I was just explaining how I saw “To Wong Fu,” in the theaters as a 17 year old with a bunch of highschool friends and absolutely nobody was scandalized. This drag panic is entirely orchestrated and much ado about nothing.
I mean, somebody’s going to mention Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, or Flip Wilson as Geraldine, but way back in the fifties, Milton Berle was on Texaco Star Theater and your grandparents or great-grandparents loved it.
A reminder that drag is old. It's so old it's ridiculous. Drag has been done in theater since the beginning of theater. And sometimes those characters are supposed to be another gender [Peter Pan is usually played by a small adult woman, and Edna Turnblad from Hairspray is famously a woman's role that's supposed to be cast with a drag queen]. Sometimes it's just a part of the show. [Some Like It Hot, where the two male characters are disguised as women to hide from the mob, and one ends the movie with a wealthy man] Drag queens as a trope have always been sassy, world-weary, and absolutely confident in themselves and their ability to attract men. Hell, sometimes the joke is that they're [deliberately] making a straight male character uncomfortable and we're supposed to be laughing at the straight male's discomfort. Law & Order has shown drag queens for decades with asshole detectives referring to them as "ma'am" when they're in drag even as they're trying to avoid the sequins.
This rhetoric is frightening because of how quickly the neo-fascist movements in the US have managed to get it to take hold.
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