ABSTRACT
Since the eighteenth century at least, sexuality that is socially branded as deviant has comprised a recognizable subculture in the west, but its most characteristic and enduring manifestations have often been coopted by the dominant culture which ignores or refuses to recognize their origins. Only recently have the debts owed to these subcultures begun to be acknowledged: unfortunately the cover-up or neglect has gone on so long that the act of retrieval is not easy. This has certainly been the case with the etiology of two relatively modern versions of cross-dressing-glamour drag and the male impersonatorwhich came to the fore in the nineteenth-century English-speaking theater.
