drag king

The Sydney Pride weekend produced an interview with a drag king.  I had never heard the term but Macquarie Dictionary has it — ‘a person, especially a woman, who dresses as a male, often adopting an exaggerated style of masculine clothing and behaviour, usually for the purposes of entertainment’.

That seems to put it nicely.  Drag king is partnered to drag queen.  The first example of drag king in print appears in 1972 but it would have been around earlier than that.  Similarly the first example of drag queen is in 1941 but again it dates back to earlier in the 1900s.  Initially they are both terms for people who adopt male or female personas, complete with dress and behaviour, usually producing exaggerated versions of male or female stereotypes.

Queen is very old.  Actually there are two queens — queen and quean.  The first comes from Old English and had the basic meaning of the wife of a king.  The second comes from a different word in Old English and meant ‘a woman, a female serf’.  A few centuries later quean meant ‘a prostitute’ and had the same spelling and pronunciation as queen.  Queen could now mean a royal personage or a prostitute as the two words melded together!  By the 1890s queen also meant a homosexual man, usually one who was ostentatiously effeminate.

Drag has been part of theatrical jargon of the 1870s.  It referred to a female part played  by a man for which the man had to dress in women’s clothing. A man taking a woman’s part wore a long petticoat and then a dress over that.  For someone used to wearing pants, the skirt seemed to be heavy and to drag on the floor.  Thus it was referred to as dressing in drag.  The link to homosexual culture did not occur until the early 1900s.