Drag is a performance of exaggeratedfemininity,masculinity, or other forms ofgender expression, usually for entertainment purposes. Drag usually involvescross-dressing. Adrag queen is someone (usually male) who performs femininely and adrag king is someone (usually female) who performs masculinely. Performances often involve comedy, social satire, and at times political commentary.^[1][2][3] The term may be used as a noun as in the expressionin drag or as an adjective as indrag show.^[4]

The origin of the termdrag is uncertain; it may date as far back as theElizabethan era in England, where it was used to describe male actors playing female roles in theaters where cross-dressing was the norm.^[5] The first recorded use ofdrag in reference to actors dressed in women's clothing is from 1870.^[6] One suggested etymological root is 19th-century theater slang, from the sensation of long skirts trailing on the floor. Another possible origin is theYiddish termtrogn meaning "to wear," from the Germantragen.^[7] It may also have been based on the termgrand rag, which was historically used for amasquerade ball.^[8]

Men dressed as women have been featured in certain traditional customs for centuries. For example, the characters of some regional variants of the traditionalmummers' play, which were traditionally always performed by men, include Besom Bet(ty); numerous variations on Bessy or Betsy; Bucksome Nell; Mrs Clagdarse; Dame Dolly; Dame Dorothy; Mrs Finney; Mrs Frail; and many others.^[9]

The variant performed aroundPlough Monday in Eastern England is known as the Plough Play^[10] (also Wooing Play or Bridal Play)^[11] and usually involves two female characters, the young "Lady Bright and Gay" and "Old Dame Jane" and a dispute about a bastard child.^[12] A character called Bessy also accompanied the Plough Jags (also known as Plough Jacks, Plough Stots, Plough Bullocks, etc.) 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.

"Maid Marian" of theAbbots Bromley Horn Dance is played by a man, and the Maid Marians referred to in old documents as having taken part in May Games and other festivals withMorris dancers would most probably also have been men. The "consort" of theCastletonGarland King was traditionally a man (until 1956, when a woman took over the role) and was originally simply referred to as "The Woman".^[10]

Cross-dressing elements of performance traditions are a widespread and longstanding cultural phenomena.

The ancient Roman playwrightPlautus' (c. 254 – 184 BCE)Menaechmi includes a scene in which Menaechmus I puts on his wife's dress, then wears a cloak over it, intending to remove the dress from the house and deliver it to his mistress.[13]^[14][15] Menaechmus says: "Look at me. Do I look the part?" [Age me aspice. ecquid adsimulo similiter?] Peniculus responds: "What in the world have you got on?!" [Quis istest ornatus tuos?] Menaechmus says: "Tell me I am gorgeous." [Dic hominem lepidissimum esse me.]^[16][17]

In England, actors inShakespeareanplays, and all Elizabethan theatre (in the 1500s and 1600s), were all male; female parts were played by young men in drag because women were banned from performing publicly.^[18] Shakespeare used the conventions to enrich the gender confusions ofAs You Like It, andBen Jonson manipulated the same conventions inEpicœne, or The Silent Woman (1609). During the reign ofCharles II of England (latter 1600s) the rules were relaxed to allow women to play female roles on the London stage, reflecting the French fashion, and the convention of men routinely playing female roles consequently disappeared.^[19]

In the 1890s, the slapstick drag traditions of undergraduate productions (notablyHasty Pudding Theatricals atHarvard College,^[20] annually since 1891, and at otherIvy League schools likePrinceton University'sTriangle Club^[21] or theUniversity of Pennsylvania'sMask and Wig Club), and many other universities in which women were not permitted admission, were permissible fare to the same upper-class American audiences that were scandalized to hear that inNew York City, rouged young men in skirts were standing on tables to dance thecan-can inBowery dives like The Slide.^[22]

Drag shows were popular night club entertainment in New York in the 1920s, then were forced underground, until the "Jewel Box Revue" played Harlem'sApollo Theater in the 1950s with their show, "49 Men and a Girl".^[23][24][25] For most of the performance, the "girls" were men in glamorous drag. At the end, the "one girl" was revealed to be the dashing young "man" in dinner clothes—Stormé DeLarverie—theMC who had been introducing each of the evening's acts.^[24][26][27]

The plot device of the filmShakespeare 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.^[19] However, drag remains a strong tradition inBritish comedy. This is seen in current-dayBritish pantomime, where traditional roles such as thepantomime dame are played by a man in drag and theprincipal boy, such asPrince Charming orDick Whittington, is played by a girl or young woman, as well as in comedy troupes such asMonty Python (formed in 1969).

