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If Drag Race is the radio, then your local gay bar is the indie scene. Alaska Thunderfuck 5000, a Drag Race All Stars champion, has also started a more inclusive competition of her own online.īut these more diverse and avant-garde shows and contests have always existed on the local level - and since drag is an art, it’s not all about competitions anyway. The Boulet Brothers, a pair of horror-inspired queens with a reality competition show called Dragula (currently streaming on Netflix), have pushed the boundaries of drag by casting gender-nonconforming competitors and even crowning an immensely talented drag king named Landon Cider as the winner of season three. Only now are we beginning to see more edgy drag competitions emerging on TV. What is keeping you occupied in these strange times? Books, games, work, Netflix?Ī post shared by Boulet Brothers on at 3:45pm PDT However, it couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, this aggrandizing narrative is sort of self-consciously written into the show itself.
What is a gay bar performer pro#
In ways that are bizarrely similar to how WWE is largely mistaken as the entirety of pro wrestling, RuPaul’s Drag Race is often taken as the be-all and end-all of drag. Drag now refers to a plethora of art made by predominantly queer people. This expanded notion of drag includes drag kings, drag queens, non-binary performers, and even some older, more “traditional” artists like photographer Cindy Sherman or the early, transgressive pop performances of Madonna.ĭrag is not just a very pretty gay man dressed as a woman and lip-syncing. So, since drag is not just men dressing as women, what exactly is it?ĭrag can best be understood as art expressed in the medium of gender, which is to say that an artist who uses their accessorized and decorated body to subvert traditional norms of gender is probably (but not always!) doing drag. These queer artists took exaggerated makeup and costuming to a new level, attempting to create fashions that made them resemble aliens, monsters, or sometimes just abstract art. Drag has played an important part in every LGBTQ+ rights movement, and drag performers have always been at the helm of positive social change.Īlthough more radical or extreme forms of drag had existed before, what’s become known as “club kid” drag garnered significant popularity in the late 1980s and early ’90s with the rise of avant-garde stars like Leigh Bowery and James St.
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Drag has been one avenue through which queer people of all kinds have expressed themselves and the means by which liberation was demanded. Drag has always been done by women and men and other assorted gender non-conforming individuals.
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Although the language didn’t exist for it back then, individuals who we might now consider transgender or non-binary have always played an important role in the drag world, and queer artists who expressed their gender in ways that didn’t conform with either traditionally male or female roles have always played around with the tropes of sex and gender. Hex/Getty Imagesīut in gay communities - which were necessarily forced into a sort of underground existence due to laws against homosexuality, sodomy, and yes, even “crossdressing” - what has become known as drag has always been more than men dressing as women. However, what we now know of as “drag” came into prominence as its own recognized art form in the late 1800s and early 1900s in the form of female impersonation, in which a usually cisgender male performer would dress in the garb of a cisgender woman. It’s likely that genderbending performance art has always existed in one way or another. What Is Drag?Īn apocryphal story often told about the origin of the word “drag” is that it comes from Shakespearean times - since women weren’t allowed to act, men would play female roles - as a shorthand for “dressed as a girl.” The debate around the validity of this factoid is both ahistorical and sort of facile, and that simplistic definition hardly captures what drag actually is or ever was.
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We’re here to break down the basics of drag. What’s with the makeup? Why are some of them monsters? Are we really supposed to believe those are women?Ī lot of the time, outsiders and straight people feel shy about asking for more information out of fear of offending performers or out of a desire to not overwork marginalized people with emotional labor. Although LGBTQ+ usually (but not always!) embraces drag, many unfamiliar with the craft find it straight up confusing.