Professional Judy: Drag queens and our gay history

Drag queens draw attention to the conflict between the reality of biology and the construct of gender, explains Professional Judy.

I was scrolling through Twitter (even though banned) and a story from 2015 caught my eye about drag queens being banned from a Pride march because they are considered offensive to the Gender Identity Advocates (GIA) and their project of enforced equality and inclusivity where everyone must believe, support, and express the exact same things at all times on pain of ‘getting in the sea.’

Although drag queens have been part of LGB culture since the early to mid 1900s, some feel that they are an offensive caricature of womanhood, others point out that what they’re mocking isn’t women but the gendered idea of what women should be. There are some truly excellent drag queens and drag shows (Funny Girls in Blackpool, for example) and I have also seen some excellent drag kings over the years.

I always viewed drag (queen or king) as a performative subversion of gender roles. You’re supposed to see them for what they are – a grotesque parody of men and women’s accepted roles and behaviours. For me they draw attention to the conflict between the reality of biology and the construct of gender, it is part of how we process our understanding of a world dominated by heteronormativity.

In 2015 Stonewall, an LGB advocacy group that helped win many of our sex-based rights and protections, shifted its entire world view to one that centred on Gender Identity Advocacy. No longer is being a homosexual exclusive same sex attraction, now its same gender attraction – which also includes people who are the same gender as you but are biologically of the opposite sex. I didn’t get that memo, did you?

Drag was never really the focus of my nights out, but they were an ever-present feature of the bars and clubs that I would frequent, always ready to host Play Your Cards Right at the drop of a tiara. I remember one show where half way through a stripper simulated putting his cock down one of the (un)lucky contestants’ mouths because, “you get nothing for a pair, not in the game!” No, I didn’t get the joke either. You would have drag queens circling the venue, getting slowly drunk, in flamboyant outfit, a burgundy wig, and foundation so thick you could grout your bathroom tiles with it, passing judgment on the ‘punters’ in the most acerbic and offensive way possible. You needed a thick skin.

In 2015 Stonewall, an LGB advocacy group that helped win many of our sex-based rights and protections, shifted its entire world view to one that centred on Gender Identity Advocacy. No longer is being a homosexual exclusive same sex attraction, now its same gender attraction – which also includes people who are the same gender as you but are biologically of the opposite sex. I didn’t get that memo, did you?

Our sexual orientation, we are told, is now influenced by the unknown gender identity located inside someone else’s mind. It must be very tough for partners of people who are gender fluid.

Marsha P. Johnson

Stonewall and America’s GLAAD also introduced the concept of the ‘Trans Umbrella’ and with that the now infamous trans umbrella image was created which shows drag queens as trans. This caused some conflict, some people disagree with that idea, some agree, some say that only some drag queens be included. This is a confusing but not untypical approach of the GIAs because the entire body of thought is based on subjectivity and is just one reason why they say ‘no debate.’ I wouldn’t even begin to understand the stance on cross dressers, where it seems that they’re trans unless you’re attacking a female MP on Twitter for liking the wrong tweets, at that point cross dressers are not trans and the MP is worse than Satan.

The truth is that Stonewall was probably started by a cross dressing lesbian called Stormé DeLarverie, there was no brick, and Marsha got there late.

What seems to be agreed on by the GIAs is that one particular drag queen, Marsha P. Johnson, was trans even though Marsha is on record as saying that HE was not. They say that (s)he threw the first brick at the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969, and that this is where gay people were first created (lesbians have never existed). Marsha, apparently, was responsible for all our rights that have ever been won, even the ones in 1967 in the UK. Marsha was that pivotal that when that brick was thrown it travelled across the Atlantic Ocean and time itself (at 88mph, naturally) to hit Lord Arran, Humphrey Berkeley and Leo Abse and mobilise them into action.

The truth is that Stonewall was probably started by a cross dressing lesbian called Stormé DeLarverie, there was no brick, and Marsha got there late.

It seems to me that drag queens only matter when they can be used to further a body of thought that is thoroughly anti-homosexual. A body of thought that is inspiring a movement of GIAs that seek to make us by-standers in the story of our own emancipation. That along with the offensive co-opting of the Holocaust and the HIV/AIDS crisis from the ‘80s is just another way that GIAs use our struggles and our unique culture against us.

At the end of the day, it has all become such a drag.

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