In Defense of the Playful Dangers of Drag
The last time I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for a drag pageant, the host asked our panel what we were looking for in the contestants’ numbers. The other judges offered several drag standards: flawless lip syncs, sickening looks, crowd-pleasing performances. When it was my turn, I added a couple of conceptual criteria.
“Number one,” I offered, “Feeling the fantasy. I want you to convince me that you believe deeply in yourself and what you’re serving. Show me that you are dreaming your dream, babe, and that we’re lucky to live in your world. Even if—no, especially if—it’s a bit delusional. Serve me a performance that makes me feel like you’re alone in your childhood bedroom performing in front of the mirror and truly living for yourself, honey.”
“Number two,” I continued, “A taste of danger. Now, I certainly don’t want anyone to get hurt, but I do want to see that you’re taking risks. Make us gasp and gag, darling. Force us to worry that you might fall off the stage, or that we’re going to get wet in the splash zone. Show me something I’ve never seen before, or compel me to think about something in a completely new way. Take us to the edge and then tell us it’s all going to be okay.”
My criteria might have been a bit dramatic, but that’s par for the course. More importantly, they offer not only a decent recipe for a legendary drag performance, but also a helpful analytic for the possibilities of drag as a form of radical play. In our current era, especially in the contexts of political attacks on this beloved art form, we need to embrace not only drag’s fantasy, but also its playful dangers.
When most people think about drag, “play” may or may not be among the descriptors they use. For many, a definition of a drag queen begins and ends along the lines of “a man who dresses or performs like a woman,” or vice versa for a drag king. Though lately, even clueless anti-LGBTQ+ legislators have begun to account for drag’s imaginative elements and inherent cultural commentary. For example, Montana’s anti-drag legislation HB 359 (signed into law by Governor Greg Gianforte in May 2023, but temporarily blocked by a federal judge) defines a drag queen as “a male or female performer who adopts a flamboyant or parodic feminine persona with glamorous or exaggerated costumes and makeup.” Parody and glamor indeed! Though as many activists have pointed out, one of the major risks of such vague definitions is that they can be weaponized against trans or gender nonconforming people in everyday contexts far from actual drag shows.
Still, in my research on drag pedagogy and the intersections of drag and digital culture, I find it helpful to think about drag broadly as a form of play. On its most basic level, drag certainly plays with gender, not only disrupting gender stereotypes but also offering creative gender expressions beyond the binary. However, it’s important to think about drag’s cultural impact as much more than gender transgression. Drag is a creative and imaginative form of play that utilizes dress-up to envision and enact new worlds, challenges experiments with a range of cultural aesthetics from exaggerated camp humor to deep earnestness, and builds community through feelings of camaraderie and commiseration.
In this spirit, drag vibes well with many canonical and contemporary theories of play. For example, the early-20th-century Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga describes play as “a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life.’” Or, similarly, contemporary American game designers Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman offer a short-and-sweet notion that “Play is free movement within a more rigid structure.” Within these frameworks, drag can be taken seriously as not only an historically significant queer/trans art form, but also as a practice of playful freedom for performers and audiences alike. That is, drag enacts a “magic circle” that creates space for pleasure for its own sake, apart from—but always in relation to—the mundane restrictions of everyday life.
I’ll admit, however, that it wasn’t until I started working with Drag Story Hour that I really began to understand drag as a form of play. Intuitively, that may be what I had been doing all along, but it was difficult to point to something so simple. In many ways, Drag Story Hour helped me to consider drag from a child’s perspective, including how kids might relate to this art form via their own experiences of dressing up or playing pretend and what unique learnings drag performers might offer. Perhaps more importantly, Drag Story Hour encouraged me to consider drag from my own childhood perspective: By re-connecting to my love of imaginative play and figuring out ways to celebrate that in my adulthood, I was able to find new potential in drag.
