IN THE SUMMER OF 1997, I gave birth to two beautiful drag babies on Pier 54 in Manhattan. We were at Wigstock, the raucous drag festival. Like many mothers, I neglected their development, but they have since grown into upstanding, fierce queens. Hundreds of drag mamas, whom Elyssa Maxx Goodman lovingly documents in Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City, were far more committed to their drag careers and to nurturing newcomers to the culture of drag than was I. While focused mainly on New York City, Goodman covers a wide historical frame from 1865 to the present with appropriate geographical forays beyond the Big Apple to give deeper cultural context to the history of drag. In the same vein, her subjects are far more diverse than the term “drag queens” suggests. She includes a wide range of “female illusionists,” female and male impersonators, cross-dressing vaudevillians, and burlesque performers. While the majority of these are males who dress (and undress) as women, she also includes the rich (but less documented) history of male illusionists. From the 1960s onward, the place of transgender and genderqueer people in society has been complicating and politicizing the question of who qualifies as a “drag queen” or “drag king.” Throughout her sensitive narrative, Goodman emphasizes the personal and cultural challenges gender non-conformists have faced in America, the political defiance that is drag, and its sheer liberatory deliriousness. Goodman’s first century of drag evolved along two seemingly parallel cultural tracks of popularity and prejudice. On the one hand, masquerade balls were hugely fashionable and crossdressing stage performers were high-paid artists who appealed to audiences of all social classes. On the other hand, crossdressers—whether effeminate men or masculine women—were widely stigmatized and pathologized. Since colonial times, masquerade balls and carnivals had been popular in the South and would evolve into the Mardi Gras extravaganzas that still draw tourists (gay and straight) to New Orleans. Ballroom and house masquerade parties became more popular through the late 19th century. A former slave, William Dorsey Swann (1860–1925; pictured on page 38)—known to friends as “the Queen”—has been credited as the first self-identified “queen of drag.” He was repeatedly arrested for hosting drag balls in Washington, D.C. AWashington Critic article (January 14, 1887) blared: “Raiding a ‘drag’: A ball where all the ladies were imitations”; and “Six colored men, dressed in elegant female attire, were arraigned ... on a charge of being suspicious persons. ... They nearly all had on low neck and short sleeve silk dresses, several of them with trains [and] corsets, bustles, long hose and slippers, and everything that goes to make a female’s dress complete.” Swann heroically (though unsuccessfully) petitioned President Grover Cleveland to pardon his ten-month jail sentence. These drag parties even caught the attention of Victorian doctors, who reported on a stunning medical discovery: “an organization of colored erotopaths.” In an 1893 article in The Alienist and Neurologist, Dr. C. H. Hughes described an annual convocation of negro men called the drag dance, which is an orgie of lascivious debauchery beyond pen power of description. ... In this sable performance of sexual perversion all of these men are lasciviously dressed in womanly attire, short sleeves, low-necked dresses and the usual ballroom decorations and ornaments of women, feathered and ribboned head-dresses, garters, frills, flowers, ruffles, etc., and deport themselves as women. Standing or seated on a pedestal, but accessible to all the rest, is the naked queen (a male), whose phallic member, decorated with a ribbon, is subject to the gaze and osculations in turn, of all the members of this lecherous gang of sexual perverts and phallic fornicators. These hysterical medical reports echoed contemporaneous European articles uncovering the disorder of “sexual inversion” or “contrary sexual sensation”—precursors of the medical diagnosis of “homosexuality.” Not surprisingly then, many gender impersonators of the early 20th century insisted on their “normal” sexuality. Some trumpeted their conventional marriages to escape the cultural prejudice associating gender deviance with sexual deviance. Gillian M. Rodger in Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage (2018) documented the centuries-long tradition of women playing men on opera, theater, and vaudeville stages. Male impersonators like Annie Hindle (“The Great Hindle”), Ella Wesner, and Kitty Dorner were tremendously successful in turn-of-the-century vaudeville, though they are less well known than the tuxedoed performances of Gladys Bentley and Marlene Dietrich. Glitter and Concretemight have benefited from some pictures of them, as well as of besequinned drag divas. As we progress beyond the 1960s, the book turns into a catalog of drag, trans, and queer performers. The individual biographies, the details of performance innovations, and the mob connections of the clubs give way to brief name-dropping. Today one can watch a 24/7 stream of global fabulosity on World of Wonder Plus or even mainstream broadcast TV. We’re Here, on HBO, brings sequins, stilettos, and boas to the stodgiest towns of America—drawing out queer pride and reactionary prejudice. Everyone is moved to tears as the drag-mobile disappears down dusty roads of the Great Plains. Goodman acknowledges up front that she is using “drag” as a shorthand to cover a variety of phenomena. One distinction made a century ago was that between professional, “gender ilDeep History of the Culture Wars VERNONROSARIO GLITTER AND CONCRETE A Cultural History of Drag in New York City by Elyssa Maxx Goodman Hanover Square Press 464 pages, $25.90 Vernon Rosario, a historian of science and child psychiatrist, is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA. He is the author of Homosexuality and Science: A Guide to the Debates. March–April 2024 37
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