Why Drag History?
My name is Jean decay and I’m a Drag historian. While there is currently no specific national or international practice of studying the art form of Drag on its own, I’ve nevertheless taken on this moniker to affirm that Drag performers should be at the forefront of analysis and discussion. There are so many performers now who are taking this endeavour on. I’m simply one of many passionate about this art form. The nature of Drag makes it hard to define and hard to preserve. My goal for this site is to be a jumping off point for people to engage with the history of Drag. In our first article on the site, I want to write about why I believe preserving Drag is important in so many more ways than we may realize.
Having an active relationship with the past reveals the many ways in which our stories are interconnected. We maintain this relationship through oral traditions, written text, and visual art. Drag specifically allows us a lens of the past that, in our current political climate, is essential in understanding fact from fiction.
In our current present, the way we experience the past is being shaped by new technology.
The relationship we have with the past now is experienced as factoids and quick social media posts online. A video on TikTok becomes a crash course on a subject. We have never had so much access to information as we do now, but the ability to find that info again, or use it as a jumping off point for further learning, is much more difficult. Searching online and understanding what’s true or not is difficult. People are also fed certain videos/posts via algorithm which also adds to confusion. As many posts I see about cool interesting people within Drag history, there are just as many horrifying videos/posts creating complete falsehoods about Drag that other folks completely believe. What’s just as frustrating, is the limits of these social media apps as research tools.
When we find something of interest, the ability to use something like Instagram as a search engine leaves much to be desired. Content creators do have the power of shaping our perception of the past, as multi media posts and short form videos create a new tapestry of Drag’s legacy. These folks are doing amazing work.What is advantageous with short form content is that a lot of ground can get covered quickly.
Drag as an art form is special because it is malleable, it can exist in other art forms while maintaining its own identity, and has been continually policed since its development in the United States. As such, Drag is a historian’s dream! Interested in historical makeup and hair styling? Go look up what Drag performers were doing. Interested in how the US government meddles in artistic expression? Look at how drag was policed in public versus the stage! Curious about how folks transgressed against ingrained gender expectations? Unsurprisingly, researching Drag history can help with that. Because it exists in so many other art forms, we can specifically utilize Drag history to explore, specifically, other aspects of United States history, and how it’s taught to us. So many of my own preconceived notions of the past have been radically challenged the more I research. Even the reality that Drag has more than a two hundred year history in the U.S. changes the way we look at the art form, and the places it exists in.
Many folks see drag as a product of the 1960s or 1990s. For the U.S., the earliest known Drag came by way of a formerly enslaved person, William Dorsey Swann. Swann was certainly not the first person “cross-dressing,” or the first person to reference “Drag.” From the info we do have, Swann seemed to have coined, however, the term “Queen of Drag.”
The perception of Drag being a modern art form ignores important contributors to the culture. Moreso, we miss how Drag connects itself to different communities, its impact on laws, specific contributions from Black performers, and how different cultural norms throughout the last couple hundred years have shaped Drag to become what it is today. This did not happen by chance.
The absence of Drag history from education, even in collegiate settings, is in no small part due to shame surrounding gender expression and Queerness.
Even before Queer became a term, the fear of the “other” existed all throughout the U.S. When historians are tasked to look at “Queerness” or “Transness” historically, folks claim it’s not appropriate to apply modern sentiments to the past. I agree! However, I argue that it is ridiculous to assume same-sex attraction didn’t exist. It’s ridiculous to assume people never questioned the gender-roles given to them, or that they felt the need to “transition” how they were perceived. What isn’t fair to assume about the past is that it was inherently more conservative, or that conservative thinking is solely a product of the past, and not an upkeeping of current rules and cultural practices we find ourselves living in today.
Different forms of gender exist historically, same-sex attraction has always existed in some facet. Drag History reminds us that we shape/contort/manipulate the rules of society. For marginalized people, much of the rules within society harm and incite violence. This is true for Drag artists and is in part how we know William Dorsey Swann exists. Court documents, news articles on his imprisonment, claiming his actions outweighed any other crime are partly why we know him at all. What we also see within these systems is his community’s pleas to free him. Swann was a well known person in his community based on how the newspaper wrote about him. We also know he was beloved by the community members requesting multiple pardons throughout his numerous arrests.
These tiny bits of info express so much. There are no surviving photos of Swann that we know of at the time of this writing, but his legacy can be felt. Drag history is an important asset to understanding
- How laws are utilized to hurt marginalized communities
- That gender and gender expression is malleable
- The body can be used as a canvas for artistic expression and protest
What people need to understand about drag history is that:
- The origins of the art form within the United States revolves around contributions from the Black community
- Drag performers have been often at many demonstrations rallying against unfair policing
- The same laws that have affected drag have also affected Trans people and Disabled people (and vice versa)
- The term Drag can apply to a lot or a little based on your definition
- There is no one perfect definition for Drag, and its existence as an art form transcends easy definition.
There’s so much cultural wealth within our history. Drag is invaluable to understanding fashion trends of the past, different methods of costume making, how different nightlife, theatre and back yard venues get transformed into community spaces. As someone who is particularly interested in Drag as it relates to politics and radical movements, my focus tends to be that. But Drag exists in so many ways, its history, arguably, can be felt across all other art forms, all aspects of society, all around the world. As an American born in California, my own personal knowledge is inherently biased and limited. Drag exists globally, and has for a very very long time. Different communities will see what Drag is differently, and that’s ok! That’s why creating a space for these different stories to be expressed is important. There’s a current need not to just know history, but interact with it. How does it connect to your life? Does it affect your life now? Do you see yourself in these stories?
More importantly, opening up more conversations about Drag history, about history in general, allows us to discern misinformation and have stronger media literacy tools. You may not be a performer, but preserving Drag history and interacting with it is beneficial to us all .
Welcome to Drag History, let’s all go on this journey together and honor the legacy we were given.
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