Within the dramatic fiction, adouble standard historically affected the uses of drag. 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.^[18] A man dressed as a woman was thought to be a falling action only suited to broad low comedy and burlesque.^[18]Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo are an all-male ballet troupe where much of the humor is in seeing male dancersen travesti; performing roles usually reserved to females, wearing tutus and dancingen pointe with considerable technical skill.^[28]

These conventions of male-dominated societies were largely unbroken before the 20th century, when rigid gender roles were undermined and began to dissolve. This evolution changed drag in the last decades of the 20th century. Among contemporary drag performers, the theatrical drag queen or street queen may at times be seen less as a "female impersonator" per se, but simply as adrag queen. Examples includeThe Cockettes,Danny La Rue orRuPaul.

Ballroom culture (also known as "ball culture", and other names) is an undergroundLGBT subculture that originated in 1920s New York^[29] in which people "walk" (i.e., compete) fortrophies, prizes, and glory at events known as balls. Ball participants are mainly youngAfrican-American andLatin American members of theLGBTQ community.^[30] Attendees dance,vogue, walk, pose, and support one another in one or more of the numerous drag and performance competition categories. 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.^[31][32]

Ball culture first gained exposure to a mainstream audience in 1990 when itsvoguing dance style was featured inMadonna's song "Vogue", and inJennie Livingston's documentaryParis is Burning the same year. Voguing is a highly stylized type of modernhouse dance that emerged in the 1980s and evolved out of 1960s ball culture inHarlem, New York.^[33] In 2018, the American television seriesPose showcased Harlem's ball culture scene of the 1980s and was nominated for numerous awards.^[34]

In Baroque opera, where soprano roles for men were sung bycastrati,Handel's heroine Bradamante, in the operaAlcina, disguises herself as a man to save her lover, played by a male soprano; contemporary audiences were not the least confused. In Romanticopera, certain roles of young boys were written for alto and soprano voices and acted by womenen travestie (in English, in "trouser roles").^[35] The most familiar trouser role in pre-Romantic opera is Cherubino inMozart'sMarriage of Figaro (1786).^[36] In Beethoven's opera Fidelio Leonore, the faithful wife of Florestan, disguises herself as a man to save her husband. Romantic opera continued the convention: there are trouser roles for women in drag in Rossini'sSemiramide (Arsace), Donizetti'sRosamonda d'Inghilterra andAnna Bolena,Berlioz'sBenvenuto Cellini, and even a page in Verdi'sDon Carlo. The convention was beginning to die out with Siebel, the ingenuous youth inCharles Gounod'sFaust (1859) and the gypsy boy Beppe in Mascagni'sL'Amico Fritz, so that Offenbach gave the role of Cupid to a real boy inOrphée aux Enfers.^[37] ButSarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in tights, giving French audiences a glimpse of Leg (the other in fact being a prosthesis) and Prince Orlovsky, who gives the ball inDie Fledermaus, is amezzo-soprano, to somewhat androgynous effect. The use oftravesti inRichard Strauss'sRosenkavalier (1912) is a special case, unusually subtle and evocative of its 18th-century setting, and should be discussed in detail atDer Rosenkavalier.

The self-consciously risqué bourgeois high jinks of Brandon Thomas'sCharley's Aunt (London, 1892) were still viable theatre material inLa Cage aux Folles (1978), which was remade, asThe Birdcage, as late as 1996.

Dame Edna,^[38] the drag persona of Australian actorBarry Humphries, was the host of several specials, includingThe Dame Edna Experience. Dame Edna also toured internationally, playing to sell-out crowds, and appeared on TV'sAlly McBeal. Dame Edna represented an anomalous example of the drag concept. Her earliest incarnation was unmistakably a man dressed (badly) as a suburban housewife. Edna's manner and appearance became so feminised and glamorised that even some of her TV show guests appear not to see that the Edna character was played by a man.^[39] The furor surrounding Dame Edna's "advice" column inVanity Fair magazine suggests that one of her harshest critics, actressSalma Hayek, was unaware Dame Edna was a female character played by a man.

