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Dressing in Drag


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There have been only a few times in my life when I dressed as a girl or woman. It hasn’t been a habit with me, nor did I feel like I was challenging gender norms or doing anything especially transgressive.

The first time, as far as I can recall, was when I was 14 or 15. I went to a church Halloween party dressed as a girl. This was back in the late sixties, long before all the Halloween-themed horror flicks, when evangelical churches hosted honest-to-God Halloween parties and good Christian parents let their kids dress up as witches, vampires, and ghosts without batting an eye.

The church was not one where we regularly attended, and I did not know anyone at the party. I think I was accompanying my sister who had been invited by a friend. I don’t remember why I chose to go as a girl, but I think the likeliest reason had to do with the ready availability of girl clothes from my sisters. I’m sure including me was a last-minute decision. In any case I put on a dress and went.

I remember two things vividly from the party. One was bobbing for apples. It was the first time I’d ever done that, and it was much harder than I had imagined it to be. The second was overhearing two women who were chaperoning the party. They were commenting about the poor girl who had come without a costume, and I was very pleased at how successful I had been at posing as a girl. Of course, in retrospect it seems to me the women knew very well I could hear them and were trying to lift my spirits by complimenting my dissimulation.

At the time I’d never heard of dressing in drag and did not know that drag shows were a thing. My parents were fairly careful about what we watched on television, and my only exposure to male characters wearing dresses was Bugs Bunny, and it was just the straightforward comedy of incongruity.

Some years ago—and many, many years after that Halloween party—I played a woman in our church’s production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, based on the book by Barbara Robinson. I played Mrs. Armstrong, a domineering, middle-aged virago who ordinarily ran everything, including the Christmas pageant, but who was laid up with a broken leg. She resorted to trying to maintain control from her hospital bed, but it didn’t work. I wore a brassiere padded by balloons filled with warm water to approximate real breasts. A beautician friend did my hair and makeup before every performance, and I was convincing enough that many people who knew me did not recognize me until they saw my name in the program.

This performance was in a non-denominational evangelical church. No one raised any objections to it. My wife was also in the play. A few people remarked that I must be confidant in my masculinity, to which I politely assented.

When my son, Noah, started fifth grade about nine months later, his teacher, who had come to a performance, remarked to his class that he had seen Noah’s dad wearing a dress. I thought Noah might be ashamed of me, but he was actually rather pleased with the notoriety and even somewhat proud of me.

Of course, my performance was not a drag show. It was a show where I was in drag. Likewise, screen performances such as Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire, Jamie Farr in M*A*S*H, or Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, are not drag shows. They are shows featuring men in drag. In most cases, they are played for laughs because we all know that it is unusual and incongruous for men to dress like women. Sometimes, as when John Travolta appeared in Hairspray, the point is not mere comedy but to show that gender differences are not as important as we often imagine when it comes to acting and by extension to many other roles where we have maintained a strict gender distinction.

We are living in a time when many such distinctions are collapsing. Some people are celebrating the collapse and want it go even further. They argue that gender, since it is socially constructed, is as fluid as fashion and can be modified at any time according to individual tastes. Others, while acknowledging the social construction of gender, fear that a too-fluid definition of gender can cause a host of mental health issues because gender is so fundamental to identity. Still others, of course, deny that gender is socially constructed and see it as synonymous with biological sex. On one side is the intoxicating brew of individual freedom with a class of victims endangered by traditional norms. On the other is the sobering common-sense of pervasive traditions mixed with disgust at sexual deviance darkly hinted at but rarely made explicit. The utopia one side hopes for is the dystopia the other side fears.

For my part, I think we in the West are far too individualistic and myopic about what constitutes a just society to envision one on our own. No matter what you think of cross-dressing, it has been practiced throughout the world in various contexts over thousands of years.

Tennessee recently enacted a law that would (as some would have it) outlaw drag shows in the state. That change in Tennessee law has produced a lot of backlash from liberals. Here is what the law did. It modified a subsection of Tennessee criminal code regulating adult-oriented entertainment. Strippers, exotic dancers, go-go girls and other acts “of prurient interest” could only take place in adult cabaret venues. They could not take place in front of children, in public places, or near schools and places of worship. To this list, the law now adds male and female impersonators. What is not clear—and probably cannot be made clear without court decisions—is whether the mere act of cross-gender dressing will itself be deemed “of prurient interest” or indeed whether gender nonconforming dress alone is sufficient to make a performer an “impersonator.” It could be argued, for example, that Klinger on M*A*S*H was not a female impersonator because he merely wore dresses. He presented himself in every other respect as a male. Will drag queens be banned from story time at libraries? It seems to me they should not be unless they insist on providing entertainment of prurient interest. Unfortunately, case law about what constitutes prurient interest leans heavily on local mores. No objective, statewide standard may apply if the law is challenged in any particular place.

I do not know whether my performance as Mrs. Armstrong, come July 2023, would make me subject to arrest in Tennessee, and this is where the rub is. Would I be willing to test it? Would I push at the law to see if it pushes back? Would I risk arrest? Or would I bow out and recommend a woman play Mrs. Armstrong? And what about the church? Would it support my decision or play it safe and distance itself from me or urge me to “abstain from all appearance of evil?” As Christians, it is not always easy to tell how or where or even whether we should engage in the culture wars. For many the tension between acting for social justice and acting to preserve traditional morality leaves them paralyzed. Better to not get involved. But injustice doesn’t go away on its own. Violence doesn’t fade away of its own accord. The change in Tennessee law may appear minor to some, but to others it represents a volley in the culture wars that cannot go unanswered.

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