The attacks on gender nonconformity of many types have come fast and brutal this year, in the form of street violence accompanied by a mad flurry of legislative attempts to ban behaviors, health care, and the mere existence of trans or gender-nonconforming people.
But the attempts to ban or eradicate drag are unique in that proponents are not only attacking a form of expression, a creative performance—drag is also a job.
The attacks on drag in particular—the first law banning drag in public places passed in Tennessee, although at press time, it was temporarily halted by a judge, and at least sixteen other states have since introduced similar legislation—aim not just to shut down a particular kind of performance that relies on playing with the boundaries of gender, exaggerating its characteristics, transgressing its rules. They also intend to make it substantially more difficult for performers to make a living in a field that is already expensive and hard to break into.
“What’s interesting about drag is the sheer amount of overhead asked of a drag performer to ever be taken seriously,” says Ryan Houlihan, a drag artist and journalist from New York City, who has been doing drag since college. “It requires you to do hours and hours of preparation and practice and learning. And all of that requires materials.” Learning makeup skills alone takes a lot of time and expensive purchases, and then there are the clothes, the accessories, the wigs, the jewelry, the learning to dance in precariously high heels. “Because it requires so much up front, most drag performers don’t expect to make money in their career in the long term. Or if they do, it’s never going to be enough money to actually justify the amount of work and hours that they need to put in,” Houlihan says.
In other words, the odds are stacked against drag workers, particularly those who don’t come from money, being able to make a living at it. Even when they make money, the overhead costs continue to expand. Contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race—which has contributed perhaps more than anything else to the mainstreaming of drag—regularly cop to spending tens of thousands of dollars of often borrowed money on costumes to have a shot at the show’s six-figure prize. “I probably wouldn’t be able to live in New York or pay my bills if I was just depending on the drag aspect of things,” Houlihan says.
New York might be pricey, but at least it’s a place where drag performers are relatively welcomed. Yet the rightwing protests against Drag Queen Story Hour programs have even reached the city’s five boroughs, and NYC City Council Member Shekar Krishnan, who has backed the story hours in his district, told reporters that protesters had also come to his office and home.
In Maryland, members of the Proud Boys are among those who have tried to shut down drag acts. Drag Queen Story Hours are a particular target of the right and, presumably, of the Tennessee law, which bans drag performances in front of children. There are now even dedicated escorts—similar to abortion clinic escorts—who guide parents and their kids through waves of sometimes violent protesters. One member of “Parasol Patrol,” as one group of escorts calls itself, had his nose bloodied in a fracas earlier this year in Maryland.
But the queens themselves are even more likely to be targets of violence, and the danger only increases when the law says that drag is akin to the grooming of children and that its playful transgressions are somehow harmful. Doing drag, Houlihan says, now more than ever requires a community and a safe space. “As much as that phrase has become politically charged, it literally requires a space that is safe for you to be doing this activity,” they say.
Yet even with all the threats, new people keep trying drag, and it keeps expanding its reach in pop culture. “And that’s despite the fact that the economic deck and the social deck and the safety deck are all stacked against us,” they add.
It wasn’t so long ago that cross-dressing of any kind was illegal, and drag was largely underground. Its surge into the mainstream has come at a time when gender roles and boundaries have blurred across the board—the last several winners of Drag Race have been trans or nonbinary—and so drag is being lumped in with other perceived threats to a gendered order that has been collapsing. It’s important to recall, though, that the gender roles that groups like the Proud Boys lament have been done in by economic factors as much as the militancy of queer rights struggles. It’s unlikely that they’ll succeed in shoving drag or any other kind of gender fluidity back into the closet, but they can do a lot of harm trying.
One of the reasons it’s hard for them to succeed is that drag itself—at least some of it—has become big business. And that’s why Houlihan thinks that what drag performers need now is a union.
