Drag Bores and Drag Wars

Joe, Calpurnia Addams, and Me
at Chicago's Kit Kat Club (c. 2002)

Once upon a time, drag was a novelty. To see a cross-dresser, you had to go out of your way. You belonged to a subculture, attended a film, or went to a ball, nightclub, or festival. You were culturally adventurous. 

Today, with boosters like RuPaul and George Santos, drag is ubiquitous. Current conservative efforts to ban drag shows have me reflecting on this widespread, centuries-old practice.

Harvard scholar Marjorie Garber sees drag throughout Western culture, from Shakespeare to Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde to Elvis. She asserts that “there can be no culture without the transvestite.”

I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when drag went mainstream. But when it did, I came to see it as a drag.

The 1978 French film La Cage Aux Folles seemed a bit daring when it was first released. By 1983, when La Cage became a Broadway musical, it had lost its zing. Approachable Broadway drag then became commonplace. Much of it --  for example, Kinky Boots (2012) and Mrs. Doubtfire (2021) -- was about as provocative as shopping at the Times Square M&M’s store.

Drag is also present in the world of dining. In the mid-1990s, I dragged friends and family to Lucky Cheng’s, a Chinese restaurant above a funeral parlor in New York’s East Village. This place was wild! It featured Asian servers in drag. Today, Lucky Cheng’s is unremarkably ensconced in New York’s touristic firmament. 

For me, the ultimate proof that there was nothing risqué left about drag came when the über-conservative American Heart Association, my former employer, hired the milquetoast D-list drag performer Mutha Chucka to emcee its June Pride celebrations two years in a row. 

All of this conflates drag with innocuous entertainment. But the line between performance and life’s exigencies sometimes blurs.

Around twenty years ago, Joe and I watched lip sync artiste Calpurnia Addams at a venue called the Kit Kat Club in Chicago. The club’s name was of course a nod to Cabaret, the great 1966 musical about Weimar Republic decadence and the encroachment of a sinister regime. Calpurnia’s quickfire, racy act captivated us. Like Sally Bowles, her life at the Kit Kat Club seemed a cabaret. Offstage, it was a different story.

We later learned that Addams was involved in an army base tragedy that became the subject of an acclaimed film, and that she was performing in order to finance what was for her lifesaving gender reassignment surgery. No “drag queen,” she was fighting for her survival, and her backstory came to exemplify the damage done by former President Clinton’s terrible “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

A 2007 trip to Paris further opened my eyes when I encountered a group in drag having dinner at a posh restaurant. There was no performative aspect to this outing. These people were on the plain side, sporting unadventurous apparel. One or two had a five o’clock shadow. They were just being their authentic selves. This stimulated a great deal of thought.

The mainstreaming of drag notwithstanding, it always takes guts for marginalized people to be themselves. They deserve safe spaces of their own.

At this moment, culture warriors and disingenuous politicians are going nuts over drag shows. The Tennessee ban threatens freedom of expression and encroaches on other hard-won rights. These bad actors claim not to see drag as a yawn but as a threat to the fabric of society. 

For them, fighting drag is a more urgent priority than mitigating climate change or curtailing gun violence. Raging against imaginary enemies is a cynical distraction from the authentic issues of the day. Like the creeping menace in Cabaret, this suppression does not bode well for anyone's freedoms.

I have learned it is a slippery slope to assume someone is in drag for entertainment purposes when there may be more to it. With drag under siege, I admit that drag-as-entertainment may no longer grip me, but I am still in solidarity with anyone who wants to put on a dress.