Drag Queens and Drag Kings: The Difference Gender Makes
1. Sexualities
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Drag Queens and Drag Kings: The Difference Gender Makes
Leila J. Rupp, Verta Taylor and Eve Ilana Shapiro
Sexualities 2010 13: 275
DOI: 10.1177/1363460709352725
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3. Sexualities 13(3)
drag kings perform gender and sexuality and engage in the political work
of drag.
The panel brought together Key West drag queens Sushi, Kylie Jean
Lucille, and Gugi Gomez, and drag kings Max Madrigal, whom the drag
queens read at first as male and then persisted in calling ‘she’, and one of
us, also known as Noah Boyz. It all started off well enough with a
discussion about identity and dressing in drag, but the tension in the
room ratcheted up when Sushi, who, as her Japanese mother complained
once, ‘has no shame’, said she thought issues of gender, sexuality and
terminology should not be taken so seriously. As the story in the student
newspaper quoted her, ‘You suck cocks or you lick pussy. Who cares?
We’re all the same’ (Gonzalez, 2004: 5). She went on to say that in her
small town high school, she used to cry when she was called a ‘jap’ or
‘faggot’, but explained that now she and the other drag queens use words
such as ‘spic’ and what she called ‘the n word’ as a way of strengthening
themselves and deflecting hatred with humor and light-heartedness.
As the perceptive reporter noted, the drag kings were ‘less flamboyant
than their fellow panelists’ (Gonzalez, 2004: 5). Max, who had graduated
from the university, commented that audience members at a drag king
show should leave thinking about their own sexuality, and Noah expressed
the hope that queer audiences would explore issues of war and politics
while straight ones would contemplate gender and sexual identity. The
contrast between the drag kings and drag queens, flamboyance aside, was
striking. Although both engaged with issues of gender and race, the drag
kings were serious and overtly political, the drag queens campy and
verging on the outrageous.
In this article, we explore the differences and similarities between drag
queens and drag kings: their divergent routes to performing drag, the
different contexts and styles of their shows, and yet the similar critique of
hegemonic gender and heteronormativity that emerges from their
performances. There is a great deal of scholarship on drag queens, begin-
ning with Newton’s (1972) classic study, while research on drag kings is
still relatively new, given the fact that drag kinging became a widespread
phenomenon in the USA only in the 1990s.1 Drag queens are gay men
who perform in women’s clothing, although they are not necessarily
female impersonators, as the descriptions of the 801 Girls will make clear.
Drag kinging includes female-bodied individuals performing masculinity,
transgender identified performers performing masculinity or femininity,
and female identified individuals performing femininity, the latter known
as ‘bio queens’. We base our analysis on our two case studies: the drag
queen troupe at the 801 Cabaret in Key West, and the self-named
‘political feminist collective’ the Disposable Boy Toys (DBT), a drag
troupe based in Santa Barbara.
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4. Rupp et al. Drag Queens and Drag Kings
This is the first systematic comparison of drag queens and drag kings,
and it enhances our understanding of the gendered dynamics of drag.
Drag queens tend to engage in gender transition early in life and come to
drag in part as a resolution of gender identity issues. In contrast, drag
kings tend to rethink their gender identities as a result of doing drag. In
addition, the drag king troupe, with connections to a university
community, engaged with gender and feminist theory, which shaped their
performances and other activities in ways quite foreign to the drag queen
world of a gay bar. Nevertheless, we argue that, despite the very different
ways that members of these troupes came to drag and the different
kinds of theoretical and political consciousness they express, in their
performances both drag queens and drag kings embody resistance to the
gender structure and heteronormativity. Performing different genders in
different ways, evoking a range of sexual identities, and eliciting non-
normative sexual desires from audience members, their performances have
a similar impact on their audiences.
Theoretical framing
The existing literature on drag suggests that drag queen and drag king
performances do not critique the binary gender system in the same ways.
Some scholars view drag queens as primarily reinforcing dominant assump-
tions about the dichotomous nature of gender presentation and sexual
desire because they appropriate gender displays associated with traditional
femininity and institutionalized heterosexuality or because, despite their
performance of femininity, they embody masculine privilege (Dolan, 1985;
Frye, 1983; Gagné and Tewksbury, 1996; Schacht, 1998, 2000, 2002a,
2002b; Tewksbury, 1993, 1994). Others, influenced by the writings of
queer theory, argue that drag queen performances are transgressive actions
that destabilize gender and sexual categories by making visible the social
basis of femininity and masculinity, heterosexuality and homosexuality, and
presenting hybrid and minority genders and sexualities (Butler, 1990,
1993; Garber, 1992; Lorber, 1994, 1999; Muñoz, 1999; Rupp and Taylor,
2003). The concept of gender performativity in queer theory (Butler,
1990, 1993; Garber, 1992; Muñoz, 1999) implies that the theatrical
performance of gender is a form of resistance that undermines the assumed
connections among gender, sex, and (hetero)sexuality (Moloney and
Fenstermaker, 2002). For Butler, traditional gender loses some its claim to
naturalness and authenticity through drag, which uses parody to reveal the
fundamentally performative nature of gender. The literature on whether
drag affirms or contests hegemonic gender is not, however, entirely polar-
ized, as suggested by the work of Schacht (2002a), who argues that drag
queens represent ‘a masculine embodiment of the feminine’ and the
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5. Sexualities 13(3)
‘homosexual embodiment of the heterosexual’, in the process ‘realizing
masculine authority and power’ (2002a, 173, 174).
