largesse.

"Maid Marian" of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is played by a man, and the Maid Marians referred to in old documents as having taken part in May Games and other festivals with Morris dancers would most probably also have been men. The "consort" of the Castleton Garland King was traditionally a man (until 1956, when a woman took over the role) and was originally simply referred to as "The Woman".

Theatre

Cross-dressing elements of performance traditions are a widespread and longstanding cultural phenomena.

The ancient Roman playwright Plautus' ( 254–184 BCE) ''Menaechmi'' includes a scene in which Menaechmus I puts on his wife's dress, then wears a cloak over it, intending to remove the dress from the house and deliver it to his mistress. Menaechmus says: "Look at me. Do I look the part?" [] Peniculus responds: "What in the world have you got on?" [] Menaechmus says: "Tell me I am gorgeous." []

In England, actors in Shakespearean plays, and all Elizabethan theatre (in the 1500s and 1600s), were all male; female parts were played by young men in drag because women were banned from performing publicly. Shakespeare used the conventions to enrich the gender confusions of ''As You Like It,'' and Ben Jonson manipulated the same conventions in '' Epicœne, or The Silent Woman'' (1609). During the reign of Charles II (1660–1685) the rules were relaxed to allow women to play female roles on the London stage, reflecting the French fashion, and the convention of men routinely playing female roles consequently disappeared.

In the 1890s, the slapstick drag traditions of undergraduate productions (notably Hasty Pudding Theatricals at Harvard College, annually since 1891, and at other Ivy League schools like Princeton University's Triangle Club or the University of Pennsylvania's Mask and Wig Club), and many other universities in which women were not permitted admission, were permissible fare to the same upper-class American audiences that were scandalized to hear that in New York City, rouged young men in skirts were standing on tables to dance the can-can in Bowery dives like The Slide.

Drag shows were popular night club entertainment in New York in the 1920s, then were forced underground, until the " Jewel Box Revue" played Harlem's Apollo Theater in the 1950s with their show, "49 Men and a Girl". For most of the performance, the "girls" were men in glamorous drag. At the end, the "one girl" was revealed to be the dashing young "man" in dinner clothes—Stormé DeLarverie—the MC who had been introducing each of the evening's acts.

The plot device of the film ''Shakespeare in Love'' (1998) turns upon the Elizabethan convention of the Shakespearean originals and the changes that came with women being allowed on stage during the reign of Charles II. However, drag remains a strong tradition in British comedy. This is seen in current-day British pantomime, where traditional roles such as the pantomime dame are played by a man in drag and the principal boy, such as Prince Charming or Dick Whittington, is played by a girl or young woman, as well as in comedy troupes such as Monty Python (formed in 1969).

Within the dramatic fiction, a double standard historically affected the uses of drag. In male-dominated societies where active roles were reserved to men, a woman might dress as a man under the pressures of her dramatic predicament. In these societies a man's position was above a woman's, causing a rising action that suited itself to tragedy, sentimental melodrama and comedies of manners that involved confused identities. A man dressed as a woman was thought to be a falling action only suited to broad low comedy and burlesque. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo are an all-male ballet troupe where much of the humor is in seeing male dancers ''en travesti;'' performing roles usually reserved to females, wearing tutus and dancing ''en pointe'' with considerable technical skill.

These conventions of male-dominated societies were largely unbroken before the 20th century, when rigid gender roles were undermined and began to dissolve. This evolution changed drag in the last decades of the 20th century. Among contemporary drag performers, the theatrical drag queen or street queen may at times be seen less as a " female impersonator" per se, but simply as a drag queen. Examples include The Cockettes, Danny La Rue or RuPaul.

Ball culture

Ballroom culture (also known as "ball culture", and other names) is an underground LGBT subculture that originated in 1920s New York in which people "walk" (i.e., compete) for trophies, prizes, and glory at events known as balls. Ball participants are mainly young African-American and Latin American members of the LGBTQ community. Attendees dance, vogue, walk, pose, and support one another in one or more of the numerous drag and performance competition categories. Categories are designed to simultaneously epitomize and satirize various genders, social classes and archetypes in society, while also offering an escape from reality. The culture extends beyond the extravagant formal events as many participants in ball culture also belong to groups known as "houses", a longstanding tradition in LGBT communities, and racial minorities, where chosen families of friends live in households together, forming relationships and community to replace families of origin from which they may be estranged.

Ball culture first gained exposure to a mainstream audience in 1990 when its voguing dance style was featured in Madonna's song "Vogue", and in Jennie Livingston's documentary '' Paris is Burning'' the same year. Voguing is a highly stylized type of modern house dance that emerged in the 1980s and evolved out of 1960s ball culture in Harlem, New York. In 2018, the American television series ''Pose'' showcased Harlem's ball culture scene of the 1980s and was nominated for numerous awards.

