Trans drag performers have played a key role throughout the history of the art form - "you can't tell the story of drag without trans people," Testa said.Īs drag grew in popularity in the '60s and beyond, many trans women found themselves performing because rampant transphobia and homophobia made it difficult to find other work. "But I'm surprised we have to get back out in the streets again and keep going." How trans performers contributed to drag history "It's great to think that you made a little dent in history," Blakk said. Police regularly raided gay bars in the US - until the late '60s, Jeffreys said, it was illegal for bars in New York to serve a drink to a "known homosexual."īlakk, then an advocate with AIDS grassroots organization Act Up and political group Queer Nation, never ran to win - she wanted to do "something different with drag and tie activism in," she said in a phone conversation. Drag queens have long been leaders in the queer liberation movementĮven after the counterculture movement took over the '60s and sizable LGBTQ communities were forming in major cities, dressing in drag in public could still be dangerous. And even though the '50s were a "dark period" for queer and trans people, Jeffreys said, some drag acts like the Jewel Box Revue found national success and catered to mainstream audiences.
The term "homosexuality" came into greater circulation in the '30s, Jeffreys said, as did "pansy acts" - hyper-feminine queens whose routines included innuendos about same-sex desire. Those who perform exaggerated forms of masculinity, now often referred to as drag kings, also commanded stages across the US, proving masculinity could be prodded as much as femininity. "Female impersonator" Julian Eltinge was a particularly popular performer who published a magazine and launched his own makeup line, Jeffreys said. "The celebration of queer joy when it's been denied in all these other spaces is activism."ĭrag performers were often stars of the vaudeville scene of the early 20th century, Jeffreys said. "The pleasure was the resistance," Testa said in a phone interview.
#Drag makeup professional#
Swann's drag dances and subsequent arrests were some of the first recorded acts of resistance in the burgeoning queer liberation movement in America, in which drag has played an essential role for more than 100 years, said Nino Testa, an associate professor of professional practice in women and gender studies at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.
When Swann confronted police in a cream satin gown after they raided one of his parties in 1888, he was arrested and charged with "being a suspicious character." He was arrested several more times throughout his life after protecting queer friends during raids, according to Channing Gerard Joseph, an LGBTQ historian and Princeton University instructor who has said he's the first academic to highlight Swann's contributions to drag history. A formerly enslaved man, Swann in 1882 began hosting guests, many of them former slaves, for drag dances at his Washington, DC home. One of the first known people to call themselves a "queen of drag" was William Dorsey Swann. (One theory about the origin of the term "drag" is that it referenced the way gowns "dragged" across the floor another is that it derived from Polari, a slang-y language used frequently by queer British men, Jeffreys said.) There, Black queer and trans residents donned dresses and wigs to perform in a safe, creative environment. New York's Harlem neighborhood is thought by many to be the birthplace of drag balls in the 1860s.
0 kommentar(er)
