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In its purest form, drag is when a person goes into a dressing room, they put this thing on, they go out on stage and they perform, and they take it off. Drag is anytime that someone is putting on clothing that is considered to be not appropriate to them, and then wearing it with some type of ironic distance.
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JEFFREYS: I would start by saying that drag is a theatrical form. TIME: What are the first things people should know about the history of drag? Jeffreys, a drag historian and videographer who teaches theater studies at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, about the history of drag, the influence of RuPaul and some of the common misconceptions many people have about drag. In an interview with the Guardian last week, RuPaul stirred controversy by saying that he would probably not let trans women compete on the show, saying, “Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it.” He has since apologized for these comments, but the sentiment has cultivated a larger conversation about who gets to do drag, and why.īeyond the realm of VH1, drag is a multivalent art form with a complex and stratified history. Recently, that influence has raised questions over who that image includes. In doing so, Drag Race has also played a key role in codifying an image of what a drag performance should look like.
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Though this isn’t the first time drag has reached pop-cultural prominence - the format and RuPaul both had a moment in the 1990s - the TV show has helped bring it to a new level of visibility. READ MORE: How the Great Depression Helped End Prohibitionīy the post-World War II era, a larger cultural shift toward earlier marriage and suburban living, the advent of TV and the anti-homosexuality crusades championed by Joseph McCarthy would help push the flowering of gay culture represented by the Pansy Craze firmly into the nation’s rear-view mirror.ĭrag balls, and the spirit of freedom and exuberance they represented, never went away entirely-but it would be decades before LGBTQ life would flourish so publicly again.With RuPaul set to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 16 and the tenth season of the hit show RuPaul’s Drag Race premiering on March 22, drag seems to have solidified its place in today’s mainstream entertainment zeitgeist.
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This not only discouraged gay men from participating in public life, but also “made homosexuality seem more dangerous to the average American.” In the mid- to late ‘30s, Heap points out, a wave of sensationalized sex crimes “provoked hysteria about sex criminals, who were often-in the mind of the public and in the mind of authorities-equated with gay men.” The sale of liquor was legal again, but newly enforced laws and regulations prohibited restaurants and bars from hiring gay employees or even serving gay patrons. Each gay enclave, wrote George Chauncey in his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, had a different class and ethnic character, cultural style and public reputation. In addition to these groups, whom social reformers in the early 1900s would call “male sex perverts,” a number of nightclubs and theaters were featuring stage performances by female impersonators these spots were mainly located in the Levee District on Chicago’s South Side, the Bowery in New York City and other largely working-class neighborhoods in American cities.īy the 1920s, gay men had established a presence in Harlem and the bohemian mecca of Greenwich Village (as well as the seedier environs of Times Square), and the city’s first lesbian enclaves had appeared in Harlem and the Village. “In the late 19th century, there was an increasingly visible presence of gender-non-conforming men who were engaged in sexual relationships with other men in major American cities,” says Chad Heap, a professor of American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940.