Opera

In Baroque opera, where soprano roles for men were sung by castrati, Handel's heroine Bradamante, in the opera ''Alcina,'' disguises herself as a man to save her lover, played by a male soprano; contemporary audiences were not the least confused. In Romantic opera, certain roles of young boys were written for alto and soprano voices and acted by women ''en travestie'' (in English, in "trouser roles"). The most familiar trouser role in pre-Romantic opera is Cherubino in Mozart's ''Marriage of Figaro'' (1786). In Beethoven's opera Fidelio Leonore, the faithful wife of Florestan, disguises herself as a man to save her husband. Romantic opera continued the convention: there are trouser roles for women in drag in Rossini's ''Semiramide'' (Arsace), Donizetti's ''Rosamonda d'Inghilterra'' and ''Anna Bolena,'' Berlioz's ''Benvenuto Cellini,'' and even a page in Verdi's ''Don Carlo.'' The convention was beginning to die out with Siebel, the ingenuous youth in Charles Gounod's ''Faust'' (1859) and the gypsy boy Beppe in Mascagni's ''L'Amico Fritz,'' so that Offenbach gave the role of Cupid to a real boy in ''Orphée aux Enfers.'' But Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in tights, giving French audiences a glimpse of Leg (the other in fact being a prosthesis) and Prince Orlovsky, who gives the ball in ''Die Fledermaus,'' is a mezzo-soprano, to somewhat androgynous effect. The use of ''travesti'' in Richard Strauss's ''Rosenkavalier'' (1912) is a special case, unusually subtle and evocative of its 18th-century setting, and should be discussed in detail at ''Der Rosenkavalier.''

Film and television

The self-consciously risqué bourgeois high jinks of Brandon Thomas's ''Charley's Aunt'' (London, 1892) were still viable theatre material in '' La Cage aux Folles'' (1978), which was remade, as ''The Birdcage,'' as late as 1996.

Dame Edna, the drag persona of Australian actor Barry Humphries, was the host of several specials, including ''The Dame Edna Experience.'' Dame Edna also toured internationally, playing to sell-out crowds, and appeared on TV's ''Ally McBeal.'' Dame Edna represented an anomalous example of the drag concept. Her earliest incarnation was unmistakably a man dressed (badly) as a suburban housewife. Edna's manner and appearance became so feminised and glamorised that even some of her TV show guests appear not to see that the Edna character was played by a man. The furor surrounding Dame Edna's "advice" column in '' Vanity Fair'' magazine suggests that one of her harshest critics, actress Salma Hayek, was unaware Dame Edna was a female character played by a man.

In 2009, ''RuPaul's Drag Race'' first premiered as a television show in the United States. The show has gained mainstream and global appeal, and it has exposed multiple generations of audiences to drag culture.

United States

In the United States, early examples of drag clothing can be found in gold rush saloons of California. The Barbary Coast district of San Francisco was known for certain saloons, such as Dash, which attracted female impersonator patrons and workers.

William Dorsey Swann was the first person to call himself "queen of drag". He was a former slave, who was freed after the American Civil War, from Maryland. By the 1880s, he was organizing and hosting drag balls in Washington, D.C. The balls included folk dances, such as the cakewalk, and the male guests often dressed in female clothing.

In the early 20th century, drag—as an art form and culture—began to flourish with minstrel shows and vaudeville. Performers such as Julian Eltinge and Bothwell Browne were drag queens and vaudeville performers. The Progressive Era brought a decline in vaudeville entertainment, but drag culture began to grow in nightclubs and bars, such as Finnochio's Club and Black Cat Bar in San Francisco.

During this period, Hollywood films included examples of drag. While drag was often used as a last-resort tactic in situational farce (its only permissible format at the time), some films provided a more empathetic lens than others. In 1919, Bothwell Browne appeared in ''Yankee Doodle in Berlin''. In 1933, came out in Germany, which later inspired '' First a Girl'' (1935) in the United States. That same year, Katharine Hepburn played a character who dressed as a male in ''Sylvia Scarlett''. In 1959, drag made a big Hollywood splash in ''Some Like It Hot'' (1959).

In the 1960s, Andy Warhol and his Factory scene included superstar drag queens, such as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, both immortalized in the Lou Reed song " Walk on the Wild Side".

By the early 1970s, drag was influenced by the psychedelic rock and hippie culture of the era. A San Francisco drag troupe, The Cockettes (1970–1972), performed with glitter eyeshadow and gilded mustaches and beards. The troupe also coined the term "genderfuck". Drag broke out from underground theatre in the persona of Divine in John Waters' ''Pink Flamingos'' (1972): see also Charles Pierce. The cult hit movie musical ''The Rocky Horror Picture Show'' (1975) inspired several generations of young people to attend performances in drag, although many of these fans would not call themselves drag queens or transvestites.

