THE ICONIC ART OF DRAG
DENIZ AKKAYA
Since RuPaul’s Drag Race began airing in 2009, the art of drag has slowly but surely gained the long over-due mainstream recognition it deserves.
No longer appreciated solely by the LGBTQ+ community, drag queens have become the world’s most respected pop culture icons, taking over magazine covers, music videos and advertising campaigns!
Drag has a rich cultural history spanning decades, evolving from a popular theatrical practice to a political stance against gender norms and roles. While drag has a strong presence in the entertainment industry, it also deserves recognition as an impressive and empowering example of an art form. Combining fashion and bodily metamorphosis skills to create a gender illusion, drag is ultimately about being a whole new person, liberated by notions of gender and sexuality. It exists to liberate and excite.
The practice of female impersonation has deep roots on stage. During periods when women were not allowed to act, men performed in female guises to portray female roles. The female characters of Japanese Onnagata, Chinese Tan or Shakespeare are incarnations of this practice. But dressing up as a woman is not synonymous with the art of drag. The artists we will now call drag queens, were subjected to incredible marginalization in the 18th and 19th centuries, when gender roles were increasingly narrowed down and ‘cross-dressing’ began to acquire a distinctly provocative identity.
If you’ve watched Netflix’s Pose, you must have seen the New York drag ball scene in the 1970s. These balls require you to make the best catwalk to surprise the jury and return home with a handful of trophies! Balls and houses were particularly important to the queer struggle during the AIDS crisis. In the 1980s, gay Americans began to get sick and die at an alarming rate. AIDS, spread through unprotected sex in many cases, has devastated the gay community. Public health agencies’ responses to AIDS were filled with homophobic and racist assumptions about queer sexual behavior, and they were working more on stigmatizing queer individuals than preventing the AIDS crisis. In response, some house mothers have set up ‘prevention homes’ where they educate their kids about safe sex and provide healing to the deep emotional traumas of those with AIDS. Some of these houses have also held prevention balls, such as the House of Latex Ball, held in NYC, where the Q & A section educates viewers on HIV risks and prevention. Drag queens and queer spaces have provided the queer community with something that heterosexual society cannot provide: protection, love and care.
Houses were families where legendary matriarchal queens protected, nurtured, and cared for young queens. Houses competed at balls where queers and queens walked and danced the runway to the hiss or cheers of an undecided crowd of spectators, reinterpreting the codes of mainstream society in which they embodied assigned categories such as ‘executive realness’. An art form created primarily by black and queer Latino Americans, balls were not just about escapism: balls were a powerful way of using imagination and performance to fundamentally recreate their social position. It was here that the concept of the ‘Drag mother’ was born. Seasoned queens would take promising drag performers under their wing to teach them how to perform as well as how to improve their looks. They provided a home not only for those who wanted to enter the world of drag, but for young people who were going through a difficult time in their lives in general.
Drag families are featured heavily in the 1990 drag ball documentary Paris is Burning (which inspired Madonna’s Vogue); House of Xtravaganza and House of LaBeija are among them.
The Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 protested police raids of New York gay bars by drag queens, especially Marsha P Johnson, and led to the founding of the Gay Liberation Front. The struggle for acceptance and equality grew in the 1970s and 1980s, and Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man elected to public office in San Francisco in 1977.
Although we still have many steps to take to make this world an equal and fair place for everyone, we can be the pioneer of these necessary steps by taking inspiration from the struggles of the past. For the activism inspiration, you can watch Tandi Iman Dupree’s icoinic death drop from the ceiling. After all, the art of drag is the most passionate form of activism and that drop is definitely out of this world 😊
