Stunning Vintage Photographs Reveal The Dazzling History Of Drag Queens

Drag is all about gender-bending style, creative expression, and celebrating inclusivity. You may be intrigued to know that the art form didn’t become synonymous with the LGBTQ+ community until the 1900s, though. Before that, drag was closely tied to the evolution of theater, from the times of Shakespeare through the Vaudeville era. And married to this is a history of cross-dressing throughout the ages!

According to Merriam-Webster, the term “drag” has been around since at least the 14th century, but it wasn’t used in relation to performing as a different gender until the 1800s. Historian Joe E. Jeffreys says that drag nowadays is predominantly a theatrical form. He told Time magazine, “Drag is anytime that someone is putting on clothing that is considered to be not appropriate to them, and then wearing it with some type of ironic distance.” 

Many observers might think that drag has only recently become popular in mainstream culture. However, historian Jeffreys says that “drag has always been mainstream; it is just that with the different platforms that drag is now able to work through, perhaps there is a wider, quicker audience that has access to it.”

When Shakespeare’s plays were being performed at The Globe theater in London, drag served an important purpose. At this time, the Christian church had a lot of power over the arts, and it largely banned women from the stage. But as we know, many of Shakespeare’s plays feature female characters.

Naturally, then, the male actors would don women’s clothing to portray the female characters. Often this involved dressing up boys and younger men of smaller stature who would pass more convincingly as women. It’s thought that at one time even Shakespeare’s most famous female characters, including Lady Macbeth and Juliet, were all played by men.

Then in 1660 King Charles II removed any restrictions on women appearing in the theater. But men wearing petticoats to play female characters didn’t go away; it was still going strong over a century later in the 1800s. And gender-bending wasn’t reserved for men, either: women playing male roles also became popular, and these parts were known as “breeches.”

So, it was the theater where the term “drag” first became associated with men dressing as women. The dresses and petticoats the male actors wore on stage were often so long that they went past their ankles and dragged on the ground. They therefore began to say they were “putting on their drags” whenever they were playing female characters! And this takes us to Victorian England.

Contrary to what you may believe, Victorian London wasn’t all stiff upper lips. Despite a highly repressed society on the surface, there were, as always, still people with the desire to push the boundaries. Two such pioneers were Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, a gay double act who performed on stage in drag as Fanny and Stella in the 1860s and ’70s.

This would have been acceptable for society at the time if Boulton and Park had limited their cross-dressing to the stage. But they were also known to wear their female attire when out and about in the city, too. Even when they appeared in public in standard men’s clothes, they would accessorize by wearing make-up. Queens!

Boulton and Park not only angered some of their fellow citizens, but they also found themselves in trouble with the law. On a fateful night in 1869, they dressed up in their female guises to watch a play at the Royal Strand Theater and reportedly used the women’s bathroom during proceedings. They were arrested upon leaving and charged with impersonating women.

But the police then trumped up more charges after a search of their home, and the two men found themselves on trial. The whole thing was a sideshow, with the newspapers dubbing them the “He-She Ladies.” However, Boulton and Park weren’t convicted of anything, and, when the jury found them not guilty, observers in the gallery reportedly screamed, “Bravo!” 

Of course, across the water in the States, there were also people pushing against societal norms. One particularly interesting example is Pattirini, a singer in Utah from the 1880s to the early 1900s. Pattirini’s falsetto voice and dulcet tones were so convincing that many audience members had no idea she was actually a man named Brigham.

Only ten years before, Brigham Morris Young had been working at a Hawaiian mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Not only that, but his father was also the president of the Mormon Church. Somehow, this son of a prominent religious figure found himself plying his trade in drag.

Other American performers of the era included Neil Burgess, whose speciality was playing older women. Amazingly, his career began quite by chance, when as a teenage stage manager he was asked to fill in last minute for an actress who’d fallen ill. His most famous role was as the widow Bedott, and his final appearance came in the musical County Fair, in which he played aging widow Abigail Prue. Burgess, married to an actress named Mary Stoddard, became one of the top female impersonators of his time.

Then there was Bert Savoy, who was another kettle of fish entirely. His influence on drag culture was huge; he was a pioneer of the campness and comedy we associate with many drag queens today. The Bostonian, born born Everett McKenzie, is also thought to have been an important influence for Mae West, the vaudeville performer known for her suggestive jokes. 

Savoy has even been credited with coining a few terms we still use now: “You don’t know the half of it” and “You slay me.” Oh, and he died when he was struck by lightning in 1923 on Long Beach. Before he was hit, he noted the thunderstorm developing and allegedly quipped, “Well, ain’t Miss God cuttin’ up somethin’ fierce!” 

Bothwell Browne is another name worth knowing in the history of drag. This Danish-American had a different style of performing; instead of focusing on comedy and vulgarity, Browne was known for pushing the boundaries in other ways, including dancing with a snake. Rather than aiming to make audiences laugh, Browne opted to seduce them with sultry, tantalizing performances. This queen was sexy!

Meanwhile, over in Washington D.C, it’s believed that the very first person to call themselves a “Queen of Drag” was having a ball. And the historian Channing Gerard Joseph claims the person in question was a freed slave who would host glitzy drag balls in venues close to the White House. Say what?! This remarkable man was William Dorsey Swann.

