Drag

modern religion. Drag has been traditionally defined as a form of entertainment where men dresses women or women dresses men. They might lip sync to a popular song, perform a role on stage, or strut down a runway wearing the trendiest clothes fashion has to offer. But in recent years, drag has come to be understood as so much more. It's a way of life, a path for people across the world to express themselves and live their truth. Today, producer Trevor Young is going to walk us from the

origins of drag to its most popular modern iteration. A reality TV show which you've maybe heard of, Rue Balls Drag Race is now on v H one. Girl, Let's do this. Your edges are officially snatched the Queen is here about bitches. Think you've seen fashion? I got it going on. It's one of my main connections with young people who are college age in the twenties. Like, we don't have a lot of other stuff to talk about. They're very different. They're always got their head in their phone.

But the one thing we can totally connect on is, Oh my god, Candy News or Simone or got Nick, you know, what do you think? Blah blah blah blah. These are kids that are Ivy League colleges or there. You know, they're straight kids, all gay kids or anything kids. There's just this connection that RuPaul was created between people.

My name is Simon Donan. I am an author, and I think a lot of people know me from my work at Barney's where I was creative director and design windows and ads, and I've done a whole bunch of things. I'm all hello. Simon and I had agreed we'd do a one hour interview about Drag, but it became two hours because we couldn't stop talking about RuPaul's drag race. It turns out we're both huge fans, but the reality is that drag is so much more than just drag. Race.

It's an art form, a means of expression that goes back hundreds even thousands of years. It's a rich historical counterculture turned pop culture phenomenon that connects people across lines of age, race, gender, wealth, in time. For Simon who grew up in the UK, it's always been a way of life. Well, I can't ever remember not being wearing a drag. I mean when I was a kid, drag was always on the TV. Many of the popular comedians in my childhood always to a drag. We had big

famous female in personators like Danny LaRue. May I call you ladies India any time we're owing a four three to eight. If mother answers don't hang up, you're still on a good thing. Dick and Marie, excuse me, miss tell me? Do you have a favorite way of spending a bank holiday? Yes? I invite the man in from next time you have a sound together, Stanley Baxter Tingers will have the staff are quite unsuitable, but surely we should spare Mrs Bridges. She's a treasure. If she's a treasure,

then I suggested better. I don't oh god, So I think English people have a different relationship to drag than Americans, at least definitely back then, because we don't have that puritanical revulsion against it. In the nineteen fifties, it was

just considered to be amusing and entertaining. I have pictures of me when I was like ten in our backyard at home, taken by my mother, with my best friend Biddy, who went on to become quite a famous drag queen in London in the seventies, and we're both in drag. After spending decades surrounded by drag, Simon wrote and published a book in twenty nineteen called Drag The Complete Story. So I had to think, well, why would I do this book now? And then I thought, well, here's the deal.

You know, in the nineties, drag was basically losing its mojo. People were speculating that now that it's would have lost a lot of its marginal status, it was just gonna fizzle, And people were making those kind of speculations, and I quote people in my book saying that. But then fast forward to the second decade of the century and there's this huge explosive revolutionary interest in gender drag, not just RuPaul's drag race, but the whole gender landscape became this

massively complex, massively focal part of the culture. As Simon says saw, the doors burst open for gender expression, and drag was the leader of this new revolution that made it very appealing to a whole new generation of people. It just seemed like a perfect art form that not only like affirmed me in a queer and trans kind of way, but also just like allowed me to showcase all of my talents and didn't put any restrictions limitations

on it. This is Taylor Alexander in Atlanta based drag performer. We'll be hearing from Taylor throughout this episode. Taylor began their drag journey in I started identifying as like non binary INN. When I had that kind of language, it just made kind of more sense to me. It felt more comfortable. Never really felt comfortable identifying with the label

of being a man. For some people, they do drag because they don't have a space or a place to explore gender, or they have an inkling that they might not be the gender they were assigned at birth, and so drag can sometimes be a way to explore that. You know, I know plenty of people who come into drag, you know, identifying as like cis gender men. And then when they start doing drag and they started doing shows, and eventually you know, they might come out as trans

or non binary, and I think that's beautiful. Well, that's the reason to do this book, because there is this gender revolution going on. When I started this book, there was this iron firewall between drag and trans. It would have been a huge mistake to call a trans person a drag queen. There was this very different focus. And then during the two years that I wrote on the book,

