My mother hates drag.
At least, she hates the concept of drag. My mother has made it known she despises the drag art form and believes that drag queens are doing what they do to make mockery of womanhood. Whenever the topic of drag has come up in conversation, she has made it perfectly clear that she thinks drag is disgusting, unworthy of recognition as an art form, inherently sexual, and inappropriate for anyone to experience.
While my mother was raised in a conservative household, but she has gravitated towards political centrism in terms of her economic and social policy preferences. Though she typically votes liberally and understands the dangers and threats levied towards marginalized communities, she has a difficult time with accepting queerness, participating in queer culture, and recognizing what it means to make queer art.
She has never been to a drag show. She refuses point blank to go to Pride with me (though I invite her each subsequent year to no avail). My mother even forced me, when she found out that there was queer art on my undergraduate recital, to come out to my extended family before they watched what I had made so it didn’t blindside them. My parents have had a very difficult time adjusting to my pronouns and accepting the gender transition I made into being openly nonbinary, and they have objected to how I dress to express my own comfort, what I say (which is sometimes inappropriate, but with no harm intended), and how I identify as a queer transgender nonbinary autistic dinosaur wizard person.
My parents are like a lot of other Americans, who have so thoroughly chosen to not experience queer culture and refused invitations into queer spaces while creating predispositions and prejudices based on their concept of queerness, the movement towards queer liberation, and the art forms that rose out of the queer community, including and especially drag.
It should be said that this what passive homophobia and transphobia looks like. My parents aren’t really actively homophobic or transphobic: they have never called me slurs or chosen to retract support on the basis that I am queer, and they have never disowned me, even though I was a very difficult child navigating queer and neurodivergent experiences that I couldn’t describe and that my parents had no tool in their parenting toolbox to accommodate or comprehend. Honestly, I believe that they simply don’t realize just how homophobic and transphobic it is to refuse point blank to participate in queer culture despite numerous invitations and opportunities to do so. And, like most Americans, I definitely don’t think that they know much queer culture and drag has shaped all queer art, including my music.
If you have never been to a drag show, first of all, go. If you are over the age of 21, find your local drag bar and attend a show on Friday or Saturday night. Bring $20 in singles (at least) to tip the performers, be prepared to grab a glass of wine or a cocktail (or two… or more), and an open mind. You will see things you have never seen before, and some of them may be offensive, but most of them will be astounding, including incredible costumes, spectacular stunts, some of the funniest things you’ve ever heard, and an embarrassment of riches in local talent.
Drag is, fundamentally, the expression of the queer art form. It is subversive, experimental, exacting, clever, and self-referential. Drag artists are masters of a precise yet temporary artistic medium, and they have spent every spare penny they have on looking like the artworks they have imagined themselves to be. A drag performance is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; no drag performance is ever the same and drag artists are constantly reinventing themselves into fresh, new, surprising works of art. As an art form, drag transcends media, combining theatre, fashion, art, and performance, and the live experience of drag is immersive and unforgettable.
Some people in my life have told me that the only experience of drag that they have has been from seeing it on TV. RuPaul’s Drag Race is a reality competition show that includes drag, but it is not a viable replacement for the experience of live drag performance. It’s like watching opera in a movie theatre or listening to an .mp3 of The Rite of Spring. It’s just not a substitute for being in the room with the artists and participating in a vibrant and beautiful artistic history that your community cherishes deeply.
In order to understand drag’s influence on art, you have to know drag’s legacy. By no means am I an expert in drag history, but you should know that drag has been around for thousands of years. It’s in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, it’s present every time a man played a woman’s role in Shakespeare, it appears to this day when a woman dresses as young boy in opera (these are referred to as pants roles, and they are extremely common practice), and drag was commonplace in performance practices such as vaudeville. In the 20th and 21st centuries, drag is omnipresent in queer culture and queer art. You see it in Some Like It Hot and Victor/Victoria. You see it in John Waters’ Hairspray and his Trash Trilogy. It’s all over things like To Wong Foo, The Birdcage, and even Mrs. Doubtfire. It is impossible to ignore the influence of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has somehow managed to mainstream drag and queer culture to an unprecedented degree. Drag has existed in all kinds of media, but perhaps the most important single piece of drag media is the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning.
Paris is Burning is a seminal drag documentary that centers the The Ballroom Scene in New York City. Ballroom culture rose to prominence within the Black and Brown queer communities in Harlem, who used drag to express themselves in ways that they could not in their public lives because they were not white or straight or passing. They knew that they were marginalized and created space for themselves with drag. They were not included in mainstream society because that society was (and, largely, remains) hostile to them, so they created their own society comprised of houses — chosen families — that competed in balls, pursuing art and beauty in categories that actually included them. It is a fantastic, important film that documents queer culture that easily could have been forgotten, and there are things peppered throughout the documentary that we still say in our queer vernacular today.
