Drag (clothing)

Drag in its broadest sense means a costume or outfit that carries symbolic significance, but usually refers to the clothing associated with one gender role when worn by a person of the other gender. The term originated either in gay theater slang in the 1870s, where the official long-established theater term for "cross-dressing" on-stage was travesti (French, "cross-dressed," giving rise to travesty which took on further connotations as a genre of critical vocabulary). The term "drag" may have been given a wider circulation in Polari, a gay street argot in England in the early part of the last century. Unlike "threads," "drag" never simply meant "clothes."

Related Topics:
Costume - Gender role - Polari

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Someone wearing drag is said to be "in drag." "Drag queen" appeared in print in 1941. The verb form is to "do drag." A folk etymology whose acronym basis reveals a characteristically late 20th-century bias, would make "drag" an abbreviation of "dressed as girl" in description of male-to-female transvestism; the converse, "drab" for "dressed as boy," is unrecorded. Drag is practiced by people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

Related Topics:
Drag queen - 1941 - Folk etymology - Acronym - Sexual orientation - Gender identities

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