EARLY DRAG QUEENS (part one)

American Hysteria

W!ZARD Studios

Society & Culture

4.4 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This series will cover the moral panics and cultural crazes that have long followed the controversial art form once called "female impersonation." For part one of our two part series, we'll start back in the 1800s to look at the earliest drag balls put on by formerly enslaved men as well as the police raids that made front page news. We'll learn about a famous Vaudeville star known for his hyper-feminine on-stage and hyper-masculine off-stage personas. We'll explore a time when gay was in, the 1930s Pansy Craze, and the political crackdown that inevitably followed. And finally, we'll cover the smash-hit drag musicals put on by the manly soldiers of WWII and the closeted GIs who may have woven in a secret campy code. Throughout, we'll start to analyze how the culture reacted to female impersonation based on the changing events of the decades, bestowing on these performers both massive success and frightening suppression, usually depending on who was performing and what their intentions were. Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content Tell us your teenage tale on our Urban Legends Hotline! American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith Sound design by Clear Commo Studios Research Assistant: Riley Swedelius-Smith Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler Voice Acting by Will Rogers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazes, examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share, and sometimes the realities we don't.
0:25.3	I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria.
0:32.7	I've seen pictures of you, Mr. Alkins, and you're dressed just like a lady.
0:36.7	Yes, but don't forget, I always had a cigar in my mouth.
0:39.3	My father would have been a boy.
0:42.3	What a disappointment.
0:43.3	A girl, my mother, cried.
0:46.3	The corporal behind the desk would look up and you'd know, and he'd say,
0:50.3	well, good morning.
0:52.3	I think the police department are entirely too lenient with these vicious exhibitions of sex.
0:59.3	I don't see what's happening to our youngsters today.
1:20.8	The modern drag queen, as we know her, has become an American archetype,
1:33.4	towering over us in six-inch heels, hair high enough to touch the great blue firmament above with cerulean eye shadow to match. To some she is a beacon, to others a beast, but to all she commands our attention and means much more than she means to,
1:51.8	undermining or overhauling the psychic conceptions of gender and sexuality, so central to our staunch sense of stability and national security.
2:07.5	But before the Stonewall protests for queer rights of 1969, kicked open the closet door and pushed aside a line of faux fur coats to reveal the otherworldly colors of gay narnia.
2:26.8	What was called female impersonation was a pursuit as potentially manly as it was potentially damning. For our purposes, we're going to
2:42.7	try to separate the performance of drag or on-stage cross-dressing from those who lived their everyday lives as transgender or gender non-conforming people.
2:56.6	I'm going to use some outdated terms that make sense in their historical context,
3:02.6	and I'm going to use the pronouns that each person in our story used in their own lifetime
3:09.2	to avoid any retrospective assumptions about how they might identify today.
3:16.4	Our series will be exploring this art form from its earliest American beginnings, up until
3:23.7	the gay liberation movements of the 1970s
	...

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