Unsurprisingly, as a queer child and future drag queen, I always gravitated toward feminized forms of play that dealt heavily in imagination and aesthetics. In my youngest years, I learned to play like a girl from my best friend down the street, as we held tea parties between her My Little Ponies and danced around in her beginner ballet tutus. Later, I was encouraged to play He-Man and Ninja Turtles with the boys in the neighborhood, but always missed the sparkles, sweet scents, and soft hair of my first bestie’s toys. I continued to gravitate toward the girls, whether playing house underneath tree branches or twirling around as mermaids at the local pool. We also loved to put on performances wherever and whenever, transforming the raised hearth of a fireplace or the back patio steps into our stage; my grandmother would help me sew costume pieces for our productions, using scraps for skirts and capes and headbands, which she always let me try on without judgment.
As I got older, I befriended two gentle boys; we found one another through a shared love of the arts, fantasy novels, and video games—and eventually the Spice Girls. Even as we grew “too old” to play as we once had, we continued to act out elaborate scenes in our bedrooms and basements, and filled sketchbooks with our own takes on our favorite characters and their costumes. In high school, despite none of us yet being out to ourselves or one another, but inspired by our exposure to the classic To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, we decided as an ensemble to attend a popular “retro” high school dance in drag, wearing borrowed clothes and makeshift wigs that were more Mrs. Doubtfire than Divine.
In hindsight, I feel lucky that I was able to find such welcoming playmates, especially ones who let me express my femininity and queerness—even before I had the language for it. But even more, I feel privileged to have had so many opportunities to build our own worlds through creative play. Even though we often played with dolls, action figures, stuffed animals, board and video games, and an array of toys, they were more often than not launching points for our bodies and imaginations to enact our own flights of fancy. We rarely cared about the rules of a game, unless they were the elaborate ones we concocted for ourselves. Instead, we got lost creating and reinventing characters, conjuring up new settings and narratives, and transforming ourselves and the spaces around us. While some might see this as a form of escape—especially in the confines of the conformist and queerphobic whiteness of our 1990s suburban environment—I am less interested in what we were trying to get away from than in the worlds we built in which we could not only feel safe, but free.
This is the spirit of drag: its approach to fantasy isn’t about falseness or fiction, but rather about experimenting with so many possibilities that we quickly realize we have the power to change not only our looks, but also our narratives, our relationships, our cultures. Put another way, like many of my childhood forms of play, drag creates space for us to imagine our most fabulous selves and the world we want to live in, and gives us tools to put those dreams into practice—even if it only lasts for the span of a song, a story, or a show. And, like other forms of open-ended play—which research suggests, if thoughtfully facilitated, often encourages deeper learning—drag can encourage adults and kids alike to develop a range of important skills, including critical and creative thinking, self-confidence, and cooperation. However, neither drag nor my childhood play should be celebrated simply for what they produced, but instead should be understood on their own terms, for the fun and joy they made possible.
Unfortunately, not all play begins or ends in fun and freedom: play can also be quite dangerous. This is especially true for people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and especially those who live at the intersections of historically marginalized identities. As scholar Aaron Trammell writes, “play is often hurtful, toxic, and haphazard... play is not always constructive; it can also be oppressive and traumatic.” There are too many horrific examples of the perils of play recently, ranging from sexualized violence directed toward women and femmes in video game culture (of which Gamergate only scratches the surface), to the criminalization and murder of Black youth at play in public spaces at the hands of both police and vigilantes (of whom vogue dancer O’Shae Sibley is the latest unjustly tragic example).
Sadly, in the past couple of years, drag has also become increasingly dangerous. Not only has it come under intensified political attack, with more than 40 bills introduced in 20 states, but there has also been a notable increase in physical threats and violence targeting drag venues, with advocacy group GLAAD documenting 161 incidents in the United States since early 2022 (a number that likely reflects under-reporting). Many attacks in both categories specifically target Drag Story Hour and other kid-friendly drag experiences: in my own work with the organization, and as the author of two children’s books about drag, I’ve received my fair share of hate mail, harassment, and death threats. Equally important, though attacks on drag are hardly new, contemporary backlash is taking place in the context of broader anti-LGBTQ+ political and cultural terrorism, facilitated by the mainstreaming of far-right ideologies, especially targeting trans youth and adults.
