Drag (entertainment)
even in places where no play was performed: "she" was a man dressed in women's clothes, who carried a collecting box[10] for money and other largesse.
[24][26][27] The plot device of the film Shakespeare in Love (1998) turns upon the Elizabethan convention of the Shakespearean originals and the changes that came with women being allowed on stage during the reign of Charles II.
In male-dominated societies where active roles were reserved to men, a woman might dress as a man under the pressures of her dramatic predicament.
In these societies a man's position was above a woman's, causing a rising action that suited itself to tragedy, sentimental melodrama and comedies of manners that involved confused identities.
[28] These conventions of male-dominated societies were largely unbroken before the 20th century, when rigid gender roles were undermined and began to dissolve.
Categories are designed to simultaneously epitomize and satirize various genders, social classes and archetypes in society, while also offering an escape from reality.
The culture extends beyond the extravagant formal events as many participants in ball culture also belong to groups known as "houses", a longstanding tradition in LGBT communities, and racial minorities, where chosen families of friends live in households together, forming relationships and community to replace families of origin from which they may be estranged.
Voguing is a highly stylized type of modern house dance that emerged in the 1980s and evolved out of 1960s ball culture in Harlem, New York.
[33] In 2018, the American television series Pose showcased Harlem's ball culture scene of the 1980s and was nominated for numerous awards.
Romantic opera continued the convention: there are trouser roles for women in drag in Rossini's Semiramide (Arsace), Donizetti's Rosamonda d'Inghilterra and Anna Bolena, Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini, and even a page in Verdi's Don Carlo.
The self-consciously risqué bourgeois high jinks of Brandon Thomas's Charley's Aunt (London, 1892) were still viable theatre material in La Cage aux Folles (1978), which was remade, as The Birdcage, as late as 1996.
The Barbary Coast district of San Francisco was known for certain saloons, such as Dash, which attracted female impersonator patrons and workers.
While drag was often used as a last-resort tactic in situational farce (its only permissible format at the time), some films provided a more empathetic lens than others.
[46][47] In the 1960s, Andy Warhol and his Factory scene included superstar drag queens, such as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, both immortalized in the Lou Reed song "Walk on the Wild Side".
[49] Drag broke out from underground theatre in the persona of Divine in John Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972): see also Charles Pierce.
Few American TV comedians consistently used drag as a comedy device, among them Milton Berle,[51] Flip Wilson,[52] and Martin Lawrence,[53] although drag characters have occasionally been popular on sketch TV shows like In Living Color (with Jim Carrey's grotesque female bodybuilder)[54] and Saturday Night Live (with the Gap Girls, among others).
[55] Maximilliana and RuPaul co-star together in the TV show Nash Bridges starring Don Johnson and Cheech Marin during the two-part episode "'Cuda Grace".
Maximilliana, looking passable, leads one of the investigators to believe he is "real" and sexually advances only to learn that he is, in fact, male, much to his chagrin.
Despite this, or perhaps because of Sim's portrayal, subsequent films in the series went on to use actresses in the headmistress role (Dora Bryan and Sheila Hancock respectively).
Monty Python women, whom the troupe called pepperpots, are random middle-aged working/lower middle class typically wearing long brown coats that were common in the 1960s.
Save for a few characters played by Eric Idle, they looked and sounded very little like actual women with their caricatural outfits and shrill falsettos.
[61] The joke is reversed in the Python film Life of Brian where "they" are pretending to be men, including obviously false beards, so that they can go to the stoning.
His appearances were often in variety shows such as The Good Old Days (itself a pastiche of music hall) and Sunday Night at the London Palladium.
[72] The Canadian film Lilies, directed by John Greyson and adapted from a theatrical play by Michel Marc Bouchard, made use of drag as a dramatic device.
[85] OutTV, a Canadian television channel devoted to LGBTQ programming, has aired the documentary series Drag Heals[86] and the reality competition shows Call Me Mother[87] and Sew Fierce.
[88] It has also been directly involved as a production partner in some programs filmed in the United States, including The Boulet Brothers' Dragula[89] and Hey Qween!.
[91] In the glam rock era many male performers (such as David Bowie and The New York Dolls) donned partial or full drag.
[92] This tradition waned somewhat in the late 1970s but was revived in the synth-pop era of the 1980s, as pop singers Boy George (of Culture Club), Pete Burns (of Dead or Alive), and Philip Oakey (of The Human League), frequently appeared in a sort of semi-drag, while female musicians of the era dabbled in their own form of androgyny, with performers like Annie Lennox, Phranc and The Bloods sometimes performing as drag kings.
[93] Maximilliana worked with RuPaul in the Nash Bridges episode "Cuda Grace" and was a regular at the now defunct Queen Mary Show Lounge in Studio City, California until the very end.
It is currently most often used to describe entertainment (singing or lip-synching) in which there is no necessarily firm correlation between a performer's deliberately macho onstage persona and offstage gender identity or sexual orientation, just as individuals assigned male at birth who do female drag for the stage may or may not identify as being either gay or female in their real-life personal identities.