In contrast to scholarship on drag queens, the emerging literature on
drag kinging, shaped by queer theory (Halberstam, 1998; Murray, 1994;
Shapiro, 2006, 2007; Troka et al., 2002; Volcano and Halberstam, 1999)
emphasizes the intentional challenge to binary gender and sexual
identities embodied in the performances of drag king troupes. The first-
person narratives in The Drag King Anthology (Troka et al., 2002)
explicitly refer to the work of gender and queer theorists to analyze their
performances, and the articles by scholars are in agreement that drag
kinging – whether performances of traditional masculinity, female
masculinity, gay male masculinity, or femininity – subverts binary
concepts of gender and heteronormativity.
In order to understand the differences and similarities between gay male
drag queens and female-bodied and transgender drag kings and bio queens,
we consider how the personal gender and sexual identities of drag per-
formers affect and are affected by their gender performances in drag. This
question can only be addressed by examining the biographies and the
sexual and gender identifications and embodiments of individual drag
performers – by telling gender and ‘sexual stories’ (Plummer, 1995). In
this article, we argue that the transgressive personal gender and sexual iden-
tities of drag queens and drag kings influence and are influenced by the
performance of drag and are key to understanding the boundary – and
identity – deconstructive potential of drag. In making this argument, we
are attentive to the interconnections between gender and sexual identities.
We heed the warnings of Valentine (2003) and Valocchi (2005), who both
argue, in different ways, that separating the concepts of gender identity and
sexual identity can obscure the desires of individuals whose identities are
more complex. To understand the multiple layering of gender, sex, and
sexuality that takes place in drag means asking whether an effeminate gay
man performing femininity who is attracted to straight masculine men or
a masculine lesbian who desires transmen breach the categories of hetero-
sexuality and homosexuality. What do expressions of desire by individuals
with such complicated identities say about the intersections of gender and
sexuality? We turn to our ethnographies of drag queen and drag king
communities to understand the complexities of gender and sexual ident-
ities, the messages that drag performances impart to audiences, and the
transgressive power of ‘queering’ gender and sexuality through drag.
Methods
Both of our case studies made use of multiple qualitative methods. Data
on the drag queens is based on research in Key West from 1998 to 2001.
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6. Rupp et al. Drag Queens and Drag Kings
The 801 Cabaret is a popular drag bar in a gay-friendly tourist town,
where a troupe of full-time drag queens lip-synch to recorded music every
night of the year to a mixed audience of men and women, tourists and
locals, queer and straight people, making at best a rather marginal living.
The research involved observing, tape-recording and transcribing 50 drag
performances, including the dialogue, music and audience interactions,
collecting data on the production of the performances by attending
weekly drag queen meetings, observing the performers in their dressing
room, conducting semi-structured life histories of 12 performers, and
remaining connected to the drag queens and the field setting after
completion of the original research. The interviewees include one Asian
American, one Puerto Rican, one Swedish immigrant, and nine native
born Whites, ranging in age from 18 to 60 years, although the majority
were in their late 20s and early 30s. Our analysis of audience responses is
based on 12 focus groups, ranging in size from 2 to 12 participants, with
audience members who attended the performances and agreed to come
back the following day to talk about the show. The focus groups consisted
of 40 people, exactly half women and half men and more than two-thirds
identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transsexual. In addition, informal
conversations with 50 audience members at the shows added to the data
on audience response, as did coverage in the local newspapers.2
Data on the drag kings are based on research on the Disposable Boy
Toys (DBT) between its debut in 2000 and its retirement in 2004. Over
its lifetime, DBT grew from a five-person drag king group to a self-titled
‘political feminist collective’. With connections to academic feminism and
queer theory, group members lip-synched and danced to numbers that
conveyed messages about sexism, racism, body size, and militarism, as well
as gender and sexuality. Performances explicitly critiqued binary categories
of masculinity/femininity and gay/straight through numbers about trans-
sexual, genderqueer, and fluid identities, queer desire, and transgressive
masculinities and femininities (such as masculine women and feminine
men). Performances took place in queer spaces as well as at straight
progressive events. Between 2002 and 2004, we conducted and tran-
scribed semi-structured interviews with 28 of 31 current and past
members. Participants ranged in age from 17 to 34, with 23 identifying
as White, one as Black, one as Asian/Pacific Islander, and three as multi-
racial. Participants described coming from or living in a range of class
positions from poor to upper middle class. The study also involved the
analysis of documents from DBT and from an annual conference called
the International Drag King Extravaganza. In addition, content analysis
of 200 hours of video-recorded drag performances from DBT and partici-
pant observation at meetings, rehearsals, workshops, and performances
added to the data.3
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7. Sexualities 13(3)
Although neither the 801 Girls nor the Disposable Boy Toys can be
taken as representative of all drag queens and drag kings, neither are they
unique. Both perform a style of drag that can be found throughout the
USA and around the world.4 In this article, we use the drag names and
the pronouns of choice of the performers. The drag kings were more
likely to match pronouns to gender of presentation than the drag queens,
who in everyday life switch back and forth between masculine and
feminine pronouns.
