DRAG HERSTORY A New Age Of

by Sarah Quinn

Iremember the first time I fell in love with drag. It was probably seven or eight years ago that I stumbled upon a YouTube video from a series called “Beatdown.” The host was Willam Belli, a drag queen from the show, RuPaul’s Drag Race. She was both funny and fabulous all at the same time, and I was absolutely captivated by her. Even after binging every episode of “Beatdown,” I needed more, so I started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race I watched all of season 4 to see more of Willam, but I discovered so much more.

Drag embodied everything that I have always loved; extravagant makeup, big hair, bold fashion, and performing. As a young teen, I would even dress up like a drag queen and do a lip sync performance for my parents in the living room. I wanted to be one of them, but there was one problem, I wasn’t a gay man. As years have passed, I return to the wild idea and question, well, why can’t a woman be a drag queen?

Well, drag originated with men dressing in women’s clothes to play female parts in ancient Greek and Shakespearean plays. They did this out of necessity, as women weren’t allowed to be on stage at the time. Even when women started performing around the 1840s in the US, it didn’t matter, as drag had become its own entity and a novelty for entertainment in minstrel and vaudeville shows. This was the start of the drag show and its introduction to popular culture.

However, it was in 2009 with the premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race that drag was brought into mainstream culture and worldwide recognition. Not only did the show create a whole new audience for drag but it also inspired a new generation of drag queens. Today, we can see people from all different gender identities and sexual orientations becoming drag queens, not just gay men. Although these queens are out there, they face a lack of representation and acceptance in pop culture and the drag community.

This attitude is reflected in RuPaul’s hesitation to let cis and trans women on his show. He said, in a 2018 Guardian article, that if a cis-gendered woman is doing drag it “loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony.”

He even said he wouldn’t accept a trans woman who had started transitioning, on the show. Although RuPaul later apologized and started to include more gender diversity on the show, unfortunately, some people in the LGBTQ and drag communities still hold this stigma. That isn’t to say that these reservations towards opening up the spotlight to queens beyond gay men aren’t without precedent.

Throughout history, the LGBTQ community and drag queens have been constantly under attack by society and politics. During the prohibition, female impersonation was banned and underground gay and drag clubs were targeted by police. This continued throughout the decades but ramped up during the 50s and 60s when people were arrested for doing drag, being transgender, and participating in homosexual acts. This came to a head with the Stonewall Riot of 1969, where the police raided a gay bar and arrested drag queens, drag kings, and transgender people. Many resisted arrest and fought back against the police.

For a long time, drag queens had to fight for their place in entertainment and for the right to express themselves. The fight continues today, as the threat and enactment of drag restrictions and bans sweep the nation. In a society that continues to target LGBTQ people for being themselves, drag was and is still a way to create a community and safe haven for queer people. And after so many years of people trying to take that community away, it’s hard to let others in. However, in order to expand the community and push the creative boundaries of this art, we have to redefine what it means to be a drag queen and look past the constructs of gender and sexuality.

Although drag started off as this illusion of a cis-gendered man that appears to be a woman, it has evolved into so much more. It has become a type of art that doesn’t need to rely on the notion of gender expectations to make a statement, but one that can stand on its own.

I believe we should recognize the queens that ran so we could all sissy that walk.

by Isabella Broccolo

Thedecision to debut a pixie haircut when I was in seventh grade kickstarted my journey towards selfconfidence. I walked into class proudly, displaying the short haircut that I had requested from my mom’s hairdresser the day before. The results were mixed. My friends told me they thought it looked good on me, but assured me that they would never cut their hair short. The boys looked at me weirdly. I didn’t care much about what anyone else thought though, I loved my short hair! As far as I was concerned, anyone who didn’t like it could take a hike. If they didn’t like it, it didn’t matter because I liked it.

I wish I could say that I was able to keep that attitude throughout my entire life, but when I got to high school, my confidence and bravado shrank into insecurity and a desperate need for approval from my peers. Specifically, I was suddenly stricken with a need to be considered attractive by the opposite sex, the most vocal opponents of my short hair. Even at the time, I questioned why I felt this way. I identified as bisexual, but I wasn’t merely content with attracting the affection of the queer girls or non-binary kids in my school, I craved attention and validation from cis guys.

I couldn’t express it at the time, but the patriarchy had ensnared me in ways that I wouldn’t be able to articulate until much later in my life, and what did the patriarchy demand of its attractive women in 2016-2019? That they have long hair. So I waved goodbye to my pixie cut, thinking that if I shed off any of my layers of individuality, self-expression, and queerness, I could become a mere body deemed attractive enough for men to date.

And the worst thing happened: it worked.

When my hair was long, I got more attention from guys than I ever did when it was short. And even when my hair was, I thought, sufficiently long, I still went on dates where the guy sitting opposite me at the restaurant told me that it would look better if it was longer, that I would be prettier if I just let it grow a few more inches.

So I let my hair get longer. I let it get so long that it shed so much it coated my bedroom floor. It got all over my hands in the shower and it took forever to dry. I didn’t really like it, it didn’t make me feel pretty, but everyone was complimenting it. So I figured that this must be the most beautiful version of myself. A version of myself that was more of a body than it was a person. A version of myself that didn’t reflect who I was on the inside at all.

I couldn’t cut it, nobody would like me if it was short, nobody would like me if my hair reflected my real self. No, better to stay in this body that didn’t feel like it belonged to me, make the best of having long hair and try to appease the male gaze as best I could.

But one day I snapped. I needed to take myself back from the society that had taken her from me and told me that the way she wanted to look wasn’t good enough. I reached for the scissors and I cut my hair.

“You look so much prettier with long hair!”

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“I think you’re so much sexier with long hair.”

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“Long hair is honestly one of the most attractive things about you.”

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“I like your long hair so much more than your short hair.”

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I don’t remember how long I stood there, in front of my mirror, hacking away at my hair, but I do remember that as more and more hair fell away from my head and onto my bathroom floor, the quieter the echoes of things other people had said to me became. Instead, a warm feeling rose up from the pit of my stomach and spread throughout my entire body. I looked at myself in the mirror, my hair choppy and uneven, and smiled. I felt so beautiful. But there was another feeling present that outshone all of the other emotions I was experiencing: freedom. I cut my hair, but more importantly, I also cut myself free from the shackles that had held me for so long, that had tied my worth to the opinions of the men around me.

So cut your hair.

And cut yourself free.