They’ve been part of a union drive before—at Bustle, the online magazine targeting young women. Drag is different, of course—the performers tend to be independent contractors working short-term or even one-off gigs and are sometimes paid in cash, which is one reason that the story hour gigs are so helpful as an added income stream. It can seem like an inherently individualistic field, one best known to the general public from a reality TV competition show. Those expectations bleed into reality, Houlihan says, with performers keeping the best makeup tips or customers for themselves and close friends. Yet how different is it really from other industries on this front? “It’s a holdover from the larger media culture, but it’s also a holdover from every other employment incentive in the world,” they say.
And drag also has a long tradition of solidarity. “Just the fact that drag families and houses exist should speak to the natural tendency for the community to grassroots organize,” they note. “I have a vision of a drag queen picket line in front of one of these production companies or touring companies that are exploiting drag workers. If you want to extend those efforts beyond unionization and create a drag queen picket line, including lots of people who put on drag for the first time that day and are just supporting, outside of a city hall, that’s going to get a lot of media attention.”
The attacks on drag have also been coming in Britain. Joseph Ballard, who performs in drag as Titania Trust, faced far-right protests outside of his “Storytime with Auntie Titania” event at North Walsham Library, and threats that actually drove him from his home. Ballard is a member of Equity, the actors’ union, which recently started organizing drag artists, and is expanding its campaign in the face of far-right escalation.
Robert Lugg began working as an organizer at Equity last year and from the beginning, he says, drag organizing has been a priority. Before he came on board, there was a national drag network within the union, but now they’ve created regional networks to bring performers together. They face, he said, “terrible health and safety [issues], sexual harassment, audience members grabbing drag performers in a very sexual way.”
The issue is compounded because drag is booming at the same time as LGBTQ+ venues are disappearing, meaning that more performers are working outside of the kinds of places that might take their safety more seriously. While the attacks on drag performers in Britain have mostly been limited to “family-friendly” events like brunches and story hours, Lugg said, “As the homophobia and transphobia that’s being churned up in this country gets worse, I think it can’t be long before it comes to other queer spaces. Part of building that collective thinking and action is being ready for that and saying to those employers and engagers if that starts happening you have to step up and work with us to tackle it.”
Organized drag queens would be a force to be reckoned with on screen, on stage, and in legislative battles around the world.
Fighting against the attacks takes a variety of forms, some of which require solidarity from the broader labor movement and the community, Lugg noted. While the union can support its members in making demands of the venues that hire them, for safety and even for fair payment if their appearances are cancelled due to threats of violence, to truly face down right-wing attacks will require an organized response that is bigger and broader than what the right can mobilize. Particularly in smaller towns like the ones where Ballard performed as Titania Trust, drag artists will need broad support that might not yet exist there.
No big union has stepped forward in the United States the way Equity has, but Houlihan hears from other queens that think it’s a good idea. “I’ve heard a lot of enthusiasm, but it is going to take bigger names sticking their neck out as a group to make a difference.” They point to the recent organizing at strip clubs as a good model, or the union at the dinner theater franchise Medieval Times, freelance writer organizing, or the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). They also note that many drag performers are already in unions, such as SAG-AFTRA or Actors’ Equity, as actors rather than specifically as drag performers.
There are basic workplace demands that drag performers can make, whether or not they’re a recognized union, by banding together and acting collectively. In this moment, having extra security in a bar or other venue hosting drag performers seems like an easy win. The demands can bleed over into the political arena, pushing employers to be part of the fight against drag bans and political attacks on trans people. But these demands can also be for minimum wages, safety shuttles, or for employers to pay for cabs to and from gigs (like the Get Me Home Safely campaign by Unite the Union’s hospitality branch in Scotland, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland).
Organized drag queens would be a force to be reckoned with on screen, on stage, and in legislative battles around the world. “These are the people who have been warriors for the queer community. And if you want to pick a fight, you’ve absolutely got a head start, but I have some news for you about the people that you’ve picked a fight with,” Houlihan says. “They have a lot of solidarity. And they’re beloved, and their job is to be beloved. And you might look at them as clowns, but I could say the same thing about your politicians and their careers in reality television. It’s time to start taking drag workers seriously—as seriously as you take anyone else in media, the arts, or communications, or honestly, in activism, because every drag artist is an activist.”