Gender identity and coming to drag
The drag queens and drag kings we studied came to drag in dramatically
different ways, a result of both the different historical context of drag
queening and drag kinging as well as the different social locations of the
economically marginal gay male drag queens and the university-connected
drag kings. For the drag queens, gender transgression and same-sex sexual
desire played an important role in how they came to do drag.5 Beginning
even before their early teens, the Key West drag queens began to engage
in gender transgression through dressing in feminine or androgynous
clothing, experimenting with make-up, and playing with what would
conventionally be seen as ‘girls’ toys’. Several of the 801 Girls tell stories
about dressing in their mothers’ clothes when they were boys. Milla, who
grew up working-class in Saint Petersburg, Florida, would wait until his
parents went out and snatch his mother’s clothes out of her closet. Scabola
Feces, whose name makes clear his lack of interest in traditional female
impersonation, claimed that he would dress in his mother’s outfits and
walk down the street to a store to buy cigarettes. Gugi Gomez, a Puerto
Rican from Chicago, also enjoyed wearing his mother’s clothes. Milla
connected his desire to wear women’s clothing to wanting to distance
himself from his abusive father. Gugi just felt more comfortable dressed
as a girl, since he wanted to be one.
All of the drag queens reported some elements of effeminacy growing
up. Milla and R.V. Beaumont, who performs as Bette Midler, both played
with their sisters’ Barbies, and Scabby liked to pretend to be a girl. R.V.
says his preference for girls’ toys meant that his mother ‘knew when I was
a kid what I was going to be’. Drag also began in the use of flamboyant
dressing as a masquerade or disguise that allowed the drag queens to
create a new identity that they could put on and take off. Kylie Jean
Lucille, who performs as a California valley girl, and Sushi, the Japanese
American house queen, grew up as best friends in Oregon in the 1980s,
and both began by imitating Boy George. At first it was just about having
fun, becoming another person, and doing crazy things. Sushi’s mother
reported that he would leave for school dressed in normal clothes and
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8. Rupp et al. Drag Queens and Drag Kings
then change into an outfit made up of his father’s pajamas and her
kimono, prompting a call from the school principal. By his senior year,
Sushi was, in his own words, a ‘flaming queen’, wearing full makeup and
platform shoes. Kylie describes their dressing up as starting out as flam-
boyance but ending up as dressing in women’s clothes.
While Newton (1972) also finds a history of cross-dressing at early ages
among the drag queens she studied, our interviews suggest that same-sex
desire and identifying as gay were even more important in the adoption
of a drag queen identity. Like the Brazilian travestís researched by Kulick
(1998), desire for men when young was what they described as the critical
factor in becoming drag queens. Inga, a towering blonde from Sweden,
said matter-of-factly that she started to do drag because of ‘coming out
being gay’. Most of the drag queens responded to the question of how
they began to dress in drag by telling us of their first sexual experiences
with boys or men. Scabby responded that he had always been gay, always
attracted to men, and told a story about kissing another boy in kinder-
garten. Milla ‘always knew what I liked, which was I knew I liked boys’.
‘I’ve always known I was gay. I always knew I was attracted to men,’
reported Gugi.
Of course not all gay men react to their experience of same-sex desire
by getting into drag. What emerged in the drag queens’ stories is that, for
them, drag is related to their desire for straight men, or straight-seeming
traditionally masculine men. Sushi connects this to a sense of being trans-
gendered. Her desire to become a woman and her decision to pass as a
woman for over a year she says is because ‘I wanted to have what men
want, I wanted a pussy’. She thought, ‘“Oh my god, I look like such a
woman, maybe I am a woman” and it sort of confused me’. Now she
describes herself as ‘some place in between’ a woman and a man, ‘I know
I’m a drag queen, I finally realized that’. Yet Kylie thinks Sushi still ‘has
a struggle . . . whether she should be a woman or a man’. Sometimes Sushi
identifies as transgendered. Watching a television show one night about
transgenderism, Sushi had a very emotional reaction, feeling that she was
really a closeted transgendered person, not a drag queen. But mostly she
just identifies as a drag queen, even though she says ‘it’s not that I realized
I was a drag queen, I learned how to become a drag queen’.
