The second article really is great. They are not listed in order if importance.
At my school, we had cross dressing days as part of Spirit Week or something. It was really just boys dressing in women's clothing since by 1985 it was really difficult for a girl to noticeably cross dress.
I remember thinking as a teenager that boys loved opportunities to dress up as girls in the same way that girls loved opportunities to dress as sluts.
My school didn't have opportunities for girls to dress up as sluts. This didn't prevent a teen pregnancy problem.
Blackface, also, very common in that generation. The common factor is "member of the privileged group dressing up as a mocking exaggeration of the unprivileged group".
Except that might be regional. At least I've never seen blackface live except for the school musical the year they did Shenandoah and they had Jeff play Gabriel.
Goes way back. Marie Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess. "Slum parties" in upper class America in the 1920s. Middle class schoolkids dressing as pimps and whores.
The common factor is "member of the privileged group dressing up as a mocking exaggeration of the unprivileged group".
Which is why it goes hand-in-hand with "but uncross your legs right now and don't BE part of the unprivileged group."
Marie Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess.
I thought that was just a sex thing.
No, it was milkmaids who were the sexy proles.
These skanks are so confusing!
There were not enough gay men in London at the time to fill that stadium over multiple nights. This is not a teeming crowd of homosexuals who showed up to cry out for Mercury, is my point. It's a crowd that cishet men make up a disproportionate percentage of, and who, like the rest of the straight world at the time, apparently had no idea Mercury wasn't one of them.
I couldn't find most of it on YouTube, but Green Wing (mid-2000s) had a scene where a thirtysomething character was playing Queen in the car, was informed for the first time that Freddie Mercury was gay, then decided to turn the music off, feeling uncomfortable.
So, overtly commenting on the quoted phenomenon, but also implicitly participating in some rectification of names, the subtler homophobia of the 2000's.
I once did a whole series of posts about eighteenth-century sexual stereotypes about working-class rural jobs. I should dig that up.
Plowmen were also considered sexy. The symbolism was not subtle.
The Nebraska capitol is a tall central tower with a round top. A statue called "The Sower", a man scattering seed, is at the top.
I had a friend in high school who was a huge Queen fan -- the way that high school boys are huge fans of particular bands. He finally saw Queen in concert and was appalled to discover that Freddie Mercury acted gay.
He continued to be a Queen fan, but he definitely struggled to assimilate this new information.
"Fat Bottomed Girls" was very heterosexual.
I remember thinking as a teenager that boys loved opportunities to dress up as girls in the same way that girls loved opportunities to dress as sluts.
The post does end up telling a story about a "pimps and hoes" themed party . . .
Blackface, also, very common in that generation. The common factor is "member of the privileged group dressing up as a mocking exaggeration of the unprivileged group".
I think that's a reasonable summary, at a very high level of generality, and I think the post does a good job of showing that, within that broad category there is a fair amount of complexity.
On a different note, I'd be curious if someone who is better at this than I am could describe the performance of masculinity in this video of Danny Kaye and Harry Belafonte: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ4FAoFnpx8
In the UK, especially the North, this is a working-class thing; take a typical group of lads going to the football/the Test match/someone's stag, and you can bet good money one of them's going to drag up at some point, in the same way as one of them will probably think it funny to show up as a comedy oil sheikh.
I feel that the second article suffers from being written from an American point of view by a parochial American. Queen was a British (well, Commonwealth) band, and the shock of Freddie Mercury in a skirt* in the 1984 video for "I Want To Break Free" was not huge in their home country, since two years before everyone had, for example, seen various members of Madness in a dress in the video for "Our House".
(*The entire band is dressed in female clothing in the video. The article only mentions Freddie.)
The article then veers off into some pretty wild speculation about how the USO wouldn't let female artists anywhere near the front line because of the danger of sexual assault:
Female performers were rarely allowed near the fronts; members of the Women's Army Corps weren't permitted to take the stage for such risqué shows either, as it was judged -- rightly so, knowing men (the sexual assault rate in an integrated military is horrifying) -- they might not be safe in such environment.
...and this is, bluntly, the author being full of shit.
No, WACs did not routinely take the stage. WACs were members of the American armed forces, there to do a job, they weren't eye candy or comfort women. There were also very few of them outside the US - only 7,600 in the entire European theatre - by VE Day - and they were subject to appalling abuse, not from soldiers in theatre but from male and female Americans back home, who saw joining the WAC as a sure route to a life of immorality. (The contrast with the treatment of Wrens, for example, is stark.)
As for "female performers were rarely allowed near the front" - all depends what you mean by "near the front". USO didn't put on shows within rifle range of the enemy, even with male artists.
But female performers did thousands of shows through the war, in every theatre of war, often in pretty basic locations (the side of a hill in Italy, for example). Where USO could go, it went, with male and female performers. They were performing on Utah Beach in Normandy, with Marlene Dietrich, in July 1944.
