DRAM501 Drag Thesis Blog

This week, I gave myself the high honour of re-watching one of my favourite films, Paris is Burning. I wanted to reacquaint myself with this movie because not only is it one of the most important pieces of modern gay media, it also moves my study from the beginning to the end of the Pansy Craze explored at the end of last week. Paris is Burning chronicles the height and end of the “Golden Age” of New York City Drag balls, as well as it provides a “thoughtful exploration of race, class, gender, and sexuality in America”. This film is extremely important to me personally because when I was a bit younger, it opened my eyes by vocalizing so many of the things I had been feeling and subconsciously doing my entire life. I think this movie is so incredibly important to the Gay community today because it provides us with a lexicon of terminology created by other Gay people to allow us to express how we navigate a predominantly heterosexual world.

As explored last week, the 1920s and 30s were when the general public were drawing links between female impersonation and homosexuality, and following WWII in the 50s and 60s, being homosexual landed you on the ‘National Security Risk’ list during the McCarthy-era communist witch hunts. Between 1947-1950, over 400 people were fired from their jobs for being homosexual. LGBT people fought back against the popular belief that they were lesser, ‘perverted’ people during the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, where Trans women and Drag Queens made up the majority of the front line battalion against police officers arresting individuals for not dressing in accordance to their biological gender. Paris is Burning offers both straight and Gay people massive insight as to why being a ‘man’ in a dress is so politically important, and how gender and sexual suppression is so deeply damaging to people and communities. The movie is a mix of footage from drag balls interspersed with monologues from many of the faces of the community at the time, notably Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Venus Xtravaganza and Willi Ninja. I believe two of the most important topics covered in the film are the concept of ‘Realness’, as well as the sense of belonging and family that the ball scene fostered. As the ‘concept’ of homosexuality became more realized during the 1900s, by which I mean the general public became more aware of means of ‘identifying’ who was a homosexual, gay people had to consciously unlearn so many innate behaviours we share that mark us as ‘other’. ‘Realness’ defined in the movie means to ‘pass’ as whatever it is you’re trying to imitate, be that a woman, a rich person, or a heterosexual. Gay people have no choice but to be constantly aware of the way they act, and the way that we are perceived by others, so it’s absolutely no surprise that we would use these skills to our benefit by creating balls wherein our trained everyday behaviour can be used in competition. This is also a good time to mention ‘Reading’ which is another skill in the gay toolbox explained in the movie which we use to both criticize each other and help to improve our ‘Realness’. A ‘Read’ is simply pointing out a flaw in someone else and exaggerating it, but as Dorien Corey so eloquently explains,

“When you are all of the same thing, then you have to go to the fine point. In other words, if I’m a black queen and you’re a black queen, we can’t call each other ‘black queens’ because we’re both black queens. That’s not a read—that’s just a fact. So then we talk about your ridiculous shape, your saggy face, your tacky clothes. Then reading became a developed form, where it became shade.”

In the same way a performance is scored out of 10 at a ball by the judges, gay people are constantly scoring and rating the everyday performance of each other (and honestly everyone else around us too). By analyzing what makes straight people “Real” we can then incorporate that realness into our own illusion.

This desire to be “Real” comes from the deep loneliness that I believe is almost universal among the gay community, both then and now. Even in 2018, people all over the world are cast out of their homes and shunned by their family and friends for coming out of the closet, some even killed. Pepper LaBeija, Mother of the House of LaBeija, explains that a lot of the kids coming into the ball scene have absolutely no where else to go, and so she effectively becomes their Mother when they join her “House”. These words were chosen by the community for these specific reasons, and it’s so fascinating to me to see the sad history behind the terms we all throw around so colloquially now at Gay social events. Balls were created for so many people cast aside by society could find a home and find an area to excel, which caused the number of categories one could walk in at a ball to be constantly expanding to include as many facets of identity as possible. The ball scene is very much alive today, obviously, but Paris is Burning is such an important touchstone for anyone looking to gain a deeper understanding of the Gay community, and provides answers to the very fair question of “Why do gay people do what they do? Why not just blend in?”. We have no choice! Straight people have made it so difficult for us to hide, so the impulse to subvert that and be as loud and outrageous as possible in my opinion makes complete sense. Ball culture was interestingly less focused on “Drag Queens” as opposed to gay and trans people in general, and next week I will be sticking with Gay NYC as I explore the even deeper underground scene of Club Kids.

