I’d been interested in learning more about drag queens, since it’s clear that despite the convention (contention?) that it’s “just for the stage” some drag queens clearly continue their feminine presentation offstage and I’d seen references to a few studies that suggested at some drag queens crossdress for similar reasons that hetrosexual crossdressing do. So I was hoping to find a book that would provide insights to the psychology of drag queens. Unfortunately “Girlfriend: Men, Women and Drag” (text by Holly Brubach and photographs by Michael James O’Brien) isn’t that book.

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh. O’Briens photos are excellent and often intriguing, and Brubach does make a number interesting insights about crossdressing in general and the drag variety in particular—plus more interesting thoughts on gender. So it’s worth reading. But it’s a “reportial” book in the bad sense of the word. It might be better subtitled: Brubach parachutes into eight drag/transgender cultures around the globe and talks about the people she meets. Unfortunately, the travel guide approach ends up being about surfaces—Brubach never delves deeply into the motivations of those she meets, although she does discuss the varying attitudes different cultures have toward crossdressing and gender impersonation.


Part of it is that “drag as (performance) art” is what Burbach is most comfortable with—and who she’s most impressed with. This seems to be beyond Brubach’s idiosyncratic definitions of people on the transgender spectrum. Brubach first distinguishes drag from female impersonators (who crossdress strictly as part of a staged performance) and transsexuals. So far so good. But her definition of crossdressers—“men (the majority of them straight) who dress in women’s clothes, usually underwear and usually in private, often as a sexual turn-on” clearly refers only to the more fetishistic type of crossdresser. Brubach doesn’t cite the source of her definition, but it seems to be heavily influenced by the DSM-IV TR’s definition of “transvestic fetishism.” In her book anyone “who dress(es) in public as women, on social occasions” is a drag queen. Brubach herself seems to recognize that she’s imposing her own definitions, since she then goes on to argue that: “The cross-dressers who claim that their impulse to dress in women’s clothes (and not only lingerie) is not erotic would theoretically qualify as drag queen.”

While this might sound like splitting hairs over semantics, it’s reflective of a problem throughout the book. Having defined other types of transgender behavior as irrelevant to her inquiry, Brubach can’t seem to see them when she encounters them, leading to strange comments, such that Brazilian travesti who get breast implants are merely “drag queens looking for a little more verisimilitude.” (Admittedly, I don’t know much about the travesti, so Brubach may be right, but it’s an observation tossed off without discussion how the travesti are actually different than the North American transsexuals they would seem to resemble. Assuming this is the case.) Likewise, Brubach seems nonplussed when she meets some rather drably dressed drag queens in a London club who turn out to be self-described transvestites, who pointedly contrast themselves with their more flamboyant sisters.

Nonetheless, in her descriptions of various drag queens interesting bits of transgenderism (rather than drag) seep in around Brubach’s preconceptions. There’s Jay, an American drag queen in Paris, who mostly models as a man, but serves as a consultant on femininity to female models—including numerous supermodels. (It’s actually not as sexist as it might sound, since much of the instruction is also teaching them the particular style of movement preferred by specific designers, as well as how to move in one type of fabric vs. another, and Jay also coaches male models on the same things.) Jay himself says he only drags for an actual modeling assignments or, on rare occasions, for some fancy social event. Says Jay: “I think it’s more of a challenge to sit at a table and actually talk to people than to go to any old restaurant and make a scene by overdoing it and being loud and outrageous.” Jay claims no desire to be a woman, but says: “I want to be able to change back and forth, from one extreme to the other, and just be comfortable.” Brubach observes: “Jay believes that the difference between being credible as a woman and being a caricature of a women is for the most part a psychological one, and when he is dressed in drag, he tries to be one hundred percent feminine in his head.” While Brubach fails to ask Jay about his motivations, the language Jay uses seems to be much more reminiscent of that used by crossdressers and transgenderists than of drag queens.

The difference turns on the intended portrayal of “femininity.” Both crossdressers and drag queens claim to be portraying idealized women. For crossdressers who go out in public, the focus is often being “the average woman”—a focus admittedly often driven by a desire to avoid the sort of attention that the drag queens intentionally seek. For its drag queens the focus is, as Brubach puts it, “womanhood at its finest…the perfection that beauty contestants and Hollywood starlets, have, to [their] mind[s], abdicated.” Interestingly, in Japan, “a society that prizes artifice in all things” according to Brubach, famed drag diva Miwa Akihiro has often been named as a personification of ideal beauty in public surveys over the course of 15-20 years and Elle Japan held up a handful of drag queens as examples to its readers, citing their “assiduous self-refinement.”