all the boundaries crumbled. Was truly revolutionary period where suddenly you had straight women identifying as drag queens, you had trans women identifying as drag queen identity. So it was all changing to the point where now obviously you see on Rupha's Drag Rays, we have got Mick who's a trans man who has a drag queen alter ego, if that's the right word for it. I thought, this is a great time to revisit the history of drag and bring it right up to day into this new revolutionary,

exploratory gender period that we're in now. Of course, it's taken a time to get to this point, so let's go back to some of the earliest iterations of what we now call drag. Early Greek and Roman society was very masculine and very chest beating and all about testosterone basically, and then late Greek society became much more androgynous, and the same with Rome, you know, towards the end of

the Roman Empire, when it began to crumble. Then you saw a lot of bacchanalien madness emperors like Nero Caligula wearing women's clothes. And you know, some people say they're exaggerated, but I like to think that they're not because they're so fun to read and and I thought, this is a great way of getting young people interested in history to tell all these super body crazy stories about Nero, who also murdered his mother. You know, it's good to keep that in mind. Um. I don't think they were

particularly nice people, by the sound of it. And the was another ancient culture to test out gender ambiguity Egypt, which is just the most marvelous, beautiful androgyny. If you look at to some common and you know that was a boy, but how beautiful, how extraordinary, how how mesmerizing and timeless, like so amazing even today It so takes your breath away to look at Egyptian art and the use of androgynous images, the androgynous clothing and the shifts.

That was a pretty amazingly rich culture. To the east, Japan used a form of drag with its kabuki theater, developed in the Edo period. Kabuki featured men, often performing as women on stage. The men would wear kimonas done heavy pale white makeup, angle fans, and assume the role of a geisha. The reasons for kabuky being male only are vast and complicated, not limited to rampant sexism and

a history of violence towards female performers. Like kabuki, Shakespearean drama in England also featured male actors playing female characters roles, and like kabuki, it was not always for great reasons. In Shakespeare, the female roles were played by men because women weren't allowed to get it on the stage physically. Oh no, even so quickly may one catch the plague. Methink, so I feel this youth's perfections with an invisible and subtle stealth to creep in out mine eyes. And then

the boys who played female roles lady Macbeth, Cleopatra. I don't think they were treated really great. They didn't become superstars or anything. They're often forgotten, whereas the male actors are still remembered and the always who played women's roles. One minute they might be in a pair of tites having a sword fight, and then they would have to put on some gown for their female role, of which there are many. Shakespeare place with this all the time

because he does a lot of swapping. Gender swapping. You know, as you like it, you're accellent is something finer than you could purchase, and sort of moved the dwelling. I have been total many but indeed the lord really just uncle of mine, told me to speak. I've heard him read many lectures against it, and I thank god, I'm not a woman to be touched with so many gideal offenses.

That's actually apparently where the word drag comes from, because there were these laws in Elizabethan, England that unless you were an aristocrat, you couldn't wear velvet pearls. Course it's all the all the finery of the aristocracy. It was illegal. So when the aristocracy wanted to dump off their all clothes, they would sell them to the Globe Theater where Shakespeare producing his place. They would refer to it as their drags, not going to wear my little jerk in and my

tides have to get my drags on. That's one theory about the origin of the word drag. Drag might have been most prevalent in the performing arts, but that wasn't its only purpose. Often the stakes were much higher. There's instances of people cross dressing to evade danger. That's a common theme throughout history. Women have worn men's clothes in

order to survive, to get a job. Even in Victorian England, you couldn't become a law clerk unless you were a boy, so a lot of girls would dress up in boys clothes, sort of like a gentle stories. What would you do with all you have? Want the life was to study and it was forbidden. But if it were that would be difficult, wouldn't it always hiding afraid of being discovered? Yes,

what's your secret? So women across just throughout history, but often with the goal being just pure survival, either physical, financial, or whatever. The technical term for a woman who dresses as a man is a drag king. While the practice was used for survival reasons. It was also incredibly popular in the entertainment industry. You know, there's drag kings who became very famous, Hetty King and those women at the turn of the twentieth century, they were making a lot

of money. They were like huge Broadway stars. People love to watch a woman grab that male man, splaining power and and satirize it. We'll hear more about drag kings in a minute for now. We Land in the early twentieth century where drag exploded. Between the wars was a very fertile time for drag. That the Harlem Renaissance. There was people like Gladys Bentley. There was this thing called

