as with anything that goes mainstream, something is lost

June 20, 2019 1:12 PM

"Drag brunch, until recently, was almost an oxymoron. For most of the 20th century, drag happened in queer spaces, in the dark, and was created by people who scraped together beauty from whatever they could find. Brunch, until about the 1980s, was conspicuously for the rich, or at least the genteel, an occasion for after church or on Mother’s Day — not one eating too much or getting too drunk. It was an opportunity to be seen looking sharp, at least in the church sense. There was little chance the worlds should ever meet. But starting around the 1990s, brunch got raucous and, concurrently, drag got mainstream." Jaya Saxena at Eater asks When Did Drag Brunch Get So Normie?
posted by everybody had matching towels (11 comments total)

Back in the mid-2000s there was a brunch place called Bump n Grind in Denver, in a made-over 1980s gym, complete with fitness murals. All the waitstaff dressed in drag and the food was amazing. It closed a few years ago and I still miss it.
posted by ananci at 2:27 PM on June 20, 2019 [4 favorites]

Meanwhile, though the definition of drag has always been mutable, the art of exaggerated gender-specific dress for performance wasn’t always a part of the counterculture. Drag has its roots in pantomime and vaudeville, and men-dressing-as-women (to be reductive) was a popular mainstay of theater. There were also performances like the Jewel Box Revue, a traveling drag show on the chitlin’ circuit, and drag balls happening in big cities around the world. But in the early 20th century in America, Prohibition drove any and all nightlife further underground, including drag.

I was looking through the history book for the community I grew up in, and I was struck by how many of the events photographed and recorded for posterity involved men dressing up as women and vice versa. This was 1950s and 1960s rural Alberta, then under the rule of "Bible Bill" Aberhart.

Was that part of the history of drag?
posted by clawsoon at 2:48 PM on June 20, 2019 [5 favorites]

Capitalism devours everything and shits it out for the mainstream culture to eat in turn. At best, a few outsiders get semi-famous and/or semi-rich.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:15 PM on June 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'm kind of glad that queens are now popular. Just as it is easy to discriminate against people who are invisible, the converse is true, as well, that it is tougher to bully groups of people who are visible. Not impossible, but more difficult.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:26 PM on June 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

I was looking through the history book for the community I grew up in, and I was struck by how many of the events photographed and recorded for posterity involved men dressing up as women and vice versa. This was 1950s and 1960s rural Alberta, then under the rule of "Bible Bill" Aberhart.

Was that part of the history of drag?

I can only answer personally. To me, I guess it fits the technical definition in a rather bland way but most instances of that sort of thing aren't in the spirit of what I'd consider drag-as-queer-expression.
posted by treepour at 6:56 PM on June 20, 2019 [2 favorites]

Was that part of the history of drag?

If you are curious about the history of drag in rural Alberta (and other queer histories from other prairie provinces!) check out Prairie Fairies by Valerie Korinek -- it's interesting research.
posted by halation at 7:13 PM on June 20, 2019 [9 favorites]

Begging the question a bit, I'd say.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:35 PM on June 20, 2019

treepour: I can only answer personally. To me, I guess it fits the technical definition in a rather bland way but most instances of that sort of thing aren't in the spirit of what I'd consider drag-as-queer-expression.

I wonder if those community hall crossing dressing events were a lark for most people but the most important and exciting days of the year for a small number of people.
posted by clawsoon at 5:10 AM on June 21, 2019 [5 favorites]

I have personally struggled with squaring the fact that I do know that wider acceptance is a good thing with my personal annoyance that how many people I basically consider boring idiots now love Drag Race.
posted by ominous_paws at 5:22 AM on June 21, 2019 [5 favorites]

Interesting to think of brunch's Prohibition roots.

(I remember going to a Detroit-area "Brunch with Bach" event circa 1980 when I was around 13. So many cultural signals being sent.)
posted by doctornemo at 8:26 AM on June 21, 2019

Was that part of the history of drag?

There's a pretty long English tradition of cross-dressing as part of popular culture festivals--I'm sure it's quite dated now, but the key book used to be Underdown's Revel Riot and Rebellion. How that fits into a history of drag per se is, I would think, a very complicated question.
posted by praemunire at 10:37 AM on June 21, 2019 [2 favorites]