Drag -For -All
Off the Main Drag
Despite its ubiquitous presence for hundreds of years, as Joe Drennan explains, many views on who can take part in the art of drag aren’t terribly modern.
Julian Mandrews
The art of drag arguably dates back to the time of William Shakespeare. The name, while, extensively debated, is believed to have come from the dragging petticoats that male thespians would wear while performing female characters onstage. Due to the heritage’s exposure to mass media nowadays, the only things that seem to be dragging on the floor are the 40-inch human hair wigs and the skulls of queens who attempt a death drop.
Despite RuPaul’s Drag Race now being a multi-milliondollar international franchise, the show has been long critiqued by audiences for its lack of inclusion for artists who don’t identify as gay men. It begs the question for people looking for another type of drag; where are all the others? GCN spoke to three artists from the craft; one queen (who happens to be straight) and two kings. Here’s what they had to say:
It was the 1980’s when a genderqueer drag king by the name of Kenny Todgers burst onto the scene. Like other kings at the time, he dabbled in gender discombobulation through the art of male impersonation. The history of it differs from that of drag in that male impersonation was not queer-coded initially. It was often performed by heterosexual women, particularly in nineteenth-century vaudeville circuits in the US.