For many decades, American network television, only the broadest slapstick drag tradition was generally represented. Few American TV comedians consistently used drag as a comedy device, among them Milton Berle, Flip Wilson, and Martin Lawrence, although drag characters have occasionally been popular on sketch TV shows like ''In Living Color'' (with Jim Carrey's grotesque female bodybuilder) and ''Saturday Night Live'' (with the Gap Girls, among others). On the popular 1960s military sitcom, ''McHale's Navy,'' Ensign Parker (Tim Conway) sometimes had to dress in drag (often with hilarious results) whenever McHale and/or his crew had to disguise themselves in order to carry out their elaborate schemes. ''Gilligan's Island'' occasionally features men dressing in women's clothes, though this was not considered drag since it was not for a performance.

On stage and screen, the actor-playwright-screenwriter-producer Tyler Perry has included his drag character of Madea in some of his most noted productions, such as the stage play ''Diary of a Mad Black Woman'' and the feature film he based upon it.

Maximilliana and RuPaul co-star together in the TV show ''Nash Bridges'' starring Don Johnson and Cheech Marin during the two-part episode "'Cuda Grace". Maximilliana, looking passable, leads one of the investigators to believe he is "real" and sexually advances only to learn that he is, in fact, male, much to his chagrin.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, drag has been more common in comedy, on both film and television. Alastair Sim plays the headmistress Miss Millicent Fritton in '' The Belles of St Trinian's'' (1954) and ''Blue Murder at St Trinian's'' (1957). He played the role straight; no direct joke about the actor's true gender is made. However, Miss Fritton is quite non-feminine in her pursuits of betting, drinking and smoking. The gag is that whilst her school sends out girls into a merciless world, it is the world that need beware. Despite this, or perhaps because of Sim's portrayal, subsequent films in the series went on to use actresses in the headmistress role (Dora Bryan respectively). The 21st century re-boot of the series however reverted to drag, with Rupert Everett in the role.

On television, Benny Hill portrayed several female characters. The Monty Python troupe and The League of Gentlemen often played female parts in their skits. The League of Gentlemen are also credited with the first ever portrayal of "nude drag", where a man playing a female character is shown naked but still with the appropriate female anatomy, like fake breasts and a merkin. Within the conceit of the sketch/film, they are actually women: it is the audience who are in on the joke.

Monty Python women, whom the troupe called pepperpots, are random middle-aged working/lower middle class typically wearing long brown coats that were common in the 1960s. Save for a few characters played by Eric Idle, they looked and sounded very little like actual women with their caricatural outfits and shrill falsettos. However, when a sketch called for a "real" woman, the Pythons almost always called on Carol Cleveland. The joke is reversed in the Python film ''Life of Brian'' where "they" are pretending to be men, including obviously false beards, so that they can go to the stoning. When someone throws the first stone too early the Pharisee asks "who threw that", and they answer "she did, she did,..." in high voices. "Are there any women here today?" he says, "No no no" they say in gruff voices.

In the 1970s the most familiar drag artist on British television was Danny La Rue. La Rue's act was essentially a music hall one, following on from a much older, and less sexualised tradition of drag. His appearances were often in variety shows such as '' The Good Old Days'' (itself a pastiche of music hall) and ''Sunday Night at the London Palladium''. Such was his popularity that he made a film, ''Our Miss Fred'' (1972). Unlike the "St Trinians" films, the plot involved a man having to dress as a woman.

David Walliams and (especially) Matt Lucas often play female roles in the television comedy ''Little Britain''; Walliams plays Emily Howard—a "rubbish transvestite", who makes an unconvincing woman.

In the UK, non-comedic representations of drag acts are less common, and usually a subsidiary feature of another story. A rare exception is the television play (1968) and film (1973) ''The Best Pair of Legs in the Business''. In the film version Reg Varney plays a holiday camp comedian and drag artist whose marriage is failing.

Canada

Early representations of drag in Canadian film included the 1971 film ''Fortune and Men's Eyes'', adapted from a theatrical play by John Herbert, and the 1974 film '' Once Upon a Time in the East'', adapted from a theatrical play by Michel Tremblay.

The 1977 film ''Outrageous!'', starring Canadian drag queen Craig Russell as a fictionalized version of himself, was an important milestone in Canadian film, as one of the first gay-themed films ever to receive widespread theatrical distribution in North America. A sequel film, ''Too Outrageous!'', was released in 1987.

In the 1980s, the sketch comedy series ''CODCO

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