In 2009,RuPaul's Drag Race first premiered as a television show in the United States. The show has gained mainstream and global appeal, and it has exposed multiple generations of audiences to drag culture.^[40]

In the United States, early examples of drag clothing can be found ingold rush saloons ofCalifornia. TheBarbary Coast district ofSan Francisco was known for certain saloons, such as Dash, which attracted female impersonator patrons and workers.^[41]

William Dorsey Swann was the first person to call himself "queen of drag". He was a formerslave, who was freed after theAmerican Civil War, from Maryland. By the 1880s, he was organizing and hosting drag balls inWashington, D.C. The balls included folk dances, such as thecakewalk, and the male guests often dressed in female clothing.^[42]

In the early 20th century, drag—as an art form and culture—began to flourish withminstrel shows andvaudeville. Performers such asJulian Eltinge andBothwell Browne were drag queens and vaudeville performers. The Progressive Era brought a decline in vaudeville entertainment, but drag culture began to grow in nightclubs and bars, such asFinnochio's Club andBlack Cat Bar inSan Francisco.^[41]

During this period, Hollywood films included examples of drag. 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. In 1919, Bothwell Browne appeared inYankee Doodle in Berlin.^[43] In 1933,Viktor und Viktoria came out in Germany, which later inspiredFirst a Girl (1935) in the United States.^[44] That same year,Katharine Hepburn played a character who dressed as a male inSylvia Scarlett.^[45] In 1959, drag made a big Hollywood splash inSome Like It Hot (1959).^[46][47]

In the 1960s,Andy Warhol and hisFactory scene included superstar drag queens, such asCandy Darling andHolly Woodlawn, both immortalized in theLou Reed song "Walk on the Wild Side".^[48]

By the early 1970s, drag was influenced by thepsychedelic rock andhippie culture of the era. A San Francisco drag troupe,The Cockettes (1970–1972), performed with glitter eyeshadow and gilded mustaches and beards. The troupe also coined the term "genderfuck".^[49] Drag broke out from underground theatre in the persona ofDivine inJohn Waters'Pink Flamingos (1972): see alsoCharles Pierce. Thecult hit movie musicalThe Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) inspired several generations of young people to attend performances in drag, although many of these fans would not call themselves drag queens or transvestites.^[50]

For many decades, Americannetwork television, only the broadest slapstick drag tradition was generally represented. Few American TV comedians consistently used drag as a comedy device, among themMilton Berle,^[51]Flip Wilson,^[52] andMartin Lawrence,^[53] although drag characters have occasionally been popular on sketch TV shows likeIn Living Color (withJim Carrey's grotesque female bodybuilder)^[54] andSaturday Night Live (with theGap Girls, among others). On the popular 1960s military sitcom,McHale's Navy, Ensign Parker (Tim Conway) sometimes had to dress in drag (often with hilarious results) whenever McHale and/or his crew had to disguise themselves in order to carry out their elaborate schemes.Gilligan's Island occasionally features men dressing in women's clothes, though this was not considered drag since it was not for a performance.

On stage and screen, the actor-playwright-screenwriter-producerTyler Perry has included his drag character of Madea in some of his most noted productions, such as the stage playDiary of a Mad Black Woman and thefeature film he based upon it.^[55]

Maximilliana andRuPaul co-star together in the TV showNash Bridges starringDon Johnson andCheech 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.^[56]

In the United Kingdom, drag has been more common in comedy, on both film and television.Alastair Sim plays the headmistress Miss Millicent Fritton inThe Belles of St Trinian's (1954)^[57] andBlue Murder at St Trinian's (1957).^[58] He played the role straight; no direct joke about the actor's true gender is made. However, Miss Fritton is quite non-feminine in her pursuits of betting, drinking and smoking. The gag is that whilst her school sends out girls into a merciless world, it is the world that need beware. 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 andSheila Hancock respectively). The 21st century re-boot of the series however reverted to drag, withRupert Everett in the role.

On television,Benny Hill portrayed several female characters. TheMonty Python troupe andThe League of Gentlemen^[59] often played female parts in their skits. The League of Gentlemen are also credited with the first ever portrayal of "nude drag", where a man playing a female character is shown naked but still with the appropriate female anatomy, like fake breasts and amerkin.^[60] Within the conceit of the sketch/film, they are actually women: it is the audience who are in on the joke.