the pansy Craze in Harlem. There was a time of sort of loosening morals, more creative freedom and freedom of expression between the wars, and you saw that in London, Germany obviously the Weimar period. And you know, if you've seen the movie Cabaret, what good is sitting alone in your room? Come here the music play. Someone like Gladys Bentley, you know, she thrived during the panty craze, became a big superstar. She had a big apartment on Park Avenue

and a limo driver, and she was doing great. She would wear a tucks and she would flirt with women in the audience, and she was a secretly charismatic woman who I think somebody should make a film about her life. Then after the Wars, particularly in America, there was this new emphas on respectability and being conventional, and you know, they started threatening her. It's illegal for women to wear men's clothes. And she wrote a terrible article in I

think it was Ebony magazine. The headline was something like, I become a woman again, And she took female hormone and had married a guy and had to retreat from this freedoms of being a drag queen. And it's quite a sad story that was very much a mirror of the times. Sadly, drag and trans performers continued to struggle for rights and for survival throughout the twentieth century. In New York City, being queer was illegal, as was selling

alcohol at openly lgbt Q establishments. Then in nineteen one event changed everything. On June, police rated a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Cops broke into the building, arresting and assaulting the patrons. The local queer community was over it, and they were furious. Riots erupted in the neighborhood that would go on for days. Headed up by movement icons Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the Stonewall riots were some of the most significant displays

of resistance and courage in the face of oppression. You know, when I was a kid, obviously for gay people of color and trans people of color, it's infinitely worse, but even for me in my little factory town, gay bashing was a weekend hobby for the local skinnets. Homophobia was just part of the lingo, as was racism, as was stuff that's completely unacceptable these days. It was just normal. And I remember my dad saying to me when he sensed,

you know, I was starting to manifest. We never discussed it during our entire life, but he was getting sense probably that I was gay, and he said to me, you know, those homosexuals, they get beaten up, they get blackmailed, most of them end up in prison or in the mental hospital. And the horrible thing is he was actually correct. It was illegal to be homosexual until nineteen sixty seven

in England, and then even when that was overturned. The actual policing of gay people continued way into the seventies, and the gay bashing in many someplaces never stopped. My family is from Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland was very slow

to make any changes. My sister's gay and my mom was terrified that the police would find out we were gay because it was illegal, was on the books, you know, like unless is into the eighties, into the nineties, I think still gay marriage isn't eagle and so imagine that. But your trans and you're you're breaking these other sacred taboos about gender is a million times worse. So I only signed my gaye experience as a sort of, you know, the tip of the iceberg for what what the trans

person might face. Simon knew a number of trans and drag performers throughout the seventies and eighties. I asked him how they got by? You have a good left hook. When I lived in Manchester in the early seventies and it was a fantastic town with a very vibrant drag scene, but the dragon queens was so tough. I remember being in at some horrible calf with these two drag queens. I knew called Aver and Charis, and some woman said

something to Ava that ticked her off. And Ava was big and she picked up her tray with her food on just threw it right out this woman and then poors Cherise later on was murdered by you know, skinhead gang. And I think that that kind of stuff continues in other parts of the world. I mean these countries where it's still illegal to be gay. There's countries in Africa, whether it's just you wonder when are they going to

make some progress on this issue. Brazil, I think it seems very liberated and very gay positive, but then trans people are murdered in record numbers in Brazil. So brave to throw on a frock and get out there and it's empowering and it's creative and it's brilliant, but it's also hugely courageous. For some younger drag queens today, that history might get lost the Internet and media portraying much more glamorized version of drag than the one of generations past.

But for Taylor Alexander, that history is everything. It's really informed how I got into drag. Who was the porting me when I started doing drag? So knowing my history and knowing what had to happen before I came along to make the world what it is for queer and trance people is extremely important. I think that there are some people who just don't think about that, who don't

take that into consideration. You know. On top of being like a performer, I'm also like a community organizer, and so as much as like you know, I love throwing parties, I'm always thinking about, like how can I reflect different communities in this drag show? How can I tie this into like queer history, how can I tie this into like movements that are happening right now, which is like

standing up for black trance lives and whatnot. It's like an ongoing process, and I think it's unfortunate that some performers just completely toss it to the side. I definitely agree. I don't want to go to every single bar and have like a sit down conversation about like stone Wall in Marsha P. Johnson, But every single person that comes to a show of mine, it comes to a uh