 

Vaudeville is a variety-show style of performance born in late 1700s France. These variety shows featured acts centered around the raw talent of the individual performer: ventriloquism, trapeze artists, trained animals, contortionists, and most notably featured both male and female ‘drag’ illusionists. As early as the 1800s, male performers would don female personas for novelty’s sake, as well as to attract audiences by offering a different type of performance. A relevant example of this I found was that there was a growing number of male ventriloquists, but very few females popularly pursuing this art. As a result, some men would give a ‘female illusion’ while also performing with their doll, but billed themselves simply as female ventriloquists. Many of these ‘illusionist’ acts involved a reversal of the illusion as part of the performance; often the performer would remove his wig and reveal himself to the audience as a man in drag as part of the spectacle of the act, much to the audience’s delight. This is very similar to last weeks Pantomime Dames, where the audience’s enjoyment is derived from watching a man perform as a woman for comedic or theatrical effect, without much deeper substance behind the performance than that.

 

What interests me more about these Vaudeville performers is that some of them carried their ‘female illusion’ out into their everyday lives. There were performers like Bobbie Kimber, who performed in Music Halls from the 1930’s to the 1960’s, who ‘wore his hair long like a woman’s, and never divulged his biological gender one way or the other to the audience’. Bobbie was one of the female ventriloquists I mentioned, and ‘according to fellow performers, he played the woman offstage as well, and the public didn’t know he was biologically male until 1952’. Bobbie was married with a wife and daughter, so the specificities of his gender identity could be contested, but for one reason or another Bobbie’s ‘drag’ persona moved fluidly from performance to everyday life, until the end of his career in the 60s. I was able to find a number of other female illusionists who also presented as female in their daily lives as well , many who remained unmarried for their entire lives. The ‘illusionists’ who maintained their illusions offstage, both fortunately and unfortunately, began giving the public and the government reason to begin drawing links between homosexuality and gender-bending, resulting in what was called the ‘Pansy Craze’ of the 1920s and 30s. The Pansy Craze was a simultaneous explosion and suppression of gay culture localized primarily in New York’s Greenwich Village and in Harlem. There was a notable emergence in Gay subculture all over the USA, which fit into the ‘anything goes’ category of those consuming illicit drink under the prohibition of the time. Next time I will be watching Paris is Burning to further explore this emerging gay scene in Harlem, which is where many aspects of modern drag culture originate.

http://thevillager.com/2018/06/20/skills-in-the-vaudeville-tradition-drag-is-alive-kicking-yodeling-fire-eating/

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/14/pansy-craze-the-wild-1930s-drag-parties-that-kickstarted-gay-nightlife

The world is a horribly sexist and misogynistic place, even in our year of 2018. We all know this, and hopefully if you’ve stumbled your way onto a blog like this, you’re already actively doing something abut it. A big driver for me in embarking on this project was to question how contemporary Drag interacts with contemporary feminism. Does part of the intrinsic charm of Drag still lie in seeing men dress in a way that lowers their social standing? Casting our gaze back a couple hundred years in history, the answer is definitely yes.

When Shakespeare was writing back in the 1590s, all female roles were played by men. Girls and women were portrayed by youths, and older women were comically portrayed by men. This glass ceiling was then thankfully shattered by Nell Gywn in the late 1600s, as most of us who have taken any sort of theatre history are likely to know. But the tradition of men playing women for comic effect has stayed steadfast ever since. This week, I focused my reading into a facet of clowning I discovered; the Pantomime Dame. The origin of the Pantomime Dames date back before Shakespeare, the earliest of which being a character named “Mrs. Noah” in the religious miracle plays of the middle ages. Pantomime is a type of storytelling that is similar to clown, but more structured. The Pantomime plays tell a fable or folk story, most often meant for children, with a beginning, middle, and end, and often incorporate a moral or lesson of some kind. While this is radically different from the similarities I could draw between clown and Drag, as neither adhere much to script or pre-set structure, a commonality I observed last week surfaces again in Pantomime:

“The element of “novelty” has always been to the forefront, as has its ability to encompass modern trends and topicality…”

 

(The History of the Pantomime – Unnamed Author)

It is the novel, unusual and by effect comical nature of the Pantomime Dame that I argue unifies the three (Clown, Drag and Pantomime). While the novelty was apparent in the 1600-1900s, as it would be out of the question (as far as I know) for men to dress up as women in any appropriate social context, or for a trans person to express their identity at all. This leaves the question of modern sexism on the table – what is the joy in seeing someone openly disobey gender constructs? Now that the idea of a Drag Queen isn’t new or novel to most, what then is the appeal, and where does the impulse lie in gay men to disobey society by putting on a dress and a wig? A drag show contains similar key aspects to clown and pantomime shows, but has its own added layer of social commentary intrinsically woven into it. While this is also arguably true of Pantomime Dames as well, as their comedy also comes from disobeying social convention, the Drag Queen is in on the joke in a different way.