That desire to be a “glamoursexual” while overtly expressed by drag queens—who usually give a wink and a nod to the artificiality of it all—is also amply on display among many crossdressers, especially the more closeted ones. Brubach notes that drag has an “uncanny knack for depersonalizing women, for reducing them time and time again to a semaphore: hair, lips, breasts, hips, high heels.” Which are precisely the frequent obsessions of many crossdressers. Crossdressers may opt for a “realistic” big-hair wig, rather than a platinum blonde, pink or blue wig, but often there’s less difference in the cartoon portrayal of “femininity” between drag queens and crossdressers than either might acknowledge. But as Brubach notes, women parody themselves when it suits them. “It is said that Marilyn Monroe could go unrecognized on the streets in New York because she wasn’t doing what she herself called ‘the walk.’ Drag highlights the ironic distance between and the person, male or female underneath—a distance with which women are already familiar. When, in 1973, the Hasty Putting Club changed its ‘Woman of the Year’ aware to the (one time only ‘Person of the Year and bestowed it on Gloria Steinem, she remarked, ‘I don’t mind drag—women have been female impersonators for years.’ It was John Waters who coined the term ‘female female impersonators’ to describe women overly simulating femininity.”

In the final chapter of the book, Brubach herself goes in drag, attending a class for drag kings, but both the experience for Brubach and her observations are oddly flat. Part of it is that from the account, it sounds like none of the dozen women in the class ever left the apartment where the class was held, so they never interacted with the outside world. Part of it is that Brubach concludes a drag king simply isn’t as transgressive as a drag queen (or other crossdressed male). “Today, men in drag are every bit as threatening as women in drag used to be, and for the same reasons: they represent a bid for power that has been denied to them—in this case, the power of beauty. While women have made significant inroads into the realm of ideas, they have also retained control of the realm of appearances, and all the audacity, the simmering envy, the frustration and resentment that once was implicitly in women’s dressing as men are now echoed in men’s dressing as women.”

However, like Norah Vincent’s “Self-Made Man,” it was interesting to see the difficulty the would-be drag kings had in “being a man.” As Brubach says: “Even the twelve women in Diane Torr’s Drag Kings Workshop had a hard time coming up with a new version of a man that didn’t seem like a hollow replica of the old kind. A woman who goes out on a blind date asks herself at the end of the evening if she liked the guy enough to see him a second time; the women who, under Torr’s direction, became drag kings for a night asked themselves whether they liked the men they had become to be them a second time, and the answer in the majority of cases was no more auspicious than it usually is after a stilted meeting with an uncongenial stranger.”

She continues: “[T]he living area took on the forlorn aspects of a club populated by the kind of guys whom the women taking part in Torr’s workshop would have pegged as losers. In friendship and in love, these women aspired to a new breed of man, and, every so often they could imagine him: in their minds, they’d pieced together a sort of collective portrait. Mostly, what he would be had been arrived at by way of what he wouldn’t be—that much at least was clear. Still, when the time came to dress in drag, they didn’t dare become him. Cozy, affectionate, communicative, he inspired in them feelings of solidarity that real men—the men they knew—rarely, if ever, inspired. [But] [h]is fears were theirs for the moment: What if, in the harsh light of day, he didn’t pass muster? What if he weren’t man enough? It would just be a matter of time before the world was on to the fact that this was not a man but an imposter and unsuccessful one, at that. And then despite the stubble on his chin and the gruff gestures and the suit that emphasized the breadth of his shoulders, the jig would be up. Masculinity, not less than femininity, is an undertaking, and those who are unsuccessful in their efforts—all the failed men—are branded women.”

As said at the beginning, Brubach’s book won’t offer much if you’re looking to understand what makes drag queens tick. But it does offer an interestingly look at the widely different ways drag is interpreted around the world—from the ever-so-chic Parisian queens, to the aggressively ugly (and political) Berlin queens, to the can’t-be-over-top-enough party queens in London’s club scene. Likewise, it offers interesting—if familiar, at least to those students of gender—observations about how drag reveals society’s concepts of femininity (and of masculinity):

“As for drag’s capacity to unsettle the viewer, it could be argued that the more complete the transformation in a man’s case, the less threatening it is.… By demonstrating that a man can ‘become’ a woman, he confirms the message that our culture sends via advertisements, magazines, movies: that femininity is predicated on artifice and therefore can be acquired…. When it comes to women in drag, however, the situation is reversed: it’s the partial transformation—the ‘butch’ women—that it’s easier to take in stride, while women who completely plausible as a man calls into our standards of masculinity. Unlike femininity, which relies on makeup, on clothes that contort and exaggerate the shape of the body, masculinity has been construed as ‘natural,’ inimitable, indomitable—strictly the providence of men. If a woman can convincing simulate a man, then there must be something wrong with masculinity: it has failed to hold its ground; it has been proven impotent in the face of a woman’s raid on its demeanor and appearance. While a man in drag may in fact uphold the ideology of femininity, a women in drag is liable to undermine the ideology of masculinity.”