Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories

Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2

Mark Edward, Stephen Farrier, Enoch Brater, Mark Taylor-Batty, Mark Edward, Stephen Farrier

• Éditeur: Methuen Drama
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350104372
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Sous-sujet: Historia y crítica teatrales

Drawing on rich interdisciplinary research that has laced the emerging subject of drag studies as an academic discipline, this book examines how drag performance is a political, socio-cultural practice with a widespread lineage throughout the history of performance. This volume maps the multi-threaded contexts of contemporary practices while rooting them in their fabulous historical past and memory. The book examines drag histories and what drag does with history, how it enacts or tells stories about remembering and the past. Featuring work about the USA, UK and Ireland, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Barbados, this book allows the reader to engage with a range of archival research including camp and history; ethnicity and drag; queering ballet through drag; the connections between drag king and queen history; queering pantomime performance; drag and military veterans; Puerto Rican drag performers and historical film.

1

Dragging Up the Past

Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier

The impossibility of a drag history

Queer histories, herstories and hairstories are often unable to be told in the same way as normative histories. This is mainly because, like many other minority or non-normative lives, LGBTQ+ people have often been rendered invisible, their stories often undocumented, or only recorded in a kind of code, their secrets safely eclipsed by loss and liminality. Constructive attempts to reclaim and shape queer histories aim at uncovering aspects and details of these hidden voices, yet because these histories are often pieced together through detective work and magpie methods they occasionally run the risk of appropriation and anachronism. Similarly, we draw on the caution expressed by Laura Doan (2001) about lesbian revisionism and how that idea can be expanded to think of historical queerness per se. Historian Matt Houlbrook (2006) lays out this kind of detective work in his book Queer London, Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–57, in which he trawls court records to piece together patterns of homosexual behaviour in a time and context when it was against the law. Houlbrook comments that his work ‘has been a deliberate attempt to write queer men back into London’s history and, in the process, to rewrite that history’ (2006: 264).

Even the most noted event in LGBTQ+ history for the west, Stonewall, is highly contested in terms of the sources that document the incident (Carter, 2004). Indeed, Stonewall and the events leading to it function as much as myth as they do historical fact. And, of course, rich accounts of queer history were lost during the AIDS crisis even when people archived queer life (see Schulman, 2012). Thus, historians are acutely aware of the limitations of any telling of queer histories, they run counter to hegemonic histories that are situated within normative identity frames. Given that, at their core, queer approaches are ingrained with anti-normative drives, queer historians/herstorians follow a different approach, placing value on the legacy and importance of queer histories and being sensitive to where, perhaps, lives do not fit recognizably as a possible index of queerness. This approach is not unique to the disciplines of performance or creative arts, or even history, but it is a queer project that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries in the academy itself. Biblical scholar Deryn Guest, for example, uses a lens of hetero-suspicion in her work on lesbian biblical hermeneutics. She describes this process as one in which ‘the researcher is resistant to the presentation of any storyworld where female homoerotic relations are virtually absent and seeks to problematize that apparent absence’ (2005: 124).

The same challenges are present when it comes to drag. There are records of drag performance, but these are often recorded in ways that were careful not to out nor incriminate a performer. For instance, the popular male impersonator Hetty King was very careful not to draw attention to the admiring letters she received from women (Dixon, 2013) and likewise almost all the famous male impersonators of the early twentieth century made sure that it was made clear in their publicity they were married (Dixon, 2013). To be clear, and not to fall foul of lesbian revisionism, the point here is not to assert that King or any other male impersonator of the era was gay, but rather to note how queerness – regardless of the apparent sexuality of the performer or their sexual activity and desire – was set aside in normative contexts. Thus we take the position that in some historical contexts the act is paramount, rather than the personal politics of sexuality because that is often unspoken, hidden or obfuscated as homosexuality was illegal. Such music hall drag was pitted against the social and legal policing of homosexuality, and later in the century the same was true when police raided bars in which queers gathered to check customers were wearing the requisite number of sex-appropriate garments.¹

Precisely because of this backdrop of social and cultural policing of non-normative gender and sexuality, we argue that there can be no single accepted version of drag history, rather there are many threaded lineages that connect drag to many kinds of performance – music hall, pantomime, stand-up, sketch and short form comedy, cabaret, vaudeville. And there will likely always be many more local drag history-sequins to discover. Therefore, we acknowledge the impossibility of tracing a single drag history as if it were comprehensive, linear and overt. To do so would result in inherent failure, yet this failure is not in the fabulously flamboyant style of Quentin Crisp or the academic adventures advocated by Jack Halberstam. This failure runs the risk of doing damage, by privileging shiny fragments we find over ones we do not see or are unable to locate. Doing this creates drag history power structures and benchmarks that are unacknowledged in their limitation. It is our position that any attempt to carve or shape an overarching history of drag performance practice will inevitably calcify drag work into shapes most recognizable to normative readings and smooth over the messiness of the history. Although we advocate for a contextual approach (by looking in any analysis of a drag performance for other kinds of performance work happening at the historical moment under discussion), we still hold that an attempt to present a history of drag performance sitting comfortably alongside maps of other historical forms also risks becoming a dominant account that will likely miss the nuance of the practice. An overarching dominant account also misses the performance work that did not grace the mainstage, that happened in closed contexts, at small gatherings or in situations of hiding in plain sight, such as at large-scale fancy dress parties (more of which below).