Monty Python women, whom the troupe calledpepperpots, 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 byEric Idle, they looked and sounded very little like actual women with their caricatural outfits and shrill falsettos. However, when a sketch called for a "real" woman, the Pythons almost always called onCarol Cleveland.^[61] The joke is reversed in the Python filmLife of Brian where "they" are pretending to be men, including obviously false beards, so that they can go to the stoning. When someone throws the first stone too early thePharisee asks "who threw that", and they answer "she did, she did,..." in high voices. "Are there any women here today?" he says, "No no no" they say in gruff voices.

In the 1970s the most familiar drag artist on British television wasDanny La Rue.^[62] La Rue's act was essentially amusic hall one, following on from a much older, and less sexualised tradition of drag. His appearances were often invariety shows such asThe Good Old Days (itself a pastiche of music hall) andSunday Night at the London Palladium. Such was his popularity that he made a film,Our Miss Fred (1972). Unlike the "St Trinians" films, the plot involved a man having to dress as a woman.^[63]

David Walliams and (especially)Matt Lucas often play female roles in the television comedyLittle Britain; Walliams plays Emily Howard—a "rubbish transvestite", who makes an unconvincing woman.^[64]

In the UK, non-comedic representations of drag acts are less common, and usually a subsidiary feature of another story. A rare exception is the television play (1968) and film (1973)The Best Pair of Legs in the Business. In the film versionReg Varney plays a holiday camp comedian and drag artist whose marriage is failing.^[65]

Early representations of drag in Canadian film included the 1971 filmFortune and Men's Eyes, adapted from a theatrical play byJohn Herbert,^[66] and the 1974 filmOnce Upon a Time in the East, adapted from a theatrical play byMichel Tremblay.^[67]

The 1977 filmOutrageous!, starring Canadian drag queenCraig Russell as a fictionalized version of himself, was an important milestone in Canadian film, as one of the first gay-themed films ever to receive widespread theatrical distribution in North America.^[68] A sequel film,Too Outrageous!, was released in 1987.^[69]

In the 1980s, the sketch comedy seriesCODCO andThe Kids in the Hall both made prominent use of drag performance.^[70]The Kids in the Hall consisted of five men, whileCODCO consisted of three men and two women; however, all ten performers, regardless of their own gender, performed both male and female characters. Notably, both troupes also had openly gay members, withScott Thompson ofThe Kids in the Hall andGreg Malone andTommy Sexton ofCODCO being important pioneers of gay representation on Canadian TV in their era.^[71] The use of drag inCODCO also transitioned to a lesser extent into the new seriesThis Hour Has 22 Minutes in the 1990s; although cross-gender performance is not as central to22 Minutes as it was inCODCO,Cathy Jones andMary Walsh, the two cast members common to both series, both continued to play selected male characters.^[72]

The Canadian filmLilies, directed byJohn Greyson and adapted from a theatrical play byMichel Marc Bouchard, made use of drag as a dramatic device.^[73] Set in a men's prison, the film centres on aplay within a play staged by one of the prisoners; however, as the roles in the play are performed by fellow prisoners, even the female characters within it are played by men, and the film blends scenes in which they are clearly depicted as men performing in their own clothes in the prison chapel with scenes in which they are performing in drag in more "realistic" settings.^[73] It became the first gay-themed film ever to win theGenie Award forBest Picture.^[74]

The short-lived French-language sitcomCover Girl, aired in 2005 onTélévision de Radio-Canada, centred on three drag queens sharing ownership of a drag cabaret inMontreal.^[75]

In 2017Ici ARTV airedIls de jour, elles de nuit, a documentary series profiling Montreal drag queensRita Baga,Barbada de Barbades, Gaby,Lady Boom Boom, Lady Pounana andTracy Trash.^[76] The documentary web seriesCanada's a Drag, launched onCBC Gem in 2018, has profiled various Canadian drag performers, inclusive of all genders, over three seasons to date.^[77]

Canada's Drag Race, a Canadian spinoff of the AmericanRuPaul's Drag Race franchise, was launched in 2020 onCrave.^[78] The same year also saw the release of Phil Connell's filmJump, Darling, centred on a young aspiring drag queen,^[79] andThom Fitzgerald's filmStage Mother, about a religious woman who inherits her son's drag club after his death,^[80] as well as the comedy web seriesQueens, starring several real Toronto-area drag queens.^[81] 2023 saw the release of the filmsEnter the Drag Dragon,^[82]Solo,^[83]Gamodi^[84] andQueen Tut.^[85]

OutTV, a Canadian television channel devoted to LGBTQ programming, has aired the documentary seriesDrag Heals,^[86] the reality competition showsCall Me Mother^[87] andSew Fierce,^[88] and the satirical reality competition parodyDrag House Rules.^[89] It has also been directly involved as a production partner in some American programs, includingThe Boulet Brothers' Dragula^[90] andHey Qween!.