Gugi also connects doing drag to being transgendered. She feels
‘feminine’ and says she always wanted to be a woman. But, like Sushi, she
knows that, at least in part, she wanted to be a woman because she is
attracted to men. She took hormones for a while and stayed in drag all
the time, going to the straight end of town to pick up men. She admits
she would love getting breasts. But she herself is not clear how much this
is because she wants to be a woman compared to wanting to be desired
by (straight) men.
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9. Sexualities 13(3)
Milla, like Sushi, passed as a woman for over a year. She took hormones
and seriously considered sex-reassignment surgery. But she came to realize
that she was running away from herself, although she also loved the atten-
tion of men. She would go out dressed as a woman and ‘just have the men
fall over, all over me, and with no clue, no clue’. Others never thought of
themselves as transgendered, feminine, or women. As a young gay
teenager in New York in the 1950s, Margo read about Christine
Jorgensen’s famous transformation from a man to a woman, and it scared
him. ‘I did not want to be a woman, and here it is in the paper that this
may be what I have to do’.
Despite the gender-transgressive experiences of many of the 801 Girls,
none at the time of the research identified as transgendered. Later, the
troupe came to include Colby Kincaid, a ‘tittie queen’ who had breast
implants but kept her penis, and Baby D, an 18-year-old on hormones
who was saving for sex-reassignment surgery. There was a lot of discussion
about Colby; Kylie thought that she was not a real drag queen because of
her breasts and did not belong in the show. In a conversation about the
book with the drag queens, Margo commented on how much more they
had learned about ‘the transgender thing’ since the book came out (Rupp
and Taylor, 2005). And even transgender sensibility does not always, for
the drag queens, translate into real understanding of transgenderism as an
identity, as is clear from our description of the drag queens’ confusion
about the gender identity of the drag kings at the panel discussion in Santa
Barbara. Since that event Sushi met one of the drag kings, now a transman
with top but not bottom surgery, and expressed shock at the idea of a man
without a penis.
In contrast to the drag queens, the drag kings tended to experience
identity transformation as a result of performing as a drag king, although
many were butch or masculine women before joining the troupe. But it
was not gender identity that attracted them to drag; rather, they joined in
search of queer community, performance opportunities, and time with
friends who were already involved. Yet doing drag in the Disposable Boy
Toys fostered gender shifts – both coming to a new gender identity and
defining or understanding a pre-existing gender identity in new ways – for
most members. When they joined DBT, almost all participants thought
of themselves simply as female; only two members identified as trans-
gender and one as genderqueer. By the time of the interviews, however,
almost half of members identified themselves as ‘genderqueer’, ‘FTM’
(female-to-male), or ‘transgender’ instead of only as female. The term
‘genderqueer’ claimed an identity outside of the male/female binary,
‘FTM’ signified moving from a female to male gender or sex, and ‘trans-
gender’ referred to a wide range of gender non-conformity, including
genderqueer and FTM identities. As the complexity of these identities
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10. Rupp et al. Drag Queens and Drag Kings
suggests, the drag kings also moved in a world shaped by exposure to
queer theory and activism.
For Mike Hawk, a member who was working as an administrative
assistant at the university and came to identify as transgender during his
participation, DBT was a place of discovery around his own gender.
I wasn’t out as trans when I joined DBT or when I started getting interested,
but there was something about going in drag that was really appealing and
something about being in this male character that was comfortable for me. [I
was] able to experience this other gender, this male gender that now I under-
stand was fitting my identity, but at the time I didn’t really understand that.
In addition to members who came to identify with masculine gender
identities, female members understood their normative-appearing
feminine identities in new ways.
All members, including those who felt that they had made conscious and
deliberate choices about their gender presentations prior to DBT, never-
theless came to think deeply about gender. For some feminine members
the community and culture of DBT opened up new identities. Venus Envy,
an undergraduate student at UC Santa Barbara, began DBT feeling
securely woman identified, but over time, ‘I came to identify as femme and
I came to be very butch femme oriented when I was never that way before.
It definitely had to do with the troupe dynamics’. Dylan, who joined as an
undergraduate and remained femme identified, described a similar shift in
self-understanding, elaborating that ‘when I started doing drag I realized
there were so many questions I hadn’t even dared to ask myself and so
many things that I hadn’t tried or been open to at all’. What these
comments by Venus Envy and Dylan reflect, and what many other
members expressed, is that participants’ understanding of how they could
be gendered broadened beyond the academic understanding they brought
to drag kinging through doing drag with DBT.
The more nuanced gender identities that members came to embrace
were reflected in a linguistic shift away from the language of male and
female to a continuum of masculinity and femininity. For example, when
describing how DBT affected him Rian Hunter, a member who began
DBT female-identified and became transgender-identified over time,
reflected that, ‘I am more ambiguous, more whatever, I just am who
I am . . . you don’t have to be in a box about anything’. Instead of
accepting normative genders, members described specific and complex
identities. For example, femininities might be ‘chosen’, ‘proud’, and ‘trans-
gressive’, expressed as ‘radical femininity’, ‘femme’, ‘genderqueer-femme’,
‘androgynous female’ and ‘de facto female’.