In his book House of Swann: Where Slaves Become Queens, Joseph wrote about the police raiding one of Swann’s events in 1888. After busting in, the dumbfounded officers allegedly “discovered dozens of black men dancing together there, wearing silk and satin dresses made according to the latest fashions.” Swann was later jailed but launched a petition to U.S. President Grover Cleveland to pardon him.

New York City was the location for a new development in the evolution of drag. Around 1867-69, Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge No. 710 began hosting an event dubbed the Annual Odd Fellows Ball. The Ball’s unique selling point was simple: the men in attendance dressed as women and the women dressed as men.

Prizes were awarded for the most stunning gown worn at the Ball, as was an award for the “most perfect feminine body displayed by an impersonator.” The event, which was usually held at the Rockland Palace, became a huge deal, with people coming from all over the country to attend. It wound up attracting 8,000 revellers in 1936!

While the Hamilton Lodge was for African-Americans, the Annual Ball saw people of all ethnicities mixing together and having a great time. During a period when race relations weren’t where they needed to be, this was quite unusual — in the best possible way.

Of the men in drag, the New York Age newspaper remarked, “in their gorgeous evening gowns, wig, and powdered faces, [they] were hard to distinguish from many of the women.” A 1927 article detailed the event’s competition, which had a judging ceremony and a grand march. So clearly the artistry behind drag was already being treated as worthy of celebration.

Meanwhile, the American vaudeville theater was becoming the focal point for the next evolution of drag. Vaudeville was an all-around entertainment experience that incorporated elements of comedy, dance, and burlesque to great effect. Male performers imitating females quickly became an incredibly beloved style of act.

The first recognizable drag act to emerge from vaudeville was Julian Eltinge, a man who sang on stage as a woman but made a point to highlight his masculinity off-stage. His act became so popular that he eclipsed the vaudeville stage and moved into Hollywood. At one point, in fact, he leapfrogged Charlie Chaplin and became the highest-earning movie star of the time!

Eltinge’s fanbase was mainly female, with comedian W.C. Fields remarking, “Women went into ecstasy about him. Men went into the smoking room.” Yet his star began to wane in the 1930s, and by the time the Great Depression hit, he was back to performing in small nightclubs. Eltinge eventually died in 1940, having opened up a path for the drag stars who would come after him.

Before the Depression hit, however, the United States experienced 13 years of prohibition. During this time, alcohol was completely outlawed: it became illegal to make or sell booze. But given how motivated people can be when they want to get soused, a solution was found: the Speakeasy. These underground clubs became flooded with black market liquor.

An interesting offshoot of these speakeasies was the creation of bars and clubs that specifically catered to LGBTQ clientele. Away from the gaze of law enforcement, these places became safe havens in big cities like New York and Chicago. The entertainment on offer included drag acts, and soon the whole movement was being referred to as the “pansy craze.”

It is this era of drag that historian Jeffreys considers the purest incarnation of the art form. He told Time magazine, “This is where the drag queen serves this kind of shaman role, this kind of court-fool role [in which] they are allowed to say and do things that the culture perhaps needs to look at. Even one of the performers on RuPaul’s Drag Race, Bianca Del Rio, will say, ‘I’m a clown.’”

These gay bars continued to be a fixture until the 1960s, but as society was criminalising the lifestyle, drag culture was forced to move mostly underground. It all came to a head in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village. The location was an important space for the city’s gay scene, and when it was raided by the police, it was the last straw.

The LGBTQ+ residents of Greenwich Village staged a series of protests against the police, and this later erupted into riots. The riots are still vital in terms of LGBTQ+ liberation in the States. Legendary drag queen and activist Marsha P. Johnson became a central figure, and it is her face many associate with the protests to this day.

After this, the phenomenon of drag queen beauty pageants sprung up around America. Flawless Sabrina was responsible for organizing many of them, and they were very much the same as a traditional pageant. She also appeared in drag on televised talk shows, which simply hadn’t been done at that time. Flawless by name, flawless by nature.

From the 1950s to the 1990s, Hollywood representations further propelled drag into the mainstream. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis cross-dressed alongside Marilyn Monroe in 1959’s Some Like It Hot, before Tim Curry gave a bizarrely brilliant turn as Frank-N-Furter in 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Later, A-listers Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze played drag queens in 1995 comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar.

But today, most would point to one queen being responsible for the prominence of drag in the mainstream: RuPaul Charles. His megahit show RuPaul’s Drag Race began airing in 2009 and has spawned countless spin-offs and international franchises. In 2017 RuPaul even sashayed his way onto Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People countdown.

And RuPaul has made drag so recognized that hundreds of thousands of fans now visit his DragCon every year in Los Angeles. The convention is a celebration of drag as an art, as well as queer culture and self-expression for anyone and everyone. In 2019 an enormous 60,000 people attended the con, 40 percent of whom, according to Glossy magazine, did not identify as queer. So there’s progress, people.

Perhaps the stunning history of drag proves that it isn’t reserved for one kind of person. It’s not exclusively for queer men, and it’s not only for performers. As historian Jeffreys told Time, “Drag is everybody’s art form...There have always been male impersonators, and there always have been female impersonators.” 

Jeffreys added, “What is being brought to the forefront now — and has been espoused in academic circles for years — is that gender is not a binary; it is a spectrum or a wave. You are not either one or the other…” He then concluded by saying, “You put it on, you take it off — which is different from how you present yourself in everyday life.” Life is a performance, baby! As RuPaul famously says, “You're born naked, and the rest is drag!”