Still, while many activists are right in framing this moment as a revanchist rise in white supremacist and fascist activity—especially attempts to legislate and control gendered, racialized, and sexualized bodies—I think that analysis is only part of the story. It is also crucial that we understand this violent and legislative resistance to drag as attacks on imagination, creativity, and play.
As the late Beat poet Diane di Prima wrote in her 1971 poem Rant: “the war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it.” In so doing, di Prima reminds us that the freedom to dream is not only crucial to any social movement, but also to our very humanity. Those wishing to cling to power attack our imaginations because they recognize the power of fantasy, free thinking, and play as central to dreaming up more just and fabulous worlds. Instead they want us to conform and live in fear so that we maintain their status quo. But drag offers so many possibilities beyond what we’re given: if playing with gender helps us understand that we don’t have to accept the boxes we’re placed in, who knows what restrictive systems and structures we might liberate ourselves from next? Attacks on drag are thus not only an attempt to control our bodies and material conditions, but also to break our souls and spirits.
In response, many drag artists and activists have countered with campaigns claiming that “drag isn’t dangerous.” And it’s certainly true: no one should have to risk their life to perform or experience drag. (And, unfortunately these days, many of us do.) But while I understand the expediency of that messaging in our moment, I also yearn for greater nuance that would allow us to celebrate the more pleasurable dangers of drag. That is, not the harms of actually getting hurt, but the risks of experiencing something unplanned, unknown, or unimagined that play uniquely affords.
Drag is certainly not the only arena in which we might invite a bit more playful danger into our lives: many theorists and designers around the world (and for at least the last century) have advocated that children be allowed to play in ways that encourage calculated risks. Initially instigated in postwar European settings, various forms of so-called junk or adventure playgrounds have re-emerged recently around the world, following decades of mass-produced, monotonous, and sterile play structures. (Even as a kid, I recall feeling a sense of loss when my own town’s playground got redesigned from well-worn wood to plastic.) These open-ended spaces and programs enable kids to build their own environments and structures with their own hands, encouraging forms of autonomous exploration, creative experimentation, and collaborative deliberation. As landscape architect and children’s advocate Lady Marjory Allen of Hurtwood famously quipped: “Better a broken arm than a bruised spirit!”
It is with that same ethos that we must celebrate the imaginative and intellectual hazards of drag. Like all art forms that interface with play, we turn to it not merely to have our own experiences reflected back to us, but also to encounter something new. As I put on my face and get dolled up, I revel in the messiness and imperfection. When I step out onto a stage or into a story hour, I embrace the excitement of not knowing exactly what will happen. That’s when the real magic begins.
Even the most gentle critics of Drag Story Hour like to claim that we’re “indoctrinating” children, dangerously foisting our own ideologies onto their impressionable minds. But the reality is that we’re simply encouraging kids (and adults) to exercise their imaginations and to lean into the creative possibilities of play. These are the only dangers of drag.
Thankfully, a war against imagination and play is always bound to lose. And at a drag pageant, regardless of who gets crowned, we’re all winners anyway. We who are fierce and fabulous have all the tools we need: we’re already feeling our fantasy and we’re not afraid of what the future holds.▪︎
Lil Miss Hot Mess serves on the board of Drag Story Hour and is the author of the children’s books If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It (Running Press Kids, 2022) and The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish (Running Press Kids, 2020). She has appeared on world-class stages like at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stanford University, and Saturday Night Live, and was a founding organizer of the #MyNameIs campaign that challenged Facebook’s “real names” policy. She has published research in academic journals like Curriculum Inquiry as well as essays in The Guardian, Wired, and Slate. When not twirling, she is a professor at the University of Arizona, where she teaches a course on Play.
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