An even more striking expansion happened around masculinities. As
more members identified as transgender or genderqueer, they claimed
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11. Sexualities 13(3)
labels such as ‘butch’, ‘ambiguous masculinity’, ‘masculine female’ and
‘female-to-male transsexual’. As part of their broadening of female
masculinities, some participants drew connections to histories of butch-
ness, while others thought that continuing to call themselves ‘women’ was
a political act. Nate Prince, an undergraduate butch Asian Pacific Islander,
talked about a solo performance he created to female vocals. ‘I did the
India Arie song [Video] to say I don’t wear pantyhose, I don’t shave my
legs all of the time, and I don’t look like a supermodel but I’m still a
woman. I wore my boxers and [men’s undershirt] and showed here are
ways to be a woman.’
The political feminist ideology of the group manifested as an effort to
resist binary gender classifications. Often, members had to be pushed to
name a singular gender identity, and then they generally qualified these
namings with caveats such as, ‘If I have to choose’, or ‘I guess I am’.
Throughout their discussions of identity, DBT members talked about
gender as constructed and intentionally chosen rather than natural, and
made sense of their own changes as outcomes of participation in DBT.
Summer’s Eve, a graduate student and bio queen, noted: ‘We joke in
DBT about drag being the gateway drug for gender regardless of what
that gender is. Some members came into a masculine butch, some
members came into a female identified butch, and some members came
into fiercely femme.’
What is striking is that participation in DBT facilitated self-reflexivity
about gender identity at a very high level, which led to significant changes
in the identities members claimed. The drag queens did not experience
the same kind of questioning about gender as a result of their perform-
ances; rather, gender transgression played an important part in bringing
them to drag, but they did not develop the same kind of complicated
gender identities and analysis. This is no doubt in part, at least, because
of the different histories of drag queens and drag kings in the gay and
lesbian community. Young men who have feminine tendencies have a
readily available model – drag queens – that they can embrace, even
though the sanctions imposed on men who wear women’s clothing under
normal circumstances are far more severe than those applied to women
who adopt masculine attire. Drag, through its association with camp,
has historically been an assertion of gay existence. Drag kinging is a
relatively recent phenomenon, although there is of course a long
history of masculinity associated with female same-sex desire, including
gender-crossing women and butch/fem communities (Feinberg. 1996;
Halberstam, 1998; Kennedy and Davis. 1993; Rupp, 2009). In any case,
these different positions – a visceral response to effeminacy and sexual
desire versus a theoretically sophisticated critique of gender – lead to
contrasting modes of performing gender and sexuality.
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12. Rupp et al. Drag Queens and Drag Kings
Performing gender and sexuality
DBT shows reflected the theoretical sophistication and political
consciousness of the collective. Although the troupe did not start with a
political or feminist focus, many of the members were graduate students
with knowledge of feminist and queer theory. As Jake Danger, a graduate
student and one of the founders who identified as genderqueer
commented, ‘Looking back on it I can say unconsciously there were all
of these notions of politics, I mean I was interested in politics, I was
writing about Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam and theories of gender
and performativity.’ Discussion about gender theory among both
academic and non-academic members helped participants challenge
normative beliefs about gender as static and biologically based. Partici-
pants used the language of performativity to talk about all gender presen-
tations, regardless of whether they occurred on stage or off. For example,
in a public statement about the validity of feminine performances made
at the third International Drag King Extravaganza, three DBT members
asserted that bio queens
perform various kinds of femininities and female genders – from heterosexual
housewives to working dominatrixes – which are not equivalent to our ‘real life’
identities. Our gender performances may resemble or be connected in some way
to our gender identities off stage, but they are valid performances nonetheless.
This description is, at its core, a declaration of the social construction of
femininity by female identified individuals. Discussions within DBT about
performativity, coupled with drag performances, gave members new
conceptual tools to make sense of gender identity as socially constructed
and mutable.
Verbal and performed challenges to the gender binary played a central
part in DBT numbers. Shows usually began with a statement about DBT
as a political feminist collective from the group’s emcee, a tall, striking bio
queen, Summer’s Eve. In DBT’s rendition of Sweetest Perfection by
Depeche Mode, a drag king and bio queen moved back and forth between
masculinity and femininity in an intricate flirtation. At the end, lip-
synching, ‘The sweetest perfection/To call my own/The slightest cor-
rection/Couldn’t finely hone/ The sweetest infection/Of body and
mind/Sweetest injection/Of any kind’, the bio-queen pulled up her skirt
to stroke boy’s underwear stuffed with a sock and the drag king wrapped
himself in a feminine scarf. Slow and sexy, this crowd favorite eroticized
gender fluidity and non-normative gender presentations. Another popular
DBT number explicitly addressed the issue of coming out as transgender.