an event that I'm producing. I would love to leave with like a certain kind of inspiration and to learn more and to to know more and to grow, and so history and representation and just learning about who came before me and what's going to happen, you know, after me. It's really important. Until the late eighties, drag culture had very little visibility outside of its few subversive pockets around

the world. But then one movie changed all of that, Jenny Livingstone documentary Paris Is Burning Law Learned and learned it well. That movie is sort of like the Citizen Kane of drag. I was working years ago in the mid eighties when all of my friends were dying. It was a terrible period, the Eights epidemic. And Susanne bart Is a very clear was friend of mine. She's a club queen in New York, and back then we were like so overwhelmed with death. You know, we're still young

people and dealing with all this death. And she said, I'm going to do a charity event, but like one of these voguing balls. And I said, what you're talking about, And she dragged me up to Harlem and we went to a bunch of these voguing balls, and then we started having committee meetings for this event she wanted to do call a love Ball, and one week Chi Valente,

who has been very involved in this work. She said, I'm bringing this girl who's doing a documentary on the voguing scene in New York killed Jenny Livingston, And she came and she showed us a little fragment, a preliminary fragment of this film, Paris Is Burning. It's a very intimate look at what was called ball culture in the late eighties. It was often less than wealthy, gay and trans people of color who put on their own pageant

shows using whatever clothes and props they had. Jay people men gathered together under one roof and decide to have competition amongst themselves. Balls. I worked to a ball. I've got a trophy, and now everybody wants to know me. In the film, you see the underground ball culture of New York City centered around Harlem, and there we meet a number of drag families such as the Lobejas and

the Extravaganzas. The House Extravaganza has a lot. It's made me feel like I have a families and we're always together. We always if we're not together, we always speak on the phone. These adoptive families and these balls were often these individuals only source of belonging and safety. It's like crossing into the looking glass in Wonderland. We're going there and you feel, you feel a hundred rights being gay, and then that's what it's like. That what it's like

in the world. The Boys, the Extravagances, lab Asia dupri they were all over Manhattan. But there's one person had the imagination to pick up a camera and create that movie. And so hats off to her that she saw that, because the impact of that movie is is enduring and enduring and enduring, and I think it's given drag to

a global language. Shante Shante Shante Shante Shante Chante. You know, throwing shade shad is I don't tell you're ugly, but I don't have to tell you because you know you're ugly, and that's shade. All the lingo that's in there, mopping, mopping, you go into a store and just look mapping, stealing. A lot of people would recognize the expressions that were used in Charaspanic because you hear them on CNN. Please don't don't trying to throw shade just because I'm making

sure that shade. I'm just trying to you know, people will say, getting shady with me and throwing shade and bloody, bloody blood. That's the magic of this film. And then you hear it every time you watch Rupules, drag Rays, Girl, shade, Shade, constant references to that movie. Now in the great tradition of Paris is Burnie the library is about to be outfit. You know, that period is very poorly documented. Not many people photographed those balls, but we have that film which

is very very touching. You know, a lot of those kids are in the balls. They don't have two of nothing. Some of them don't even eat. They come to ball starting and they sleep on the pier or wherever. They don't have a home to go to. But they'll make they'll go out and they'll still or something and get dressed up and come to a war for that one

night and lived a fantasy. One of the things I find so amazing about it is when you look back at it, Jenny Livingston said, I realized I'd entered the world where these people knew exactly how to be themselves. Mistakes were so low for those people in that film. They were so marginalized on so many levels that they

had nothing to lose. What you see when you look at those people like Pepper up Asia and Dorr and Corey and the legendary children and all of it is people who know how to be themselves without any filter, and they all seem strangely happy. You know, obviously they're on for the camera, but that's the thing that always strikes me, Like, as Pepper lap Asia says, they don't have two of nothing, but it was laughing and they make their own fun and then not being driven bonkers

by social media. Obviously they have their TIFFs in their issues, and they all were casualties of aids and drugs, and you know, they didn't have easy I'm not saying they had easy lives, but there's this weird joy that radiates from people even though they have essentially nothing. I find that very touching, very inspiring. At the same time that voguing balls were taking place in small Manhattan clubs and dragging in forms of drag, we're being commercialized in pop culture,

most notably in the music industry. The counterculture. Back then, people talked about unisex, unisex clothing, unisex hair dues, and it was around that time that glam rock erupted, turns On, Leave It On. How you are driving. I want my m T, I want my TV. I worshiped David Bowie, Mark Boland, all those people used to go to those early concerts of Theirs and We're Satin, you know, and things I couldn't afford to buy from Mr Freedom, which was the big glam rock star I used to make myself.