The world ofpopular music has a venerable history of drag.Marlene Dietrich was a popular actress and singer who sometimes performed dressed as a man, such as in the filmsBlue Angel^[91] andMorocco.^[92]

In theglam rock era many male performers (such asDavid Bowie andThe New York Dolls) donned partial or full drag.^[93] This tradition waned somewhat in the late 1970s but was revived in thesynth-pop era of the 1980s, as pop singersBoy George (ofCulture Club),Pete Burns (ofDead or Alive), andPhilip Oakey (ofThe Human League), frequently appeared in a sort of semi-drag, while female musicians of the era dabbled in their own form ofandrogyny, with performers likeAnnie Lennox, Phranc and The Bloods sometimes performing as drag kings.

The malegrunge musicians of the 1990s sometimes performed wearing deliberately ugly drag—that is, wearing dresses but making no attempt to look feminine, not wearing makeup and often not even shaving their beards. (Nirvana did this several times, notably in the "In Bloom" video.) However, possibly the most famous drag artist in music in the 1990s wasRuPaul.^[94] Maximilliana worked with RuPaul in theNash Bridges episode "Cuda Grace" and was a regular at the now defunct Queen Mary Show Lounge in Studio City, California until the very end.^[95] Max (short for Maximilliana) is most well known for her performance as Charlie/Claire inRingmaster: the Jerry Springer Movie. Max has also appeared in other movies includingShoot or Be Shot and10 Attitudes as well as on television shows includingNash Bridges as mentioned above,Clueless,Gilmore Girls,The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,Mas Vale Tarde with Alex Cambert,MadTV,The Tyra Banks Show,The Tom Joyner Show,America's Got Talent, and many others.

In Japan there are several musicians in thevisual kei scene, such asMana (Moi dix Mois andMalice Mizer),Kaya (Schwarz Stein),Hizaki andJasmine You (bothVersailles), who always or usually appear in full or semi-drag.

Adrag queen (first use in print, 1941) is a person, usually a man, that dresses in drag, either as part of a performance or for personal fulfillment. The term "drag queen" distinguishes such men fromtransvestites,transsexuals ortransgender people. Those who "perform drag" as comedy do so while wearing dramatically heavy and often elaborate makeup, wigs, and prosthetic devices (breasts) as part of the performance costume.Women who dress as men and perform ashypermasculine men are sometimes calleddrag kings; however,drag king also has a much wider range of meanings. 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.

Abio queen,^[96] or female-bodied queen, on the other hand, is usually a cisgender woman performing in the same context as traditional (men-as-women) drag and displaying such features as exaggerated hair and makeup (as an example, the performance of the actress and singerLady Gaga during her first appearance in the 2018 filmA Star is Born).^[97]

Constructing a drag persona can be seen as a form of "stigma resistance," where consumers who practice drag are able to "embody pride" and work to combat stigma and shame.^[98]Stigma ("social stigma" page on Wikipedia) often operates through a process of shame,^[99][100] and drag queens are often both socially and economically marginalized.^[101] However, drag practices can also provide a means of stigma resistance, offering new ways ofmanaging individual stigma with performances in a supportive community. Venkatraman et al's (2024) interviewees also highlighted that building pride in one's self and identity through drag could then permeate outward into other aspects of the drag performer's life, while Berkowitz and Belgrave (2010) indicate the empowering rewards of drag. We might thus see the transformative potential of drag as a practice, particularly for marginalized individuals.

• En femme
• List of transgender-related topics
• List of drag queens
• Travesti (theatre)

• Padva, Gilad (2000). "Priscilla Fights Back: The Politicization of Camp Subculture".Journal of Communication Inquiry.24 (2):216–243.doi:10.1177/0196859900024002007.S2CID 144510862.

• Drag (entertainment)

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