Created by a member who had just embraced the identity of transgender
himself, Unwell by Matchbox 20 told the story of a transgender person
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13. Sexualities 13(3)
triumphing over familial and social rejection. As the protagonist resisted
these forces he sang, ‘I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell/I know right
now you can’t tell/But stay awhile and maybe then you’ll see/A differ-
ent side of me’. By performing such a wide range of gender identities –
transgender, genderqueer, butch, femme, as well as hegemonic male and
female identities – DBT eroticized gender fluidity and non-normative
gender presentations in ways consistent with queer theory.
The drag queens, in contrast, do not come to their performances from
an understanding of queer theory, but in different ways they raise ques-
tions about the ‘naturalness’ of gender and sexual identity. They are not
female impersonators: although they sometimes look like beautiful
women, they announce from the start that they are gay men, they talk in
men’s voices, they make jokes about their large clitorises and ‘manginas’,
and they interact with audience members in an aggressively sexual way
that is more masculine than feminine. Some do not even shave their legs
or underarms or tuck their genitals. Inga was often introduced as ‘Inga
with a pinga’, and Milla sometimes appeared with a dildo gripped in her
crotch, calling attention to the real item tucked away. Sushi occasionally
pulled down her dress and bra to reveal her male chest, and then she even
took to flashing her penis on stage. In some performances she stripped
entirely behind a white sheer curtain but kept her genitals tucked between
her legs as she backed off stage, presenting what the drag kings would call
a ‘gender-queer’ body. For the final number of the weekend shows, R.V.
changed out of drag on stage to the Charles Aznevour ballad, ‘What
Makes a Man a Man?’ transforming himself from woman to man. And a
regular feature of the Saturday night ‘Girlie Show’ is Kylie stripping
entirely to ‘Queen of the Night’, leaving the audience with the contrast
between her blond wig, makeup, high heels, and well-hung body.
These are the ways the drag queens educate their audiences about the
performativity of gender.
The drag queens also work to undermine the divide between hetero-
sexual and homosexual by deliberately working to arouse desires outside
audience members’ claimed sexual identities. A central part of the show
involved bringing audience members on stage to represent different sexual
identity categories. The drag queens called for a straight man, a gay man,
a straight woman, and a lesbian, sometimes a bisexual or transsexual. While
this seems to affirm the boundaries of sexual desire, the intent of the drag
queens was quite the opposite. First of all, they allowed a great deal of
latitude in who represented what categories, and audience members played
with the categories, so that gay men called out that they were lesbians and
straight women played lesbian for a night. And then, once on stage, the
girls arranged the couples in positions simulating sex acts, the two women
as the drag queens say ‘bumping pussy’ and the gay man on his back with
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14. Rupp et al. Drag Queens and Drag Kings
the straight man crouched over his pelvis. By asking presumably straight
audience members to enact queer sex acts, and by encouraging them to
‘try it, you might like it’, they contest heteronormativity.
The drag queens also move out into the audience, hoping to arouse
men they identify as straight by touching and fondling them. One night
a straight couple got in a fight because the man got an erection when
Sushi caressed his penis. A straight woman tourist, on the other hand,
loved when the girls fondled her husband. ‘It’s like here’s this man
touching my husband, it’s like really cool. And he’s standing there letting
him.’ She found this the ‘sexiest’ part of the show, ‘there was something
crackling the most’. Her husband described his own response: ‘I’m sitting
there and there’s a little bit of me saying, ‘This is sexually exciting’ and
there’s another part of me saying, ‘Wait a minute, don’t do this. You’re
not supposed to be sexually excited, this is a man . . . .’ At one show, a
very macho young man there with his girlfriend took one look at Sushi
and confided in us, ‘I could do her’. The drag queens report that often
when straight men approach them after the show, they are interested in
taking the insertee rather than inserter role in sexual encounters.
And it is not just straight men who experience sexual desires outside
their claimed identities. A lesbian woman described feeling very attracted
to Milla: ‘She was so sexy’, and a straight woman agreed, commenting
that ‘I was very drawn to her sexually. I felt like kissing her. And I’m not
gay at all’. Another straight woman ‘started falling in love with’ Milla and
announced, ‘I want to make love with her’. Straight women in the bar
sometimes take to kissing and fondling each other during the shows.
From different vantage points, then, the drag kings and drag queens
perform in ways that underscore the social construction of gender and
sexuality. The drag kings very consciously and deliberately invoke queer
theory and the perspectives of the transgender movement, raising ques-
tions about what is ‘real’ beneath the costumes. The drag queens play with
categories of gender and sexuality out of their own histories and desires,
but they announce that they are gay men with intact male genitalia. They
transgress in different ways, sending different messages about what queer
genders and sexualities look like. But both, in the process, contest binary
gender and heteronormativity.