It was a totally androgynous lot of boys were big platform shoots and our heels, which was great for me because I'm only five ft four, so it's fabulous. It was a period where androgyny became a big thing, and and it surges in and out of pop music. I mean, Jimmy Hendrix is obviously very androgynous, wearing flowers and velvet.

Mick Jagger that was the sixties thing too, and then resurfaced with glam rock in a more theatrical show busy way with satin and stars and stuff like that, and then loads of makeup obviously, like Boie, I find that I am a person who can take on the guises of different people that I meet. I can switch accents in seconds of me somebody and I can adopt their accent. I've always found that I collect I'm a collector I

have a hotchpotch philosophy, which really is very minimal. And you seem like somebody maybe who would love glam rock. Are you a glamor rock person? But he is probably my favorite musician of all time. Well, today you're looking very hunky dory, thank you. Yes, I get that a lot. He was so he wasn't male, it wasn't female. He was genuinely very androgynous, like you actually stopped thinking about anatotomical stuff with him. He was just this beautiful extraterrestrial

of androgyny. For gay people of my generation, it was very powerful because back then you thought, oh, if you're gay, you just end up being some alcoholic Judy Garland loving person who's full of self loathing and living in the shadows. And suddenly, oh, my god, is this way to be gay. That's hip and groovy and tied into the culture. And so it was very significant for my generation. I think he was the most sophisticated take on androgyny other than

maybe Grace Jones. How do you view yourself? I'm schizophrenic, have many different moods. I think, like everyone else, I'm very much human, very much that Grace Jones is incredibly beautiful visual take of androgyny. It's also very unforgettable. Then at other times it became like the New York Dolls. You know, they were doing a parody of almost like slapping the makeup on and you know, hasty, kind of ratchet drag, which was sort of just designed to be provocative.

And then we moved into the eighties with hair Metal. You know, hair Metal was pure drag. It was like guys dressing in their mother's aerobics clothes and then getting their done like Joan Cusack in Working Girl. It was brilliant and very funny, you know, aggressively heterosexual, but then dressed like a New Jersey housewife basically no offense to New Jersey housewives. But when the nineties hit, drag became

synonymous with one name and one name only, RuPaul. You've had a show, Bunny as the Pyramid Club was the focus of drag when I came to New York in the early eighties, and that is where drag kind of started to become hip. I mean a lot of people stood out, but there was one person who was just different, and that was RuPaul. Because RuPaul was always turned out, never sloppy, it was never hag drag, you know, it

was always turned out. And I'm not at all surprised that he has gotten where he's got because there was always this aura around him of success, and he used to say it. He always envisaged his own success. He knew he kind of would be something, he would amount to something. When you become the image of your own imagination, it's the most powerful thing you could ever do, you know, because I ain't stopping, you know. You know, in my mind, I've always been a superstar, you know, and nobody couldn't

tell me no different, you know what I mean. So if you believe it, then they'll believe it, they'll buy you. Hear that from a lot of people. Madonna also has that. I think I've always had a lot of confidence in myself. What are your dreams? What's left to rule the world? Like nothing was going to get in their way. It was going to happen. And there's this weird kind of certainty that most of us don't have, but certain people, and root Poles, one of them, always had that vision

of herself and has fulfilled it. RuPaul Charles was born in California, but really kicked off his drag career in Atlanta,

Georgia in the nineteen eighties. He then went on to New York City, where he exploded onto the scene, appearing on TV with the RuPaul Show one studios in New York Show Up and recording hit songs like you Better Work in a Shade Shady, I just want to give pay, I just want to Finally, in two thousand nine, RuPaul launched the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race, a show where queens would compete to be the next drag superstar.

So goes the show's popular slogan, good Dragular, these queens will rate them old by spreading and positivity and unity to become a America's next drag superstar not away from me. The show would not only bring drag into the mainstream, but inspire a whole new generation of drag performers, including Taylor Alexander, though they have some mixed feelings about RuPaul.

It's weird because RuPaul started doing drag here in Atlanta, and when she first started doing drag, which is like my favorite era of RuPaul, she was you know, very into like Androgyny. She used to wear like you know, football shield and like shoulder pad like mohawks and like also used to do like music. She was in a band called Wee Pole that used to perform right along

here on Ponds. And so it's funny that you know, she was dabbling in androgyny and messing with gender and messing with even like the ideas of drag because even then there were still like, you know, these notions that you know, drag is quote unquote to be a female illusionists, and so they have to be padded and have this very kind of like quafft and perfected, you know. Look, and here comes through Paul, just like completely messing with that.

