In Defence of Drag
Or, “I can’t believe that anyone needs to write this in 2023”
It’s a tale as old as time: queer people breathe, fascists and reactionaries see it as a threat to life as they know it, they stoke fear and hatred, and whatever they were freaking out about doesn’t come to pass. Rinse and repeat. The moral panic du jour is drag, specifically performances where children are in the audience.
While it shouldn’t need to be restated, drag is an art form, just as much as music, as painting, and as filmmaking. Artists work for years to develop their craft; they learn how to sow beautiful garments, to turn their face into a work of art, to use their body and their wit to take us on a journey in three and a half minutes. They face drunk, rowdy patrons on a nightly basis, lead our protests and marches, and are truly the “special forces” of the queer community and of the art world as a whole.
This kind of performance — because that’s what it is — isn’t anything new; it’s an important part of our cultures. For centuries, drag was a central part of theatre. Western women weren’t allowed to walk the boards well into the Renaissance, so all the female roles went to men. That means Antigone was played by some bloke named Hercules, and Romeo fell in star-crossed love with Julian, and no one batted an eye.
Drag as we know it today further developed in underground clubs over the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries after being criminalised by morality/obscenity laws. Where once it was a common practice on stage, particularly in forms of entertainment such as vaudeville, it became associated with nightlife — and with the queer community also targeted by those same laws.
Outside of modern drag, cross-dressing remains an integral part of Britain’s tradition of pantomime and of Japanese kabuki, among others. On television, I can’t count how many times Bugs Bunny has camped it up. And yet, some people see drag as a fetish or a kink — though to be clear, far be it from me to judge those for whom it is that — rather than a valid, magical art form. That I, or anybody, need to defend it is ridiculous, because there’s nothing there that merits being attacked in the first place.
You don’t mind drag, just not with children around? Luckily, like any other artist — or person for that matter — drag performers change their performances depending on the audience. You don’t talk the same way at work or with your mother as you do at the bar with your buddies, do you? It’s the same idea here. While yes, drag performances can be risqué, those are performed for adults within our own spaces, far away from your precious kids. For all-ages shows, the numbers are different! Sometimes, the performers wear bodysuits because they dance a lot and need the freedom to move. If you think that’s overtly sexual, you might also want to disband every high school cheerleading squad and remove even the suggestion of nudity or sexuality from advertising that could potentially be seen by children. I’m sure hateful idiots are going to cherry pick some examples of performances they deem to be inappropriate but, let’s face it, if someone thinks that the underlying principle of the thing is wrong, how many performances are they going to consider to be family friendly? Even dressing up like a princess to simply read to children is apparently pushing it.
What make the homophobia and transphobia of culture-warring critics obvious is their hypocrisy. It’s hard to imagine anyone having such a big problem with straight, cisgender men who cross-dress for a performance. If anything, they’re more likely to receive acclaim and be recognized for their bravery. I don’t remember Mrs. Doubtfire or Big Mama’s House sending me into a death spiral of gender dysphoria when I watched them as a kid. Hell, you can’t tell me that Gene Simmons wasn’t putting on full drag every time K.I.S.S. got on stage. I wasn’t confused by any of them, nor did I feel weird watching them. They’re performers in costumes, nothing more. Besides, I was already plenty queer all on my own and didn’t need their help to figure it out.
The only time people have a real problem with drag is when they realize a queer person is behind the make-up. Suddenly, centuries old stereotypes bubble up to the surface: drag artists are perverts, getting some sort of weird kick from dressing up and dancing in front of children, grooming them into a life of sin and moral turpitude. This most recent wave of hate is particularly transphobic, relying on disinformation amplified by right-wing talking heads and legacy media. Honestly, I wish these pilgrims would at least get creative with their hate.
What these people never seem to get is that queer and trans children exist, and they’re going to continue existing whether people want them to or not. They don’t need to be “recruited” into anything (Source: me, an adult queer who was once a queer child).
I promise you that your child can survive using the singular “they” or seeing a woman in a suit dancing and pretending to sing like Freddie Mercury at brunch. I can also promise that your child will remember the hate you spew. For their sake, I hope that they aren’t queer: they’ll absorb your hate like a sponge and inflict it on others, maybe even on themselves. You’ll have made them miserable because of your ignorance. They deserve to have loving, open-minded parents, who support them exactly as they are and who want nothing more than for them to be happy.
This moral panic needs to end before someone else gets hurt. If the trends continue, the violence we’ve seen in America isn’t far behind. Just in our city, queer people, drag performers, and the spaces hosting them are constantly under attack. The Rainbow District School Board, after some back and forth, ultimately chose to cancel an event — where two drag artists were going to tell kids that it’s okay to love themselves — for being “too political” and “oversexualized”, caving to pressure from small-minded parents and administrators. Fierté Sudbury Pride has been on the receiving end of conspiracy theories and harassment campaigns for the past few years. Zigs Bar is getting some flack for hosting dances for teens — something they’ve done for years — and the Caruso Club is being bombarded by threats for hosting a drag show in May that’s open to teenagers. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the daily, almost banal examples of hate that seem to be more present than ever before. As the temperature rises, I’m afraid that it’s only a matter of time before everything bubbles over, and that we have our own Colorado Springs.
You don’t like drag shows and don’t want your kids to attend them? Don’t go, then! I can promise you that everyone there will be much happier without you around. Art is meant to provoke and, obviously, you just can’t handle it. I’m sure there’s something more productive you could do with your time anyway, like protesting vaccine mandates that no longer exist. It’s just a shame that you’ve chosen to waste your time on trying to silence queer joy instead of making your own.
If you expect to continue trying to purge us from society without any consequences, know that history will not be kind to you. We’re more than happy to bash back. We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again, and we’ll do it fabulously.
