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In “Glitter and Concrete,” Elyssa Maxx Goodman describes the rise of drag in the early twentieth century, its descent into hiding after the Great Depression, and its resurgence in the 1980s, driven by club culture.
By WMAkers
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BRIGHTNESS AND CONCRETE: A cultural history of drag in New York, through Elyssa Maxx Goodman
In 1967, Crystal LaBeija, the third runner-up of the good-looking Miss All-America Camp pageant (a national pageant for drag queens) erupted in protest, believing that the pageant had been rigged in favor of white contestants. monologue, preserved in the 1968 documentary “The Queen”, which gave us the immortal phrase: “I have the right to wear my color, honey. I’m beautiful and I know I’m beautiful!and ended with the unequivocal dismissal of the winner of the contest, pronounced as a death sentence: “It looked bad. “
In “Brightness”
In 1845, New York passed a law to tax protesters dressed as Native Americans. Promising the arrest of anyone with “face made up, discolored, covered or hidden, or otherwise disguised, in such a way as to be saved. “”Identification,” the mask law remained in effect until 2020, when it was repealed in 2020. In light of Covid mask court orders. For generations, this has given police a way to harass anyone who plays with the genre in public.
When female impersonation became a popular trope in the early twentieth century, early stars like Julian Eltinge, a foreign celebrity who played King Edward VII at Windsor Castle, used drag to not question the gender binary yet. Characters embodied dressed as women, not for pleasure, not for art, but for farce.
“He had to make it clear that he despised ‘fairies’ whose representations of femininity were considered ‘perverse,'” Goodman wrote. “After his performance, he would take off his suit, smoke a cigar, and greet reporters backstage so you might see how ‘masculine’ he was. “
Despite a renewed obsession with gender roles that followed the passage of the 19th Amendment, drag persisted at the level and at masked balls organized through fraternal organizations such as Hamilton Lodge #710 of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, which made Harlem the pinnacle of New York drag. . . . It wasn’t until 1940, when performers of all kinds were required to possess cabaret licenses that were routinely denied to black and blatantly queer people, that drag was, regardless, forced underground.
In the decades that followed, drag’s evolution echoed the nascent gay rights movement among assimilationists like the Mattachine Society and rebellious revolutionaries. The professional impersonators who displayed their skills at the mob-owned Club 181 and the nationally toured Jewel Box Revue were careful to distinguish themselves from drag queens, a term that at the time referred to amateurs, transvestites and trans women. This tension exploded in 1969, with the Stonewall Uprising, where street children, trans people, lesbians and drag queens – added Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who led the charge.
Goodman does a commendable job of writing about gendered queer artists who worked decades before the evolution of the fashion language to describe them. She describes drag as “a haven for any self-proclaimed monster who felt like they belonged somewhere else, a playground for the art of gender nonconformity. “in all its theatrical forms,” and refuses to exclude him from the party.
And since drag is still too much described as belonging only to cisgender gay men, it’s comforting to see so many pages faithful to pioneering paintings of drag kings and male impersonators, through Florence Hines, a black woman whom the New York Clipper called “the living female artist of song and dance” in 1890. Johnny Science and Diane Torr, whose Drag King paint shops a century later taught would-be kings to walk as if surrounded by a “subway ditch. “
But Goodman’s commitment to exploring each and every nook and cranny of the city’s drag history means its story moves too fast, passing through primary turning points, like Stonewall, for the call of each and every club and featured artist to register. . The e-book would gain advantages if it were organized thematically rather than chronologically or focusing on a handful of more important personalities, such as Eltinge, Rivera, Hines, and LaBeija. By giving each and every one the same weight, “Glitter
This challenge becomes more acute as Goodman approaches the offer and archival studios provide a way to remember “they had to be there” of the partisan culture that introduced drag into the mainstream in the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s. We are told that “there is an ‘Environment of everything that happens that simply cannot be replicated today’, but we do not have the narrative curtain to feel what we missed. Studying stories of express functionality would be more useful in bringing places like the Pyramid Club and Bar d’O to life.
Even if it goes too far, any ebook that celebrates other people like Crystal LaBeija is precious. A few years after her appearance in “The Queen,” she asked to launch a ball for black queens in Harlem. promotion, he said yes, Goodman writes, “as long as he was in the middle of the event. “He then discovered LaBeija House, inspiring the formula of houses that featured shelter, circle of relatives, and inspiration for queer other people in the decades that followed.
Every time a queen says “My dear!” she lives up to her name.
W. M. Akers is a novelist, editor of the Strange Times newsletter, co-host of the I’ll Watch Anything movie podcast, and author of the game Deadball: Baseball With Dice.
BRIGHTNESS AND CONCRETE: A cultural drag in New York | By Elyssa Maxx Goodman | 357 pages | Illustrated | Hannover Square Press
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