But then you see her slowly transform over the years into this glamazon and she calls it and kind of completely forget the very queer, the very like androgynous route that she began with. And I think that's because of her personal journey with being like the world's most like famous drag queen. What Taylor is referring to is that throughout the runtime of Drag Race, RuPaul has been slow to accept trans performers into the ranks, instead preferring sis

gay men exclusively. However, the show itself has progressed over its decade plus time on the air, now featuring a number of trans men and women. Most of all, the show has provided a platform for drag performers of all types to expand their brands and show their stuff. The show also allows for many intimate and tender moments with many of these queens. My dad passed in October two thousand thirteen, and it's still so fresh to me. We didn't see at at first, but we ended up having

the best relationship. He came to my patents and we was always talking, and he told me, you need to go on Rupa's request so him pass. And he was like, yeah, it's time. I want to do it for my dad. Wow, it's an amazing story and you've done so well. I am so proud of you. Thank you. I'd love watching

you just work through it and make it happen. I love how if there's some drag queen who's struggling a bit and they're in a saboteur is pushing them in the wrong direction, and Rupat has that very paternal maternal conversation with them about being your own best pal and get your act together. You deserve to have good things happen to you. And I think that's a very important message because I don't think drag queens historically thought that

they deserve to have good things happened to them. The whole society was telling them the opposite, Just like my dad telling me, we'll gay people. They all get blackmailed and they all end up in prison or depressed or whatever. RuPaul is just annihilated all that. These kids know how to make money, they know how to take care of themselves. They're great role models for like survival, because survival is really important, how to get a job, how to keep

a job. And RuPaul has those basically solid working class beliefs that are married with this amazing, free flowing creativity. To be successful at drag race, usually you have to do two things. You have to look good and you have to be funny. Ms Bendella Cram. After seeing you and drag I realized now why Seattle had to hide

suicide rate. It used to be quite separate, you know, glamor drag and comedy drag, especially in my childhood, like someone like caught Yell, you know a show girl from the Lieberger was it was about glamor and then the straight guys like Benny Hill, dec Emery, Monty, Python, egg sausage, Egon, spa and bacon and spagon sausage and spa. They were wearing drag and they basically looked hideous. You know. It

was a kind of misogynistic take on womanhood. So they work kind of separate in many ways, And what you see now is the real success comes when people combine them in. Rupole was one of the first people to do that. She's very funny, she's very witty. As the Queen of Sauca, you lacked spice, she wants to look elegant and beautiful and megastar, but she's funny as well, So I think that's a fairly recent thing, a brilliant

combination of the two. They deride people on Rupa's drags for being, oh, she's too much of a pageant queen. So just being an air to a drawing is not enough. You have to you have to have some humanity because not everybody wants to lose themselves in the aesthetic vision, but everybody wants to have a good laugh. When you're watching RuPaul's drag race, don't you find yourself just I think I've been sitting here for forty five minutes with the biggest grin on my face, like it's the most

life affirming show. And again it's like partsipering. You cry a bit, but mostly you just laugh and you think, oh my god, this is insane. It's so fun. As of this episode's airing, there have been thirteen seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race, six seasons of Drag Race All Stars, two seasons of Drag Race UK, and spinoffs in country

like Australia, Canada, Holland, Spain and Thailand. Drag has officially become a global commercial empire, and it's now a glitzy business that's not always reflective of the more d i y drag culture you might expect to find in your local gay bars. I asked Taylor Alexander what they think of drag Race and if they'd ever do it. Have I considered drag Race, yes, because I would love to be able to do. Drag is like my full time gig, and that's just it which some people are able to

do in the city. You know, up until the pandemic, half of my income was from doing shows and doing drag, so I'm happy to get back to that soon. But what I ever do drag Race just because of the kind of like legal contractual obligations of being on Drag Race. Like recently there was this whole like expose about the latest season's contract. Provision A says, the producer has the irrevocable option to require you to appear as a participant

in one cycle of series episodes. The next provision grants the producer the additional exclusive and irrevocable options to have you appear as a participant in five additional seasons, which, by the way, it could be cycles of this series RuPaul's Drag Race or Rupau's Drag Race All Stars. And the next part signs away your rights to all of the materials in the show, including the casting tape that

you created and submitted to them. Basically, when signing this form, you're now legally obligated to participated into six seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race. I've chosen to do so. They could potentially own you basically from like four to twenty years.