Queering gender and sexuality
As the name ‘political feminist collective’ makes clear, the Disposable Boy
Toys were very explicit about their intersectional politics and performed
numbers with the intention of challenging their audiences not only on
issues of gender and sexuality but race, class, body size, and war, to name
just a few. Because of the connection of DBT to academic feminism and
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15. Sexualities 13(3)
queer theory, the troupe developed a consciously anti-racist perspective,
leading them not to perform numbers in which White performers lip-
synched to songs by musicians of color. As a result, some members of the
Santa Barbara community, as well as DBT members of color, critiqued
the troupe’s repertoire as ‘too White’. Presentations of gender and sexual
fluidity were central to their performances. Kentucky Fried Woman, a
graduate student who joined as a bio queen and remained femme-
presenting, drew on the troupe’s understanding of gender as always
performative to make sense of gender transgression – what she and others
called a genderqueer identity – as intentional gender play. She stated:
I believe that me and the people I perform with . . . my friends, my community,
we’re gender outlaws. We refuse to be placed in a box that says this is what
we’re born as, this is what we are. We play with it. And the more we play with
it the more I feel like the fucked up foundations that our whole society is built
on are going to crumble.
Regardless of outward gender presentation, identifying as a gender outlaw
became a political act through resistance to hegemonic gender norms.
Although our research did not explicitly explore the impact of drag king
performances on audiences, the connections between audience members
and performers – especially in local queer venues – were close enough to
know something about audience reaction to the political messages of drag
kinging. As Bill Dagger, an African American graduate student who
identified as a genderqueer butch dyke, explained, DBT ‘gives a way for
the audience to express desire towards people that they might otherwise
not be inclined to express in public’. In contrast to the drag queens, who
engaged in sexual touching and fondling as a way to arouse unaccustomed
desires, the drag kings developed a critique of such practices. At the same
time, they recognized the potential of the kind of tactics embraced by the
drag queens. As Summer’s Eve explained, gay men in the audience were
sometimes turned on by butch members on stage.
Sometimes it was really inappropriate; they were very grabby and touchy in ways
that were just appalling to some of our members. But it was also very interest-
ing and fascinating to see these guys who are so about the cult of masculinity.
That gets troubled when you get a hard-on for a drag king and you know that
the plumbing up there isn’t the plumbing that you desire . . . I would say that
DBT has been a force for counteracting misogyny in the queer community.
Roman Hands, a graduate student who joined as transgender-identified,
put it this way:
When DBT performs for an audience . . . there is a certain amount of eroticism
of us by the audience [and this] pushes their boundaries . . . When you put two
people up on stage and they are both performing a gay male persona, one of
them may live their life as a woman and one of them as a gay man. [What
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16. Rupp et al. Drag Queens and Drag Kings
happens when] someone in the audience is attracted to both of them and that
person thought they were straight? It makes people question themselves and
any of the strict biases and prejudices they have in their head because they see
it in themselves, then.
From an entirely different perspective, the drag queens also challenge
hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity. Although none of them
have read Judith Butler, they, too, get across to audiences the per-
formativity of gender and the fluidity of sexuality, race and ethnicity. They
see themselves as challenging their audiences and raising consciousness.
As Milla put it, ‘We are attractive to everybody. We have taken gender and
thrown it out of the way, and we’ve crossed a bridge here. And when we
are all up there, there is no gay/straight or anything.’ Race, ethnicity, and
class are also explicit in their performances, but in a complicated way. On
the one hand, the drag queens deploy the tradition of camp humor, which
can be read as self-denigrating and incompatible with assertions of gay
pride (Newton, 1972). Sushi, for example, asked the audience to call her
a ‘nip’, ‘gook’, and ‘chink’ and deliberately played on stereotypes of Asian
sexuality, and Destiny identified as ‘white trash’ while performing Harper
Valley PTA. On the other hand, the drag queens embrace a more fluid
conception of race and ethnicity when they engage in what Robertson
(1988) calls ‘cross-ethnicking’: Gugi performed as Cuban or Mexican as
well as Puerto Rican, and Milla, whom the other girls called a ‘Black
woman trapped in a White male body’, favored numbers by Black women.
The strategies of both the drag queens and drag kings – with profoundly
different theoretical foundations – called attention to racial, ethnic and
class difference, appealing to some audience members but not others.
And in fact, as focus group members made clear, their message got
across. One gay man concluded that the labels of ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, like
‘man’ and ‘woman’, just do not fit: ‘You leave them at the door’. Said
another, the drag queens are ‘challenging the whole idea of gender and
so forth and they’re breaking that down’. A straight male tourist put it
this way: ‘I think that one of the beauties of attending a show like this is
that you do realize that you . . . shouldn’t walk out and say, “I only like
men”, and you shouldn’t say “I only like women”, and it all kind of blends
together a lot more so than maybe what we want to live in our normal
daily lives.’
Despite fundamental differences between the drag queens and drag
kings, both troupes make a real impact on people’s thinking about the
boundaries of gender and sexuality. They bring people together, blur the
lines of gender, and arouse unaccustomed sexual desires. The drag kings
consciously embody a queer theory perspective, but the drag queens,
without the language of social constructionism or gender performativity,
trouble gender and sexuality in similar ways.