Therefore, the incompleteness, impossibility and frankly undesirable task of developing a canonical history is something we acknowledge, and, thus, we do not uphold the historical drag events and narratives located in this book to be a comprehensive overview. So the sequins of drag history, the shiny parts that draw our eye, led by our positionality, run the risk of being happy accidents, but these are sparkles in the dust fallen from an original source that can no longer be found. Our desire is not to re-stitch these sequins into an entire garment because that erases their own individuality. We see each dazzle as delight that offers clues but also exists in its own right. As well as being a source for drag pasts, they are as if sacred queer texts, pointing to individualized contexts, settings and locations, raising questions and suspicion about their own knowability and history.

Snatching drag sources

For the reasons set out above, rather than risk developing a dominant history of drag, we want to start in a different place, a place where perhaps people in the context of illegality and social disapprobation could find access to scarce knowledge of a set of practices. We start with a sequin that glinted at us. Searching popular sources, small advertisements and magazines is a useful starting point to begin working on drag history. Female Mimics is one such source, a magazine that ran from 1963 to 1979 in which there are pictures and articles for cross-dressers, drag aspirants and transsexual people.² The magazine served as a crossover of community newsletter with soft porn overtones, containing articles written about the histories of cross-dressing and drag – and firmly connects those histories together. This magazine served a portmanteau audience, those interested in what we would currently call non-binary presentations of gender. In issue 6 from 1965 there appears an article, ‘Mister Actress’ (pp. 13–14 and 64–66) by John Chalmers in which there is a description of the differences between transvestitism and drag. Chalmers (1965) draws the history of drag as commonly thought at the time. It roots drag in the Elizabethan stage where boys played ‘female’ parts and later in the Restoration where ‘breeches roles’ were played by women (we will come on to think this through further below as these practices are not mirror images of each other). After the Elizabethan and Restoration theatres, Chalmers links the work of male actors playing female parts, a part he calls ‘Mister Actress’, to vaudeville. Indeed, the description of the roots of drag in the magazine set out in a shorter form almost the entirety of the history section of Roger Baker’s book Drag: A History of Female Impersonation on the Stage released at the end of the 1960s (Baker, 1968, reissued and updated 1994). The article’s focus is to separate the cross-cast performer (those who dress in ‘opposite’ gender clothing for performance works, such as in Shakespearean times) from the idea of drag and transvestitism. At the end of the article Chalmers laments the loss of great cross-gender parts, saying that:

We laugh at (and with) Mister Actress today. Mister Actress makes us laugh, but in Shakespeare’s time he made the audience weep. Today’s theatre does not call for Mister Actress to tear out hearts to a passion. But we are coming to a new era in theatre. The possibility that Mister Actress might once more find himself as a tragedienne becomes more and more certain.

1965: 65

Here, Chalmers is referring to a recent playing of Jean Genet’s The Maids at Café La Mama in New York. Chalmers speaks about how cross-cast performance emerges in the theatre aligned with acting and character, rather than as popular drag form. However, this separation is not as clear as it first seems, as the article goes on to mention a cross-dressed William Haywood who toured the same places as Sarah Bernhardt with a satirized or drag-like version of her Camille in the 1890s, which she apparently applauded, so there appears to be some commingling of cross-casting in theatre and drag performance. Current understandings of drag performance are no longer wholly connected with the idea of cross-casting; as drag can happen without a hint of crossing. What is clear from the content of Female Mimics is that drag’s heredities are commingled: transvestism, transsexualism, effeminate men, camp and female impersonators.

The roots of drag are intermixed so thoroughly with cross-casting as to be almost impossible to disentangle. Certainly we consider drag a performance form and style that is not solely about cross-gender representation. Indeed, drag can evade binary gender entirely. Kieran Sellars (2020), for example, has examined contemporary drag as it is performed by a nude body, rendering null the idea of cross-dressing as germane to the form. Although there are historical connections with female and male impersonation, which are clearer to see on the music hall or vaudeville stage for instance, connections to parts played by cross-cast performers in the past are less clearly present in current drag work. It may also be the case that the oft-quoted connection to Shakespeare and the Restoration stage is in some sense a claim to be taken seriously, because a connection to the high/dominant arts (even if the works were popular originally) gives some cachet or validity to the performance form. The quest to be taken seriously certainly reflects how research into popular forms of performance is a relatively recent activity and, in some places, is still met with reduction and ridicule, rather than being credited for the rigour and originality which it generates (Schilt, 2018). The...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Dragging Up the Past
• 2 ‘Once Upon a Time, There Was a Tavern’: Metadrag and Other Uses of the Past at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern
• 3 Camp and Drag in the Mainstream: A Critical Study of the Phenomenon of Drag Performance in the Northern British Fun Pubs, 1973–1993
• 4 Soldiers in Skirts: Cross-Dressing Ex-Servicemen, Sexuality and Censorship in Post-War Britain
• 5 Kinging the Stage: Male Impersonators and Drag Kings, Exploring Shared Historical Narratives
• 6 A Kiss that Breaks the Spell: Japanese ‘Drag Kings’ and the Homosocial Culture of the Takarazuka Revue
• 7 Camp Can Be Such a Drag: Approaches to Understanding Camp and Drag
• 8 Vonni Diva: Showgirl
• 9 ‘FagHag Drag’: Penny Arcade’s Archive of Otherness
• 10 Nobody’s Trash: Holly Woodlawn’s Puerto Rican Drag and the Subversion of Authorship
• 11 Bibi is a Sissy: Drag, Death by Silence and the Journey to Self-Determination
• 12 Mother Sally and the Fig Leaf: Re/Productions of a Carnival Character in Barbados
• 13 The Buttcracker: Dragging Ballet into Queer Places
• 14 Oh Wow! He’s Queer! Queering Panto in Belfast: An Interview with Ross Anderson-Doherty
• 15 Wicked Queens of Pantoland
• Index
• Copyright