They could negotiate how much you get paid, what you post on social media, what kind of merch And it's just like, I don't need that as much as I would love like a national platform to showcase my artistry and be able to like tour in whatever off of drag. It's just like being tied to a brand that I have no control over. It's just scary and also so I just think for me, I'm best doing what I

do here in the city of Atlanta. I really see myself being here for decades and kind of creating my own legacy in terms of like Drag Race and kind of like how it informed me. I'm the kind of person that's always critiquing Drag Race, but I will watch every single episode, probably like multiple times, just because you know, it's the only like big mainstream kind of representation of drag. There's like other smaller drag showcases on a bigger platform.

But I think for me, I would much rather not see people kind of competing, but more so just like highlighting the amazing drag communities that we have here in

the country. Like one of my goals eventually it's like do my own show where I travel from like a city to city and like highlight one drag show and show like their whole process of like getting into drag and why they do drag and what dragged us for their communities, and you know, I've I've done shows in like places like you know, Spartansburg, South Carolina, or like during North Carolina, which has an amazing queer community that's

way smaller than Atlanta. But the love and be affection and the intent and creating those spaces, especially for more marginalized folks in like rural, more conservative areas, I think that needs to be highlighted. As much as I love like the pageantry and the glitz and the glamor drag race, I also love like the true grit of like regularly, regular everyday drag performers. What Taylor is getting at is a question I've also thought to myself. Is drag becoming

too big? Too commercial? People used to say that about drag in the nineties, you know, so look where we are now. People always say that, Oh they said it about the counterculture, about punk, about everything. Oh it's going

to become blah blah blah, diluted commercialized. I never worry about that because people are so surprising and protein and a lot of drag queens may become very household names or you know, integrated into the culture, but there's always going to be radical ones who find new ways to be assaulted and crazy and fun and provocative. It's just

the nature of the beast. There's always going to be new ways of looking at things, like this new obsession with meticulous artistry that's become such a signature part of Drag. Now there'll be something after that that comes along keeps it alive, because this is a great form of satire, you know, and satire is sort of getting lost a bit in our culture. Good satire, but Drag Queens now, they're still good at satirizing masculinity, femininity, stupidity, political issues.

They amp it up every season that show. They find new ways to reinvent the medium and make it more extraordinary because they are very imaginative, creative people. So it's actually something I don't worry about. All I see is like magical creativity and enough to go around and easily enough to propel this movement into a new, unforeseen, extraordinary, apocalyptic craziness. I can't wait, not to quote RuPaul, but

to quote RuPaul, Drag will always be punk. I don't think that she fully believes in that in practices that on her show, but Drag will always be punking. D I Y it will always be messy, it will always be not the nicest, clean cut, you know, one and a half hour kind of production that Rupau's Drag Race is. Drag will always be for the people, by the people, and not as like nice and polished. And I think

that's beautiful. Do I think that the audiences who engage and drag have changed and will change the future absolutely, Like even like the first shows in my career, those audiences were, you know, mainly like queer and trance people, but over the years, more and more like sis gender heterosexual people are just like coming to show. I think

drag will always be kind of like nitty gritty. If Drag Race, you know, wants to continue and change and more from being a long running staple American television, I think it's going to have to go back to a certain kind of d I Y elements. I feel like Drag Race has really changed since season nine. I feel like season nine is where we saw kind of more like polished ready for TV. I'm trying to get an

Emmy Award nomination kind of producing. You know, Even like season three, season four, those were incredibly like d I Y. They were like so many challenges where they had to make their own outfits, and you know, it was so much of those based more on performance and not so much like story producing. But I really feel like the past few seasons have just gone straight into that kind of like, alright, this is a television reality show and

not so much like a drag competition show. So it'll be interesting to see how Drag Race transformed over the next few seasons, over the next few years. But I think of the drag regardless of Drag Race, has always been d i y, has always been gritty, has always been punk, and I hope they gets more punk. I would love to see. It's like, you know, mainstream note variety around drag goes up that like the kind of weirdness and quirkiness of drag just gets even more and

