José Sarria handed friends labels reading I am a boy
Where dressing as a woman in public could lead to arrest, the drag queen José Sarria handed out labels reading I am a boy, so friends could not be charged with female impersonation. That small act of defiance belongs to a performance tradition stretching back to the male actors of ancient Greece.
Men playing women on stage is ancient. In Greek theatre women's low status meant male actors took the female parts, a custom that lasted for centuries and faded as films took over. In the vaudeville era, when appearing on stage was thought immodest for women, some men became stars as female impersonators. The word drag in this sense is first recorded in 1870, though it may reach back to Elizabethan England. In twentieth-century America, many gender impersonators working in mainstream clubs and theatres deliberately presented themselves as heterosexual to separate the craft from queer identity.
The phrase drag queen appeared in New York City in the 1950s with two meanings. One described amateurs who performed at drag balls and pageants, as opposed to paid impersonators. The other described men who wore women's clothes in the street, then illegal in the city. By 1971 Lee Brewster's Drag Queens magazine was calling the drag queen hyperfeminine, flamboyant and militant. The writer Esther Newton said in 1972 that a female impersonator was essentially a professional drag queen.
RuPaul has pushed back on the impersonation label entirely, saying no woman he knows wears seven-inch heels and four-foot wigs, and that he dresses like a drag queen, not a woman. Performances usually mix lip-syncing, live singing and dancing at pride parades, cabarets, pageants and nightclubs, and the female counterpart is the drag king.
Canada supplied early milestones. In the 1940s John Herbert, who entered drag pageants, was convicted of indecency after being attacked while dressed as a woman; in 1973 Michel Tremblay's Hosanna put a drag queen at the centre of a Canadian play for the first time, in the lead role as well as the plot; and in 1977 the film Outrageous!, with Craig Russell, reached mainstream cinemas. In India, a drag scene has flourished since a 2018 court ruling, with a first drag convention in Hyderabad that year and the magazine Dragvanti from 2020. In Lebanon, Bassem Feghali became a household name in the 1990s impersonating female singers.
Source: Drag queen
