Drag

Dressing up in the clothes of another gender as a performance; in gay culture, usually a man in a dress, wig, heels and makeup, a drag queen.

Drag is dressing up in the clothes of another gender as a performance, and in gay culture it usually means a man in women's clothes, wig, heels and makeup. A man in drag is a drag queen; the look, the character and the act are all "drag". It is an art form, a party trick, a political statement and a job, sometimes all on the same night.

Drag is not the same as being trans: a drag queen takes the look off at the end of the show, and plenty of drag queens are gay men who live as men the rest of the time. It is also not just for queens. Drag kings perform masculinity, and there are bearded queens, club kids and performers who do something no category can hold.

Where it comes from

The word is Victorian. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds "living in drag" in a letter of 1870, and in the same year a newspaper explained that "in drag" was "the slang for going about in women's clothes". An 1873 slang dictionary defined drag as "feminine attire worn by men" and noted that a recent notorious impersonation case had put the word into print. By 1914 a glossary of criminal slang knew it from female impersonators on the stage, with an example sentence about the "fagots" who would all be "dressed in drag at the ball tonight".

Why it is called drag, nobody knows for sure. The popular story about long skirts dragging along the floor is just that, a story, with no early source behind it.

From the balls to the TV

Drag was at the heart of gay nightlife long before it was on television. The great drag balls of the early 20th century in New York and other cities drew thousands of people, and they were where many gay men first came out into gay society. Later, Black and Latino drag queens in New York built their own ballroom scene, with houses, categories and voguing, and the language of that world still runs through gay slang today.

Then came RuPaul's Drag Race, which turned drag queens into celebrities and phrases like shade, reading and werk into everyday words for millions of viewers who had never set foot in a gay bar.

How it is used today

• In drag, to do drag: to dress and perform as a queen.
• Drag name, drag mother: your stage name, and the experienced queen who taught you to paint and gave you that name.
• Boy drag: what a queen calls her everyday men's clothes.
• Drag brunch: eggs, mimosas and a lip sync at noon.

Drag is also, again, political: in recent years several governments and parties have tried to restrict drag shows, and drag has become a symbol of the freedom to be camp, loud and visible in public.

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