more visible. So we've heard what drag was during the Roman Empire, and we've heard what drag is today. So what's the common thread that ties all of these vast interpretations of the art form together. Why does drag exist in our world in our culture. Well, here's simon. I feel like drag is a visual thing. In fact, there was this theory back in the nineties that why are men drawn to the idea of cross dressing or trans vestis um or you know the millions of words that

have been used over the years. Why are men drawn to that? And there was this theory that for the twentieth century, during the twenties century, women owned what was known as the visual realm. So there is no male equivalent to Marilyn Monroe, there is no male equivalent to Gene Harlow, there is no Linda Event, Julista, Naomi Campbell. You know, they have this incredible power that just purely comes from if they show up, there's this free song,

this magical thing around women. They continue to own the visual realm. That's why you have phenomenon's like Golden Age of Hollywood, Lady Gaga, all of it. And then men wearing women's clothes was seen back then as being sort of a power grab, a very complex paragraph because it was like, I want to have that, I want to own the visual realm. I want to walk into a restaurant. Everyone's looking at me. I'm Liz Taylor, I'm Marilyn Monroe,

I'm an injury evangelista. Men used to record the motivations to where women's clothes as being this incredible sense of freedom, like I'm no longer the bread when the male burden is lifted and I get to own this visual realm that women. I think it remains to be true. I mean, I'm a gay man, but I love to look at femaleness, even if it's a drag queen. You could never build a show around a bunch of people dressing up as lumba jacks and roadwork. I don't know, maybe if it

might be fun, but never say never. But there's something about the Medusa like power. And you see on RuPaul's drag race very clearly when they walk into the workroom. At the beginning, they seem very young, very ang new, these young boys, and then suddenly the two foot taller the hair is out to hear. Drag queens are very intimidating. That's part of the deal. They grabbed the power center in the room and people love it. Taylor Alexander has

a different perspective. I think that drag has always been a way for people to not only entertain a perform for people, but to off like navigate spaces where if they were out of drag they probably would and be as accepted, which is sad to say there's a history and queer community of drag reformers often also being activists,

are also being you know, marginalized in some capacity. You know, when we think about like historical figures, we think about you know, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia rivera miss Major, so many other icons who on top of being you know, trans women and sometimes sex workers, were also drag reformers.

And so I think sometimes the history is muddled because language changes so much where people are like, oh, she was a drag queen, she wasn't a trans woman, because you know, transgender, the term that we use all the time nowadays, really didn't come into like public conversation into like the late nineties and really didn't pop off like on the internet and to like you know, the men

two thousand's early two thousand tens. And so sometimes our history gets forgotten or gets kind of muddled, or it's hard to decipher because it's hard to translate actions and identities you know, of forty fifty years ago to like

to day. Like I feel like every single month there's a new way to identify, which I think is beautiful, but it also should harken back to our past to understand that drag and gender has always meshed with each other and have always been inside of like this weird coexistence. I think that drag and gender both playing to the idea that nothing is clean cut, and I think it's one as it may seem. I think that's a beautiful thing that I think people are really starting to understand now.

I think sometimes especially with the on flaught of RuPaul's Drag Race, you know, especially those outside the community, but even inside the LGBTQ community are informed by that. So they're thinking trans people can't do drag, They're thinking trans people shouldn't be represented, and now we have this public conversation where that's completely incorrect and has never been historically accurate.

And so I think, especially with this last season the Drag Race, they're really trying to correct their previous hiccups and kind of like explaining to the public, both the queer public and the kind of like cis gender head sexual public, that drag and being trans are having a trans identity can coexist and they always have been, and anybody who tells you otherwise it's just you know, completely like uneducated. Just to end on a fun note, here's a super cut of some of the best catchphrases coined

by queens from Drag Rags. Miss Banjie, miss Banjie, Miss Sandy. Oh honey, all this shade, Honey shade comes from reading Yes, Mama boots the house down for your nerves. Work, Look out range, little girl, I'm jump I'm not joking. Let it go, tired ass, show girl, show girl. At least I am a show girl. Go back to party City where you belong, back rolls, hollo it out Party. This episode of Ephemeral was written and assembled by Trevor Young

and produced with Max and Alex Williams. Simon Dunan is the author of Drag The Complete Story, available wherever books are found, and follow Taylor Alexander on Instagram at t A Y l O R a l x n d R to keep up with all their events, including Southern Fried Queer Pride, which works to support trans and queer

people all across the Southeast. For more on everything you heard here, visit our website Ephemeral dot Show, and for more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.