By Jake Stigers
“We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.”
This famous—well, famous to those of us who pay attention to such things—quote by RuPaul in her 1996 book Lettin it All Hang Out: An Autobiography defined a new sensibility of and modern perspective on the evolution of drag writ large in a culture where it has exploded from gay-bar entertainment to mainstream art form. RuPaul is, of course, the towering, flawless-skinned doyenne of the reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has enjoyed nine blindingly sequined seasons pitting expertly contoured drag-queen contestants against each other in a lip-synching-for-their-lives battle to be crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar.
So what exactly is drag?
Before we go any further, I want to make some distinctions: Drag queens, as you’re about to see in Kinky Boots, are essentially—and this paragraph is written in very general terms to provide very basic information for people who might not possess this understanding—men who dress as women for the sake of performing. They are different from transvestites, who are men (or women) who for any number of reasons enjoy dressing as women (or men) in private or in public. And transsexuals are people who feel that they were born the wrong gender and who undergo any degree of transformations from basic outward appearance to hormone therapy to surgery to change their genders … and then usually dress and live as completely as possible in those new genders.
Also before we go any further, I—your tall, not-at-all-petite writer—also want to offer some of my drag bona fides: I have dressed in drag on stage (I once rocked a black leotard and heels playing Velma Kelly in a loving re-creation of Chicago’s “Cell Block Tango” with the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus), I have dressed in drag in public (I attended a Christmas-drag-mandatory birthday party populated by ten sturdy, ridiculously-not-pretty drag queens dressed in various degrees of red-and-green tragedy at an otherwise respectable restaurant), I have dressed in drag at home (because walking fiercely in heels doesn’t just happen by magic), and given this vast experience in the drag world I eventually decided I needed my own drag name (Porcelain Bidet, thanks for asking).
So back to our question: What exactly is drag?
In the current popular-culture definition—and, again, in Kinky Boots—drag is men dressing and performing as women not to try to be women but to celebrate and elevate and experience the inherent fabulousness of women. And these men do drag for any number of reasons: Performing only as men is limiting, breaking gender constructs is subversive and provocative, bringing out an inner diva is both liberating and fierce, being a drag queen is just another role to play for an actor or singer or dancer … or sometimes men do drag just because it’s a whole lot of fun. Aside from wearing heels, of course. Because ouch. Ouch ouch ouch. Ouch.
You can even parse drag into any number of subsets:
Comedic drag, like comedian Harvey Korman cross-dressing just to be silly in a decade of skits on The Carol Burnett Show.
Tragic drag, like actor Harris Glenn Milstead’s inspiredly disturbing drag character—and director John Waters’ muse—Divine in movies like 1974’s Female Trouble.
Gimmick drag, where men play women less for plausibility and more to drive wacky-hijinks plotlines, like Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon unconvincingly donning frocks to escape the mafia in the 1959 movie Some Like it Hot, or Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari gussying up to save on rent in a not-very-observant-girls-only apartment building from 1980 to 1982 in the mercifully short-lived TV show Bosom Buddies.
Fabulous drag, which is an umbrella term for the work of all the men who dress as women, shimmer in the spotlight and reach for the stars in Kinky Boots, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and every gay bar in America with a stage and a good sound system.
We can also delineate a difference between drag on a stage and drag in public. While stage drag is about creating a character or performing as an idealized persona, drag in public—which, again, is entirely different from cross-dressing as a transvestite to feel comfortable or as a transexual person in an effort to achieve some level of “passing”—is usually done in the spirit of dressing in a costume just to have fun … or even perhaps to provoke a person-to-person response from people.
If we look at drag as something that provokes a response or makes an impression, it can mean practically anything. If I—a man who defaults to T-shirts, cargo shorts and old running shoes whenever possible—walk down the street instead in a black suit or a Santa hat and a red Speedo or a bunny outfit or a marabou-trimmed sweater and a skirt made from a repurposed poinsettia tablecloth—all of which I have done—I’m essentially wearing a costume that influences people either consciously or unconsciously to see—and react to—me in a certain way. Again: We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.
And then there’s the matter of what constitutes women’s clothing and what constitutes men’s clothing at any point in time. A mere 250 years ago, America’s Founding Fathers—like all their gentlemen contemporaries—wore heels, stockings and curled wigs ... all of which are articles of dress that only America’s mothers—and daughters and all women, of course, but I’m trying to use a clever father-mother parallel here—conventionally wear today. So at what point did these modes of dress cease to be men’s, start to be women’s, and then become iconic and fabulous enough to be appropriated by drag queens?
The cultural history of what constitutes drag for women doesn’t offer a clear parallel distinction, though; from a modern gender-conforming perspective, men wear pants and women wear dresses. But women also wear pants. Though it wasn’t always this binary. There were American laws enacted as recently as 1907 that forbade women from wearing trousers in public. It wasn’t until Marlene Dietrich was splashed all over the fan magazines wearing a black tuxedo to a 1932 movie premiere that attitudes toward women in pants started to shift; a year later, Eleanor Roosevelt presided over the Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn wearing riding pants, and Vogue magazine published its first photos of women wearing slacks in 1939. And even though professional women were wearing menswear-inspired pants and suits by the 1970s, it wasn’t until 1993—that’s not a typo—that women were allowed to wear trousers on the U.S. Senate floor. (That last bit of information doesn’t really pertain to this narrative, though. I just stumbled on it in my research and found it flabbergasting enough that I thought it was worth sharing.)
Anyway, for the last half-century, women have been wearing menswear-style clothing in both casual and formal settings. So drag kings—women dressing and sometimes performing as the male counterparts to drag queens—have to be more and more diligent (and creative) in defining their drag-king personas.
It is at this point that a thorough, responsible researcher and writer would incorporate into his narrative the gender-appropriating fads of man-buns, guyliner and George Michael’s hair in his WHAM! years. I, however, will not.
So take a moment to look past the drag queens and their stories in Kinky Boots and notice the other characters and what they wear … and how it influences—or is influenced by—their stories. Then think about the story you tell every time you choose something to put on. Because even if it doesn’t include sequins or break the bounds of gender conformity, it would be a total drag if you didn’t celebrate the story it tells about you.
Jake Stigers is a writer, editor, blogger and performer living in Cedar Rapids. Porcelain Bidet is now permanently retired from performing and resides in a box somewhere in the attic.
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