Listening to Drag

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 11, 2015

For Coming Out Weekend, we’ll talk about the cultural and political statement of drag: men dressing as women to perform as entertainers. How is it subversive to the powers that be?

At first I was afraid
I was petrified
Kept thinking I could never live
without you by my side
But then I spent so many nights
thinking how you did me wrong
And I grew strong
And I learned how to get along

Every social movement has its songs, its gestures, its slang, its assumptions, infighting, and its sense of what’s wrong in the world. This morning, in honor of National Coming Out Weekend, we’re going to look together about the culture of drag and give it a salute for being one of the big-haired, heavily made up mothers of the new freedom, the growing normalcy of the LGBT movement. Drag is cis-men (that means men who were born male) dressing up as women for the purposes of entertainment. Well, sometimes they dress up as parodies of femininity, with exaggerated eye makeup, wigs that reach to the ceiling fans, and six inch heels. Sometimes they dress in torn punk clothes, with just a couple of items of female-identified clothing. Sometimes they are in a satin dress and pearls, sporting a full beard. Sometimes drag can be cis-women (women who were born female) dressed as men, expressing themselves in ways that our culture has identified as male. Sometimes they will have on makeup, eye shadow, a beard, girl jeans and a boy shirt, smoking a pipe…. Oh well. It’s complicated. RuPaul, the most famous drag queen in the world, says “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.

A sociology PhD thesis by Elizabeth Kaminski analyses drag culture as a community. An oppositional culture, organized both to imitate and mock the dominant culture. In the had old days, which, in many places ended – um – last month, you could get thrown out of your family for being gay. In the early seventies, when some of you came out, you could still get thrown into a mental institution for being gay. About 40% of street kids are gay or transgender. You are three times more likely to commit suicide as a gay teen. A chosen family becomes the structure which holds you together. Sometimes drag queens will take in younger men, give them a place to stay and a start as a drag performer. They can be the “drag mother,” and you can be a performer at the drag balls from their “house.” You belong. There is love and drama and betrayal and cattiness, like there is in a lot of families. A created community has its own language. Your work may have its own language. Your family may have it’s own language. Some of you know a little drag language. What happens if I say “You – better – WERK!”

Not all gay people know about drag. Drag and trans are two separate things, with some overlap, of course. Trans is being born biologically one gender and feeling inside like the other. Of course, that’s oversimplified, because some babies are born with some characteristics of one gender and some of the other, but our culture doesn’t have space for a third gender, like some other cultures do, so parents have to choose for the child. All of this is over simplified, because gender is a continuum, but not as linear as that – you have how you like to express your gender, who you’re attracted to, And trans women aren’t performing, aren’t exaggerated, they just want to express the femaleness they feel at their core. Trans men are just being regular men, not performing. There is a little overlap, but the two things shouldn’t be confused. Drag culture expresses community. It makes a free space for an oppressed minority to express and experiment without apology or approbation, where the music evokes sympathy, humor, solidarity. Outrage, then agency/empowerment. Through songs, jokes, language. Drag shows are for gay folks, but they are also to expose heterosexuals to the culture, to give them a sense of being outsiders let inside.

Drag queens have had to be tough and funny. When you get beat up as a child, you learn to fight, or to take the beating. The GLBT revolution started in a bar where there were men dressed as women and women dressed as men. It was a free space, but not really, since the police raided it regularly. It was 1969, where being gay was still considered pathology. The patrons of the Stonewall Inn were gay men and lesbians, drag queens, transgender folks, and homeless teens. They were used to being raided by the police. Arrests were violent, gay bashing was the rule of the day, and that doesn’t mean verbal bashing. This one night, though, something snapped. The police raided, but the patrons wouldn’t run. Accounts vary, but many say it was the drag queens and butch lesbians who started throwing punches. Then bricks. People poured out on the street to protest police violence that had run unchecked for decades. Things began to change.

Social change happens when collective identity can be developed, and social action frames can shape understanding of what is wrong and what can be done to make it right. Then political protest can be energized. There must be a strong sense of “us” and an anger at what it wrong. Language and music helps with the sense of “us.” We are the ones who understand certain words. We are the ones who get it. We get strong among ourselves and then we act. Some will be drawn to our cause.

One thing sociologists haven’t talked about in the reading I’ve done is that, for social change to happen, there have to be the people who are respectable and the other scarier people. In the often-violent suffrage movement, Alice Paul and her followers chained themselves to the White House fence, were arrested, beaten, went on hunger strikes, and were force fed in jail. Carrie Chapman Catt was respectable and reasonable, and the legislators only dealt with her because on the other hand were the riot women. It looks like President Johnson dealt with MLK because Malcom X was on the other hand, looking scary. Gay organizations which had been working respectably in the culture were suddenly easier to deal with when images of foul mouthed drag queens with bricks in their hands were there for you to deal with if you didn’t deal with the respectable gays.

One song performed in drag shows is called “What Makes a Man a Man.” The performer presents as a woman, but, during the song, takes off the wigs, takes out the pads, and reveals himself as a man as the verses go on. The persona of femaleness is not just for performance – it’s an expression of soul. Some drag queens would dress up whether or not they were performing. Some say they wouldn’t. What they do for the culture is to make it clear to everyone that there are powerful biological drivers which determine gender, there are also certain agreed-upon elements of gender performance we all learn. What woman doesn’t remember someone teaching her to run like a girl, laugh in a lady like way, cross your legs when you sit. I remember my mother telling me to turn the steering wheel delicately, with a pretty bend in my wrist. She also told me not to beat a boy in ping pong or chess, that men had to be taken care of in that way. She was my gender performance coach. My dad too. Drag queens, in the ways they exaggerate femininity, pay tribute to the beauty of that gender performance, but mock it as well, putting the idea in the mind of the culture that they see the performance. They see the social construct. They play out the pathos of longing for love and losing it, gathering up the shards of a broken heart and willing yourself to survive.

A drag show is a place where a free space for an oppositional culture is created. Gender constructs are parodied, injustice is mourned, rage is sung, and spirits are empowered. The queens deserve our respect and our gratitude.
THE BEAUTY IN YOU

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