The problem I feel is emerging in contemporary Drag shows (in large part, I believe because of the influence of RuPaul’s Drag Race) is that some of this biting social commentary is lost; speaking from personal experience, I was initially infatuated with the idea of drag simply because I felt that I wanted to live life as a beautiful woman instead of a gay man. Upon self reflection, I was to check myself and realize that that belief itself is sexist, rather than progressive. It is ignorant of me to think my life would be any easier as a trans person, or drag queen. And how do trans persons fit into this discussion of gender politics? I am eager to continue this line of questioning because I believe the root of misogyny runs deep in drag culture. How can we as gay men claim progressiveness when our performance as “Queens” still encompasses reinforcing harmful stereotypes about what it is to be “feminine”. As more and more baby gays are being introduced to drag not in bars, but on TV, how does drag culture shift?

All this and more as I continue my exploration. Thank you for bearing with me this week, and I am excited to continue this conversation in the future.

http://www.its-behind-you.com/pantodames.html

Click to access The%20History%20of%20Pantomime.pdf

“The key feature uniting all clowns, therefore, is their ability, skill or stupidity, to break the rules”

Do all fools come from clowns? Are all forms of fooling clownish? Do you laugh at the man in the dress? I’ve always been fascinated with humour, and decided to begin my exploration of the art of Drag with the humble clown. A lot of the subversive, absurd and grotesque ‘queering of reality’ qualities that I observe in contemporary drag I believe are rooted in the culture of clowning, and so to better understand that, I chose to read sections of Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice by Jon Davidson for this week’s post.

In the chapter “Clown History”, I am immediately struck by how easily the word ‘clown’ could be interchanged with Drag/Trickster figure. For the purposes of my present research, I will be focusing specifically on Drag Queens for simplicities sake, but I acknowledge the varied types of drag performance and will be exploring the subgenres of Drag more in depth in following weeks. In the previous chapter (What Do Clowns Do?), Davidson quotes author John Wright from his book Why is That So Funny?, that

“Asking ‘How do clowns walk?’ or ‘What do clowns wear?’ are inane questions. But to ask ‘How do clowns make us laugh?’ and, more importantly, ‘What physical impulses inspire that comedy’ will take you to a place where you can find a personal ownership of ‘clown’ as a level of play.

(Wright 2006: 180)

This is the exact approach I mean to tackle this study of contemporary Drag with; simply asking what kinds of things a queen may wear, or looking at why drag scenes emerge across cultures are too inane – I instead wish to focus on what it is about Drag that is so rebellious and subversive, and what makes rebelling against proper society in this way so enticing. Davidson says that there is an easily accessible internet history of ‘Clowning’ that I argue is very similar to the popular history of Drag – beginning in ancient Egypt, moving to Greece and Rome, through the middle ages, through Italy, Europe after the Renaissance, and then focusing on England, the early 19^th-20^th centaury ‘Golden Age’ of performance, degeneration post WWII, and then it’s ‘ascension’ into being recognized as an Art Form. This is an abridged history I’ve smashed together based on Davidson’s account of clown history, to make a similar point – studying the ‘important’ moments of Drag will allow me to create a cohesive narrative of then to now. But, what I (as well as Davidson) am much more interested in is observing these ‘important’ moments in time and asking ‘What in this social setting created the need for drag expression? Who were the people performing? How was the performance met?”.

Clowns, Davidson states, are shaped by the moment in history that they exist in, and by exploring what it is they did in those historical moments that gave them relevance, how it affected others and how it was received, we can begin to understand the impulses behind the performances themselves. It is the same for my study; I am interested primarily in what drove the drag figures to performance, and what drives us now in 2018 to still feel that specific niche need to express ourselves through costume, illusion and Drag. The imitate links I am looking to connect are the impulses between clowns and drag figures to express suffering, sadness and hopelessness in a bright, bombastic and joyful way for audience amusement. I am deeply interested in the commodification of what could be called ‘gay suffering’ and how we as gay people are able to use what it is about us that is innately subversive still in 2018 for the amusement of straight and cisgender people. So this question Davidson points me to of ‘Why do clowns clown?’ becomes ‘Why do queens queen?’, which is a very exciting departure point for me. Next week I will be looking to Pierrot clowns, ‘Pantomime Dames’, and the specific links and divergences between clown and drag.

This is an evolving study and my eyes are bigger than my stomach when it comes to readings and research, so feel free to reach out to me to point my studies in any way you see fit, reader. Drag comes from the people, and the people are who I want to study for. So drop me a line! I can’t wait to continue this journey with you. :o)

 

Sam