I had a friend in high school who was a huge Queen fan -- the way that high school boys are huge fans of particular bands. He finally saw Queen in concert and was appalled to discover that Freddie Mercury acted gay.
I was fairly fond of Queen in the 80s, though not at the level of being a fan - I just liked their music - and this is probably why I had no clue until after his death that Freddie Mercury was gay.
(An excellent exchange from "Kev", a Garth Ennis comic:
"But you've never had a problem working with gay men before, Kev."
"Like who?"
"Remember those lads from Delta? Remember Gay Boy Billy?"
"Yeah?"
"Well... he was gay."
"Gay Boy Billy was gay? Fuck, I thought he was just cheerful.")
I feel like the second article is missing an explanation. If masculinity is rigidly coded, then it's clear that men in drag are obviously playing it for laughs, and being good at drag is even better for laughs. If masculinity is less rigidly coded -- or is thought to be under threat -- then drag reads as transgressive in a gender-undermining way.
But it's just weird to see my dad, who has gone off the Infowars deep end and flipped out at a picture of my niece and Pebbles in shirts with rainbows*, freak out about drag when listening to Queen on vinyl is something I remember as an elementary schooler and MASH was on in reruns all the time.
*They were five. Sometimes a rainbow is just a rainbow.
Obligatory pic https://x.com/lawmadillo/status/1664692705207746560?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
I was definitely aware that Freddie Mercury was gay at the time. Perhaps not in 1980 (because I was 7 or 8 years old) but definitely by the time of Live Aid. My Dad may have told me.* My father also told me, as I remember specifically watching that Culture Club performance on ToTP at the time, that he thought Boy George was cool/interesting.
* my Dad was somewhat unusual in terms of central Scottish working class dads of the 70s and 80s, because he had--and still has--gay friends, and had told me about them for as long as I can remember. Some of those gay friends he made while he was in the army.
Thinking about it, I am not sure that I even knew who Freddie Mercury was in the 1980s, to be honest. Maybe I knew the name, but I doubt I could have recognised a picture. There was this band called Queen and their songs sounded good, that's as far as my knowledge went.
One of my parents' favorite stories is me, about age two, asking them to play the Queen album by toddling up and saying "Dust? Dust?"
I am apparently an Old, but I was trying to explain to the Youth that my high school had a yearly drag show. Called the Man of the Year competition. It was truly bizarre, even in the late 90s. I have to guess it made more sense two generations prior. The idea was to parody a beauty pageant: so there was an interview, and I think a talent portion, but what I remember is the drag dance number at the end. Absolutely great. Also non-remarkable, not protested, half of the boys were evangelicals, etc. My students think I'm from the Moon.
I feel like the second article is missing an explanation. If masculinity is rigidly coded, then it's clear that men in drag are obviously playing it for laughs, and being good at drag is even better for laughs. If masculinity is less rigidly coded -- or is thought to be under threat -- then drag reads as transgressive in a gender-undermining way.
Thank you, this puts so succinctly what it would have taken me five paragraphs to wander around.
I knew some of the songs, but I didn't really know who Queen was until Wayne's World.
27: actually I've got a similar story. One of my very earliest memories is hearing Another One Bites the Dust on the radio. I was in the front bench seat of our proto-suburban that my dad somehow had, with my feet straight out to touch the dashboard.
That vehicle was weird. The back bench seat was back-to-back with the front bench seat and there were no wells for your feet, which was fine as kids, and then we had a plastic floral twin mattress and a bean bag in the space beyond that. Great for road trips. We put luggage in this weird one-wheeled trailer that they stopped selling because if the trailer tipped, it could pull a car over with it. But I guess the proto-suburban was big enough to handle it.
Also, to the paragraph of Cala's that Sim quotes in 28, I think the author doesn't have this resolved for themself, either, and they're circling how all these apparent contradictions coexist.
Also I'm at the kid's dentist, so a proper post will have to wait for another hour or so till I'm at work.
A thing that makes this harder to process is the amount of, I don't know how to say it, cultural continuity between old-fashioned straight guy drag like Donald Trump grabbing Rudy Giuliani's fake tits and so on, and the gender-undermining stuff where drag is on a spectrum that's continuous with transness. Some things -- Rudy Giuliani in a blonde wig -- are clearly one or the other, but there's a lot of gender-undermining drag that culturally refers back to the other type.
Also, I think it's a wrong reading of MASH to think of Klinger as trying to get kicked out as taking advantage of the army's homophobia. I could be wrong, but he's trying to present as *crazy*, not gay or trans, and is trying to get released from service on craziness grounds. (Section 8? I'm working off nearly 40 year old memories.).
My super tough guy Reagan supporting elementary school gym teacher made up a game and called Another One Bites the Dust. Doubt he knew about Freddie.
IIRC it was some weird combination of dodgeball and maybe cricket. At each end of the gym were five bowling pins your team had to defend. Teams had to stay on their half of the gym. There were balls to try to knock over the others team's pins and you won by hitting all five. You could eliminate opposing players by hitting them with balls (fuzzy snowball like things, not standard kickball/dodgeball things) but if they caught your throw in the air you were out.
