One of the most regrettable things about the last decade of general cultural awfulness has been the politicisation and sexualisation of drag. The crude and frequently obvious art of blokes dolled up in women’s clobber has been a golden thread running through British comedy for centuries, from Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor to Jack Duckworth as Ida Fagg in Coronation Street. Now, like everything else we used to enjoy, it’s wrapped up in the suffocating shroud of American identity politics. Astonishingly, drag is regularly referred to as a way for a man to find his ‘authentic self’. This surely is the opposite of its primal function – to dress up as something you are evidently not, for a giggle.
We have to suffer the instant ‘tradition’ of Drag Queen Story Hour, where said entertainers visit school libraries to raise awareness of something or other – it’s not clear exactly what – to tiny tots. This is another bad thing we have imported from the US, like critical race theory and Paramount Plus. (We never seem to get any of its good things, like casual friendliness or Stove Top stuffing.) As with so much of the cultural onslaught, the barely concealed true aim of Drag Queen Story Hour seems to be the goading of conservatives. Just another land grab.
But hang on. Until this shift happened, fairly recently, comedic cross dressing was innocently enjoyed by the British public at large as harmless, meaningless fun, especially at Christmas. Pantomime dames are one of the very last, very faint atavistic traces of the medieval tradition of Carnival, with its ‘king for a day’ inversion of categories.
When the subject of Drag Queen Story Hour comes up in discussion, one point raised by its proponents is that a drag queen is no different from the pantomime dame, with a similar audience of young children. But this is overlooking a vital distinction.
Panto is a specialised art form with its own arcane rules and traditions. These include the panto dame, who (like the principal ‘boy’) is a sexless comedy character, all ‘Whoops, my bloomers!’ and accidental innuendo that goes over the heads of the kids and delights their parents. There is a marked contrast between the traditional Ugly Sister and Nathan Mullen aka ‘Flow Job’, the drag queen who was hired to read stories to primary school children in Paisley. Mullen posted pictures of the visit to his Instagram account, which also featured images of him with a ball-shaped bondage gag in his mouth and posing with a sex toy. I can’t see Widow Twankey doing that.
Here we have the nub of it. Drag is an adult flavour. You need a full adult understanding of adult sex stereotypes to understand what is being subverted. Panto dames are children’s characters. Drag queens are not. It’s the same difference as there is between Father Christmas and a big old leather bear in chaps and chains. We don’t want Drag Queen Story Hour, for the same reason we don’t need or want Pole Dancer Play Time or Striptease Swimming Practice.
The very close, almost exclusive, association between drag and gay culture is also odd. Drag was everywhere when I was a lad, often performed by heterosexuals such as Dick Emery, the Two Ronnies and Benny Hill. The gay drag artists – Danny La Rue, Hinge & Bracket, Arthur Marshall – were in that same vein. Such mild sauce is several worlds away from the ‘Charisma Uniqueness Nerve and Talent’ acronym of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which is obviously bog-standard misogyny blended with a blatant expression – you’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind to miss it – of the sexual jealousy of gay men for straight women.
The spectacle of Drag Race contestants squirting ‘breast milk’ or the antics of trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney (who seems to think being female means being a ditzy scatterbrain) are the minstrel shows of our time. Mulvaney is even worse because he actually claims to be a woman. Others are happy to go along with his fantasy – indeed, he was recently awarded the inaugural ‘Woman of the Year’ award by the gay magazine Attitude. Presumably no women were quite good enough until a chap came along.
Mulvaney’s claim points to another modern dichotomy, which is very funny when you stop and think for a moment. This is the bizarre ‘progressive’ doublethink that men in women’s clothes are inherently funny, but simultaneously men in women’s clothes are to be taken absolutely seriously when they say they are women. Try believing both of those things at the same time. Many attempt it.
The fine British tradition of fellers in frocks needs to be uncoupled from politics and sex, and from sexual politics. Down with 21st-century drag queens and up with pantomime dames.
Comments