For all its glamour and fantasy, drag is a political statement, too, writes Craig Seligman
Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Dragn 1987, Doris Fish, at that time San Francisco’s reigning drag queen, had accumulated enough notoriety for a Pittsburgh TV station to fly him east for an interview on its daytime talk show. The studio audience was wide-eyed, and for good reason: Doris walked on in a red-fringed halter top, purple skirt, cobalt-blue opera-length gloves, gold platforms, and grapefruit-size earrings under a teased blonde wig.
The audience laughed appreciatively at the quip. No one, Doris included, imagined an era was on the way in which “drag queen” could be considered a profession, and a child might conceivably aspire to be one. But in fact drag queens like Doris were creating that future, perhaps without even knowing it. They thought of themselves as entertainers, not political workers. And yet, today, we can see just how much drag—for all its glamour and fantasy—was a political act.
At a time when a lot of gay people involved in the fight for equal rights were nervously trying to look as respectable as candidates going to corporate job interviews, drag queens wanted to stand out, respectability be damned. The drag shows that Doris was putting on in San Francisco, and Lypsinka, RuPaul, and the Lady Bunny in New York , Atlanta, and elsewhere, weren’t overtly political—but there’s more than one kind of politics. And they weren’t attracting just gay audiences.
Meanwhile, John Epperson’s Lypsinka was mining old movies to satirize clichés about women, and to make it clear how outmoded and damaging those clichés were. Doris and the Sluts a-Go-Go, the drag troupe he led, were doing their shows in a TV-talk-show format as a way of satirizing, and thus protesting, queer invisibility on TV. They didn’t think of themselves as pioneers, but they were setting a precedent for the now totally regular appearance of queer people in the media.
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