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The Sisters reportedly formed as an antidote to the boring conformity its founders saw occurring in San Francisco’s gay Castro District. While their performances failed to attain a national following, their free-spirited satirical irreverence arguably planted a seed that would later sprout around 1980 with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Their ragtag shows lampooned highbrow theater musicals and satirized political events - for instance, their staging of the wedding of Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia ended in an LSD-fueled orgy. Since then, drag queens and impersonators of women have gone from kitschy 1930s comedy acts enjoyed by everyone alike to gay club acts where publicity would risk criminal charges, including transvestitism, prostitution, sodomy, and other “lewd and lascivious” acts that officers generally considered offensive, until around the 1970s.īut Chris Mitchell, a doctoral lecturer of gender and sexuality studies at Hunter College, told Vox that the current generation of politically active drag queens found early incubation in the Cockettes, a 1970s San Francisco queer performance troupe.
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The rise of political drag queensĭrag queens as we know them in America really developed from vaudeville acts in the early 1900s that caricatured feminine stock characters like “the wench,” “the damsel” and “the prima donna,” according to Roger Baker, author of Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. As entertainers who straddle the gender divide and are known for their irreverent outspokenness, they may seem to be in a particularly unique position at this exact political moment to address the Republican pushback on the #MeToo movement and transgender rights.īut a closer look reveals a hazy view of the political change drag queens can actually create, a view that has some social conservatives alarmed nonetheless. In the modern age, drag queens have risen from obscure gay-bar performers to celebrities with an ever-expanding social media reach. While the US Supreme Court justices hear arguments surrounding the same-sex marriage ban, Proposition 8, A man dressed in drag known as “Queen,” from Florida, dances in front of the Court on March 26, 2013, in Washington, DC. And drag only becomes more pointedly political in an environment where an illegitimate regime seeks - picking just one example - to impose reductive and cruel ideas about gender that fly in the face of gender’s proven complexity.” “Because as playful and as fun as drag can and will always be, it can also be serious fun, by playing with society’s norms in a very profound way. Nonetheless, classifying drag only as a guilty pleasure underestimates its power, Bailey and Barbato say.
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“It’s a celebration of life through difference and diversity, and it’s about planting that flag in the ground and claiming our place in this world.” “DragCon has never been a bubble in denial about reality,” said Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, co-founders World of Wonder and DragCon and executive producers of RuPaul’s Drag Race, in a statement to Vox. Meanwhile, in the exhibition hall, groups like the Human Rights Campaign and Swing Left, an organization focused on congressional races in US swing districts, educated attendees about policy issues and the importance of voter registration. Similarly, previous DragCons in New York and Los Angeles have featured panels like “Drag In Trump’s America,” “The Art of Resistance” and “Liberty and Justice for All,” in which presenters from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) showed everyday citizens different ways to become politically active.Īt another panel, drag nuns from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence shared their group’s 39-year history of activism. Recent seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race have featured House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as a guest contestants discussing conversion therapy while applying their makeup and one performer, Bob the Drag Queen, describing his arrest during a 2011 marriage equality protest. A mother and her preteen daughters pose for a picture with drag queens during RuPaul’s DragCon at the Los Angeles Convention Center, May 7, 2016, in Los Angeles, California.