The Gender Binary’s a Drag
Last Saturday, I put on a $20 suit, strapped a gift-wrapped cardboard box to my waist, and sang about genitals to a cheering crowd. That is to say, I did drag for the first time. This semester, I’d been engaging more actively with queer communities on campus and joining up with the Bad Romantics — Yale’s undergraduate drag troupe — seemed like a natural next step. Plus, it sounded fun. Nevertheless, as tech week approached, I had some doubts. My previous exposure to drag comprised a single live show in Toronto, and a few scattered episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race. As I understood it, drag typically consisted of cis gay men dressing as women. It was fun and subversive, I thought, but also potentially problematic. When a cis man performs as a woman, his misogyny can pass undetected. He can call women “bitches,” mock femininity, and play into stereotypes about women for his own comic gain. So, when I walked into the first day of Bad Romantics tech rehearsal, my excitement was tempered by an eye towards potential misogyny and trans-misogyny within the art form. What I found when I arrived, however, shattered my worries.
The members of the Bad Romantics took me in with kindness and enthusiasm, and changed my conception of the format and impact of a drag show.. The first thing they taught me was that drag is not only cis gay men performing as women. It can also be non-binary people performing as women, men, and everything in between. They/them pronouns abound in the Bad Romantics rehearsal room, with the trans* nearly outnumbering the cis. And drag can be women performing as men — my stage persona, for instance, was drag king “Justin Timberdick” — or even women performing as women. Nataly Moreno-Martinez, TC ’21, does femme drag, because she enjoys it as a form of artistic expression, and feels it’s “like putting on a mask or a shield [that] lets you be really free in front of people.” Drag even has room for the straight and cis. Elijah Gunther, BR ’18, who performed “Marry the Night” by Lady Gaga, says that he “likes how [his] doing drag being cis and straight really breaks out of the boundaries of what’s considered normal” and that he has a lot of fun “doing something really non-normative.”
The Bad Romantics not only welcome people of all genders and sexualities , but also empower them to engage in any type of performance they find meaningful. Performers sang original songs and covers, lip-synced, danced, recited spoken word poetry, and even monologued about philosophy. During every act, members of the group cheered each other on enthusiastically. And my decision to wear no makeup or wigs, in defiance of the typical drag emphasis on aesthetics, went unquestioned. Whatever made each of us feel powerful and subversive was whole-heartedly supported by the rest of the group.
The Bad Romantics also taught me how freeing and exhilarating a drag performance can be. As an improviser in Lux Improvitas, I often find myself playing confident male buffoons. Inhabiting masculinity on stage allows me to take up space physically and vocally, something I feel self-conscious about doing in real life. It allows me to poke fun at gender and toxic masculinity. And it allows me access to a greater range of comic characters than if I limited myself to only playing women. Drag seemed like a good way to take this fun to the next level, and engage more with Yale’s queer scene. And I had the perfect performance idea, the act which would make me feel the most cartoonishly masculine, and which was sure to make the heteropatriarchy cower in fear: Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake’s Dick in a Box. So I found an Andy (the incomparable Paige Davis, MC ’21), bought a suit from a queer thrift shop, choreographed a dance, and rigged a box to hang from my crotch. Then there was tech week, a whirlwind of lighting, props, sweat, and new friends. And then we performed. We strutted in, serenaded, and seduced the audience, suggestively gyrating our boxes. It was a parody of gender performativity and aggressive male heterosexuality, and it slayed. We walked offstage to raucous cheering. When the adrenaline rush faded, I was left with a feeling of satisfaction and power. I had stolen a piece of male swagger and sexuality, and I had gotten away with it.
Performing with The Bad Romantics didn’t completely abate my worries about misogyny and transmisogyny in drag. After all, Yale’s drag scene doesn’t exactly conform to the standards of more mainstream drag. In spaces where drag is only open to cis gay men (of which there are still many, despite the efforts of drag kings and non-binary performers), there is definitely a risk that performers will end up mocking womanhood instead of celebrating it, or degrading trans* people rather than uplifting them. But when and where this happens, performers are failing to honor the true spirit of drag, which involves pushing back against gender roles, playing with performativity, and mopping the floor with the gender binary. Drag is meant to steal power from the oppressor, not from women and trans* people. This can be done by cis gay men — most of whom use drag to celebrate their own femininity, or to poke fun at strict gender standards, or just to slay in a way that only a femme queen can slay. But it cannot be done by them alone. And it shouldn’t be.
Limiting drag to cis gay men precludes other people from reaping its benefits. The non-binary members of The Bad Romantics with whom I spoke find drag to be a freeing space, within which they can radically be themselves. One member, Brian Matusovsky, PC ’19, told me that for them “gender always feels like performing,” and since they usually present as more masculine, “getting to perform something feminine and opposite of that is really satisfying.” For another member, Xuan, DC ’18, drag has been “an irreplaceable part of discovering, inhabiting, and displaying [their] trans identity.” The stage can be a safe place for trans* performers to explore and express their gender, and be cheered on while they do. And in the process, they can make funny, subversive, affecting art. The nonbinary performers alone at this weekend’s show put forth a stirring original song, a dance routine to a twisted and evocative mix of pop music, a genderqueer reinterpretation of Monty Python’s “The Lumberjack Song,” a spoken-word poem about body dysmorphic disorder, and more. Inclusion of women and trans and nonbinary people in drag not only opens up for us a world of power, creativity, and fun; It is also the ultimate realization of drag’s revolutionary spirit.
