"Drag"

“Drag” in the edition shown here is a re-publication of a 1994 revision of a 1968 book with additional material from two other writers. So what’s relevant about it now? Roger Baker set about his original “History of Female Impersonation In The Performing Arts” when such a thing was a novelty. It involved him in complicated considerations of category and language, many of which he adjusted in his revision and some of which have been updated by the other writers. Now "Drag" is very specific, - then and maybe usefully, it reached from impersonation to transition involving all the fluidities in between. What was kept in the revision was the history up to the 60’s and here are the stories of mediaeval, Elizabethan, Asiatic, music-hall (and other) precursors to the drag culture so abundant in the late-early 21st Century (though even the re-publication, whilst mentioning Rupaul, doesn’t reach as far as the Drag Race). Why bother? Well, if we are to get the commodified monster of contemporary drag into perspective we need to “eat our greens” – absorb our history. When we do we will realize that what appears to our sometimes simplistic world-view as a new-minted cultural phenomenon is actually a hybrid of many influences and traditions which had deep-rooted political, anarchic, carnivalesque functions which a maybe de-commodified “drag” could do with rediscovering. Roger Baker admitted that he had no “Grand Theory” of drag, and nor should we but we do need to see, really see, what’s going on, how, if necessary, to rescue drag from itself (and us) and where we all came from. If spending some time with a routine but lovingly assembled and solid review of our origins (mythical and otherwise) is a way to do that – get reading!