RuPaul’s Drag Race all but defines what drag is and who can perform it. The world’s best drag kings would like a word.
—made lucrative careers appearing on cigarette adverts and modeling male clothes. Thousands of young women purchased posters and wrote adoring letters to them.
Their days were always numbered. “The men, and their willingness to see caricatures of themselves, determined the popularity of the impersonators,” Elyssa Goodman, author of the upcoming bookabout drag history in New York, told Jezebel. In moments of socio-economic tension between the lower and upper classes, such as the Long Depression and the Prohibition, and in moments of artistic proliferation, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Pansy Craze, male impersonation was in vogue.
Male impersonation also found an unlikely home in venues operated by the Mafia. With the end of Prohibition, speakeasies were no longer necessary, but serving alcohol to homosexuals remained illegal, so the mob started running gay and lesbian nightclubs. It was a solid, bilateral trade: The mob got their money, and the queers had their spaces, free from harassment. In lesbian bars located in the West Village, it was often the case that both wait staff and performers were male impersonators.
Stormé DeLarverie, surrounded by three female impersonators at the Roberts Show Club in Chicago circa 1958.Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public LibraryThe dark days of the AIDs crisis molded modern-day kings, according to Halberstam. As AIDS tore through the gay community, many gay men were hesitant to frequent clubs.
The queens passed on their skills in drag, as well as that siren call to be oneself, to the kings, who answered in kind. Through costume, makeup, and performance—the influences of
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