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17. Sexualities 13(3)
Conclusion
As the events at the UC Santa Barbara panel discussion with which we
opened this article make clear, drag queens and drag kings do not always
see eye-to-eye. The 801 Girls do not quite know what to make of drag
kings, and drag kings often view drag queens as misogynist. When DBT
was first emerging, the troupe often performed with local drag queens,
sometimes to the dismay of the kings. Earl remembered thinking, ‘Holy
shit, are they going to just make fun of women all night?’ Yet despite the
very real differences – the different histories and trajectories of coming to
drag, the different theoretical foundations, the different styles of per-
formance – the intent of the shows and the potential impact of drag queen
and drag king performances have something in common.
For young men like Sushi and Milla and Gugi, ‘drag queen’ as a
potential identity allowed them a place between man and woman and to
assert their gay identity. Male effeminacy is more stigmatized in US society
than female masculinity, so the world of drag queens has long provided a
haven for men with the desire to perform femininity, on stage and off.
Although neither female masculinity nor female drag are new, drag king
communities are a recent development, so they do not play the same kind
of function for masculine women. Rather than attracting individuals who
were in the process of exploring their gender identities, we found that
DBT sparked among its lesbian membership the reconceptualization of
gender identities. Drag kinging is in many places closely connected to
university communities, bringing theoretical perspectives on gender and
sexuality and an intersectional political consciousness to drag perform-
ances, but not offering an easy access to a range of individuals as does the
older and more common venue of the drag queen bar.
Nevertheless, both the theoretically grounded, feminist and explicitly
political numbers of the drag kings and the sometimes raunchy and in-
your-face tactics of the drag queens create new gender and sexual
possibilities through their challenge to hegemonic gender and hetero-
normativity. Both troupes use entertainment as a means of education, both
create solidarity among queer audience members. And both allow us to see
the ways that consciously performed gender has the potential to change
both the performers and their audiences, perhaps even to dismantle rigid
and binary gender and sexual categories and subvert heteronormativity.
Thinking about the difference gender makes in intentional performances
of femininity and masculinity and the acting out of complex sexual desires
can also help us to understand the significance of doing gender and
sexuality in everyday life for challenging the gender and sexual system.
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18. Rupp et al. Drag Queens and Drag Kings
Notes
1. Newton (1972); (see also Butler, 1990, 1993; Dolan, 1985; Frye, 1983;
Gagné and Tewksbury, 1996; Garber, 1992; Halberstam, 1998; Lorber,
1994, 1999; Muñoz, 1999; Rupp and Taylor 2003; Schacht, 1998, 2000,
2002a, 2002b; Tewksbury, 1993, 1994). The literature on drag kings
includes Halberstam (1998), Murray (1994), Shapiro (2006), Troka et al.
(2002).
2. A full description of the study can be found in Rupp and Taylor 2003.
3. A full description of the study can be found in Shapiro 2006.
4. Although some drag queens are female impersonators who maintain the
illusion of femaleness throughout their performances, the literature on drag
queens, our own observations of drag in different locations, and focus group
research with audience members makes clear that the 801 style of drag is a
common alternative to female impersonation. DBT was part of a national and
international drag king community, as reflected in the annual International
Drag King Extravaganza held in Columbus, Ohio.
5. This discussion is based on Taylor and Rupp 2004.
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Biographical Notes
Leila J. Rupp is Professor of Feminist Studies and Associate Dean of Social
Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is co-author, with
Verta Taylor, of Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret (2003) and Survival in the
Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1987)
and author of A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Sexuality in America
(1999), Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement
(1997), and Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda,
1939–1945 (1978). Her most recent book is Sapphistries: A Global History of
Love Between Women (2009). Address: Department of Feminist Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106–7110.
[email: lrupp@femst.ucsb.edu]
Verta Taylor is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. She is co-author with Leila J. Rupp of
Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret (University of Chicago Press) and Survival in
the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s
(Oxford University Press); co-editor of 8 editions of Feminist Frontiers; and
author of Rock-a-by Baby: Feminism, Self-Help and Postpartum Depression
(Routledge). Her articles have appeared in journals including The American
Sociological Review, Signs, Social Problems, Mobilization, Gender & Society,
Qualitative Sociology, Journal of Women’s History and Journal of Homosexuality.
Address: Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa
Barbara, CA 93106–9430. [email: vtaylor@soc.ucsb.edu]
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21. Sexualities 13(3)
Eve Shapiro, an Assistant Professor at Westfield State College, received her PhD
from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, with a PhD certificate in Women’s Studies. Her research is guided by a
theoretical and empirical interest in how individuals and communities respond
to social change. Eve’s study of drag kings has been published in Gender &
Society as well as in several edited volumes. Her book Gender Circuits: Bodies
and Identities in a Technological Age (2010) explores the impact of new
biomedical and information technologies on the gendered lives of individuals.
Eve Shapiro is also Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Gender and Society
(2008). Address: Department of Sociology, Westfield State College, Westfield,
MA 01086, 413–572–5385. [email: eshapiro@wsc.ma.edu]
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