I had a bit of spare time on my hands and felt like a bit of a rant on this topic. It's a longer than usual post, but I found it quite cathartic to get my feelings down on paper (so to speak).
So here are my thoughts on Drag Culture (the culture bit is a misnomer):
I don’t like most drag acts. I’m a gay man, surely I fit into a target audience somewhere?
Let’s go back in time to the 80’s when 3rd rate drag acts were common in 2nd rate gay bars throughout the land. I saw or rather endured far too many of these acts. Their reliance on sex and sexuality as the main thrust (!) of their humour wasn’t a problem for me. I like blue jokes as much as the next person, but only if the joke can be told without reliance on good old misogyny.
In those far away days in my part of the world there was far too much reliance on Grimsby fish docks as a punchline to give you a flavour of the “jokes” in question. The other thing these drag queens relied on was the humiliation of members of the audience. So if you were a little bit different, stood out from the crowd, then watch out. If there was a black guy in the crowd then they would dig out a reference to big members of the audience. If, like my partner, you were both bald and Asian you hid well back from the performer for fear of being cast as Gandhi. Some lesbians with a perverse sense of humour hung around to be humiliated. Takes all sorts.
Different times no doubt, but you sort of hope that being a community that was, at the time despised, reviled and oppressed would mean they showed more solidarity with others rather than less. Lighten up I hear some saying, they are only jokes, get a life.
Well yes, poor sexist and racist jokes, but jokes.
Anyway, out of this culture were born a few stars, Lily Savage aka Paul O’Grady for one. He also indulged in jokes that were to my mind offensive (I know taken, not given blah, blah). What is so galling in O’Grady’s case is that he is a funny man and needs no costume or sexist bollocks to be funny. And now he is the nation's favourite dog lover and all-round good egg. But I still remember his less than savoury jokes about women. And that is a shame. Memory is a strange thing. Things I’d like to forget I can’t - like O’Grady resorting to misogyny, things I’d like to remember like my password to my Google account, well you get my drift…..
So now in the 21st century, we are treated to “drag races” from various countries where contestants have names like Ginga Minj and Cheryl Hole and Ongina. And still indulging in the same old same old jokes. Some of these persons of drag present themselves as such hideous caricatures of women that any claim of paying homage to women, can I think be dismissed. Danny La Rue or Jim Bailey they definitely are not.
I have seen claims that this is all part of a noble tradition stretching back through pantomime to Shakespeare. To that, I say, no. You are the equivalent of a comedian in a working men's club from the ’70s & ’80s. With a dress and make-up.
To conclude I’d ban drag race as it really cannot be worth the money to make and urge the BBC to show repeats of Hinge & Bracket. Theirs was a drag act worthy of the price of entry. And no, that’s not a double entendre.
