Drag on BBC

[Ariana12]

Is anyone else moticing the Beeb obsession with drag? Can anyone explain it? I used to enjoy drag acts in the old gentle days but how did it all become so crude? And why is it de rigeur fot our kids to know all about the sexualised version??

Ithink what you are seeing is the difference between "drag" which is a very specific, stylized type of female impersonation by gay men, and men dressing as women for other purposes.

Those other purposes might be someone who is a comedian with a female character role, usually comedic - you see this go the other way sometimes too though it's less common. It's also common in sketch comedy, where the troupe member best suited to a particular role may not be the same sex, or there are limited choices.

Panto is another one where the purpose is largely about being topsy turvy, as well as having a laugh at how silly the actor looks, how clearly not a woman he is.

The reasons for those kinds of depictions isn't all that similar to drag which is fundamentally about the links between sexual desire and gender presentation.

I have been told that the reason for the loss of the principle boy being played by a woman was mainly commercial.

If you do it the traditional way you get a pretty girl, a funny masculine bear-man dressed as a woman, and another pretty girl dressed as a boy.

If you make the boy a young attractive male actor you broaden the appeal.

And this is particularly the case where a production is hoping to use well known actors to bring in the audience, there are some people who will pay to see the up and coming young leading men.

Why is the BBC so keen on promoting drag?
Because they want children to sit on their laps, of course.

there, ‘fixed it’ for you

It isn't simple and I believe you are confusing transgender with drag (I know the deliberately ambiguous label "trans" does this).

Drag comes from gay culture, there have been drag queens that transition, and they would be defined as homosexual transsexuals.

I believe you are confusing them with the heterosexual transsexuals (AGP).

Drag queens and transsexual are different.

I'm not sure it's us doing the confusing, YesterdaysFuture - having a 24/7 drag queen who insists on female pronouns all the time seems to be the way the BBC et al are currently representing everything that isn't straight.

Drag has always been around, but it has only recently been mysteriously promoted to represent the entire 'LGBTQ++' population in many areas of life, from TV shows to children's story time at in your local public library, and we are trying to work through how that has happened, and why.

It's confusing because it's confusing. Nobody who fought for lesbian and gay rights in past decades could have foreseen a situation where 'TQ+++' would be added on to, and then take over, LGB rights, and where 'LGBTQ++' diversity is so often represented by a man dressed up as an ugly caricature of a woman.

Yes, places like the BBC are confusing the issue, but drag does still seem to be almost totally dominated by gay men, rather than other types of gender transitioning males. Which I think accounts for the animosities we've seen between the groups.

Drag comes from gay culture

That’s not drag’s exclusive roots. It also comes from music hall tradition, which itself is born out of the likes of pleasure gardens, commedia dell’arte, and pub back room entertainments (which had particular form for bawdiness). Like burlesque (which has also suffered a dumbing down) it was subversive and cocking a snook at the strictures of society by turning “rules” on their heads in the form of cross-dressing etc.

Good drag, like good burlesque, should be clever, funny and entertaining and - yes - quite risqué. Burlesque too often went down the route of “put on a sparkly costume and wave your tits about” and drag has morphed into this horrible misogynistic crap.

If anyone wants to know more, John Major (yes, the terribly grey politician!) wrote an excellent book on music hall called My Old Man (both a lyric from a music hall song and a reference to his father who was a music hall performer) 🙂

Did he wear gor blimey trousers, Sideways?

He may well have done, but it may also have been who was issuing an instruction to follow a van 😉