In the UK, there were a lot of mainstream TV stars of the 1960s, 60s and 80s whose act contained a lot of stuff with them in drag. Some of whom, were clearly masculine-coded men playing it for laugh, like Les Dawson, and some of whom were distinctly camp presences who were not straightforwardly gender-conforming men: Kenny Everett, etc and where a lot but not all of the audience was very definitely aware of that. Then there were performers like Danny La Rue who were much closer to modern drag queens, and where I assume most or even all of the audience was fully aware of that. Then there were strange presences like Dick Emery, who was incredibly camp, and where I have assumed all of my life, he was gay, but apparently not and he was in fact a massive womanizer.
All of those performers were completely mainstream TV stars. I don't know if the US had similar performers?
The halakha follows R. Cala. https://mash.fandom.com/wiki/Maxwell_Q._Klinger
34 is right. Klinger specifically turned down the guy who said he would be kicked out of he said he was homosexual. Klinger wanted a Section 8 discharge.
The Benny Hill of the Americans is Benny Hill.
We are all so conditioned by the water we swim in. I lived for a while in San Francisco during the 1970s, people being surprised that Freddie Mercury was gay remind me of people who are surprised when they discover that person X is Jewish because they couldn't see the horns on his head. The person who did surprise me was Rob Halford [No, not that one, the one who was lead singer for Judas Priest], who one day responding to a question in an interview I read 5-10 years ago simply drops in "Well, as a gay man ..." Which I thought was an awesome combination of "there's me and there's my performing persona, there's me and then there's private me which is none of your or the public's business, and then there's private me who informs me about my opinion on issues."
Looney Toons and other cartoons from that era have a lot of drag.
The Benny Hill of the Americans is Benny Hill.
Yeah, there isn't really an American equivalent to the British drag-comedy tradition but we did import some of the original stuff. Monty Python is another example.
Although 42 is also true. Maybe there was an American version at one point but it died out?
Milton Berle, Jack Lemmon, Flip Wilson, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, Tyler Perry....
Tyler Perry is a good example that I had forgotten. Some of those others are movies that are about crossdressing in a way that feels different from it just being a standard part of someone's shtick though.
As per teofilo's 47, those aren't the same thing, I don't think.
The performers I'm talking about performed in drag, either as a single character, or as a series of characters, over decades. It was a central part of their shtick, as Teo says. Someone like Danny La Rue almost never appeared except in drag. He was much closer to someone like Ru Paul than Adam Sandler.
Flip Wilson splits that difference I think. Not always drag, but certainly so with some regularity. And not as a man playing a ruse, like Mrs. Doubtfire, but inhabiting a character. I could look up how he felt about Geraldine, but that's not good prep for pub trivia tonight.
Milton Berle is enough before my time that I know he performed in drag, but I don't know how his act went. I can just barely remember Geraldine.
Today I learned that the Grant Morrison character Danny the Street was a parody of/reference to a real person.
I didn't know about Danny La Rue and the like, and I don't think the US had an equivalent. The sort of carnivalesque comedy drag you got on American movies and TV was always completely distinct from queerness, and I think keeping that distinction in place was crucial to its legibility. Once RuPaul and such broke out in the late 90s, boundaries really shifted, and I think that's why a lot of folks remember cross-dressing high school spirit weeks and such in a way that seems impossible now.
In 1997 or so I went to a campus party to which it was decided that guys would wear dresses. This was firmly in the carnivalesque mode; a lot of the guys had spent the week or two beforehand growing out their facial hair for maximum incongruity. I on the other hand took it as an excuse to shave my legs and underarms and, though I don't remember this part (a friend reminded me years later), I apparently refused to give up my borrowed dress after the party and showed up still wearing it in the dining hall the next evening. Anyway I didn't cross-dress for a long time after that because it was all too clear I was putting it to a different use than everyone else.
Morgan Wallen threw a chair of the roof of a bar. I'm not entirely sure who he is, but I'm glad county music is going back to its roots. I think the problem is that Nashville has built higher buildings now.
Which is off topic. But we are past 40.
Huh. The Dave Rimmer who's quoted twice in the Boy George article is a colleague from Budapest days. Small world sometimes.
re: 52
Plus points for that fan wiki page being written in Polari.
OT:
Via Alex on X, this incredibly thought-provoking and arguably deranged thread.
https://twitter.com/TACJ/status/1778024418540749241
(Mentions electing the Upper House by sortition which makes me think that he may be a lurker here)
He's right about scrapping the TCPA (both that it's good & that it's deranged to think it could happen)
Town & Country Planning Act 1947 (as a regime, not a literal law, I know it's been amended).
Ah, yes. Thanks. I grow increasingly sure that the idea of "community involvement in public decision-making" is an insane one, and a blight on every unfortunate nation that implements it.
The idea about taking a year off work on the state pension at any time of your life, in exchange for retiring a year later, is really quite promising.