Over the course of the last 50 years or so, the influence of drag has percolated through less explicitly queer media. For example, Disney’s The Little Mermaid is fairly clearly queer allegory, complete with a villain whose designed was inspired by Divine and a lyricist who died shortly thereafter due to complications from AIDS. This is one example; there are dozens, if not hundreds, and probably thousands or tens of thousands more.
As a queer person, it is impossible to ignore or refuse to acknowledge that drag exists and that it has had a profound impact on our community. I don’t know any queer people who haven’t experienced live drag. As a queer artist, it is also impossible to separate queer art from drag itself.
I’m not claiming that all queer art is drag in the sense that every queer artist is performing in elaborate costumes, makeup, and wigs or engaging in the tropes typical of the medium of drag performance. Queer art is innumerable in media types and exists in every artistic market there is, and suggesting that the drag performance medium is the only way queer art could be presented is ludicrous. But as queer artists, we are all standing on the backs of the legendary houses before us, borrowing freely from the drag phenomenon and incorporating ourselves in the same narrative that includes everyone from Crystal LaBeija to Divine, Willi Ninja to Trixie Mattel.
I think there is a very fair reading of my music as an act of drag performance.
Over the course of my career as a composer, I have composed several works that center my experience of queerness. The first of these works was Moonlit Meeting, a reed quintet work which was about the unexpected emotional ramifications of engaging in queer hookup culture. My second queer work was Jigsaw, another reed quintet piece which centers the experience of the aftermath of coming out. After those works came to be, queerness has percolated through many of my works: from First Dance, which implicitly mentions my feelings about a breakup I had with a bassoonist I met in community college, to The Winning Play, which invokes camp aesthetics and encourages ensembles performing it to be so theatrical it engages with drag.
I recently finished a queer work and am working on another: first, The Grind, a work for soprano saxophone, narrator, and piano which pointedly criticizes Grindr and the culture that has coalesced around using it for casual sex; and, second, Realness, a work for oboe and piano that celebrates the rich history of drag and the musical artists who influenced it. The Grind will be performed at the end of this month at the North American Saxophone Conference in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Realness will be performed at this summer’s International Double Reed Society conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Like my entire catalogue of music which has explicitly been created by a queer person, both of these works could easily be considered acts of drag performance.
In a way, I kind of love that. I like that that my work is becoming more openly queer again, and incorporating more elements of drag and queer culture. It makes me feel alive, fearless, and strong.
RuPaul has said some very silly things, but also some profound things. The profound RuPaul quote that most resonates with me is “ We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” This simple little statement is particularly impactful for me because I feel it not just as a queer person wanting the freedom to express myself, but as an autistic person, forced to mask — to, in a way, create for myself and act out neurotypical realness in public. But it’s more than that.
Everything I do, every article of clothing I use to decorate and protect my body, every note and word that I write for someone to play or to speak, and every single, granular creative decision I’ve ever made on everything I’ve ever put into the world? Drag.
In the midst of being unable to divorce my queer classical music from drag, there are legislatures in my country making it a priority to ban drag from public spaces. This is not just an attack of the experience of drag, but it is an attack of the experience of all queer art. The language embedded in the legislation working its way through a dozen state legislatures in my country is so broad that would not only make drag impossible anywhere in which children may come in contact with it, but penalize any other queer artist in equal measure. Those legislatures are using children as a class that is more protected than the queer community to silence and make illegal the art created by drag queens and any other queer artists whose work even includes a tangential relationship to drag, which is to say all queer art.
If you are a queer artist and you are not terrified, wake up. They will not stop with drag. They will use the legislation that will criminalize drag as a precedent to silence you. They will challenge and argue their way to the Supreme Court, which will always uphold the most conservative possible ruling. We have got to fight back, not just to protect our ability to create queer work, but for our fellow queer artists in drag spaces and to protect the legacy and history of drag in the United States.
If you are an American who has willfully chosen to ignore queer art or refused an olive branch held out to you by a queer friend or family member, inviting you to participate in the culture for which we have had to fight tooth and nail, it’s not too late. When was the last time you saw a queer film? When the last time you went to a local business you knew was owned by a queer person or a queer family? When was the last you protested alongside us, waving a little rainbow flag at a Pride parade?
When was the last time you went to a drag show?
Drag is the expression of the queer art form, and the expression of what it means to be queer is drag. If you found yourself identifying with the passive homophobia and transphobia that has prevented you from being in the room with a drag artist and watching them perform because of a prejudice you have harbored against them without ever actually experiencing their work yourself, you can do better. You should do better.
And if you are like my parents, it’s high time to recognize that your prejudice against drag artists may include the livelihood of your queer artist child. Or a colleague’s child. Or a friend. Maybe even a total stranger, for whom the dollar you waved in the air could mean that their art actually matters to someone real.
Go to a drag show. Support queer art. It might be your last chance.