ABSTRACT
Studies on men who appear as women but are still known to be men, whether they are called drag queens, show queens or female impersonators, have revealed that drag and drag performances play a significant role in twentieth-century sexual cultures.1 One of the first profound studies on the topic, Esther Newton’s Mother Camp (1972/1979), demonstrated that female impersonators in the 1960s acted as spokespersons for the American LGBT community in general, and gay men in particular, by representing the stigma of the gay world. Newton considered drag queens as gay culture’s ‘heroes’ at a time when homosexuality was still recovering from active oppression under the McCarthy regime while facing new threats by outspoken opponents of LGBT rights such as Anita Bryant.
