[Caption]Photo: Extra.com[/caption]

I follow a lot of drag queens on Facebook. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s bored with social media, especially as those on your friend list get older and settle down. In lieu of wedding announcements and photos of new babies, my newsfeed is filled with “best butt” competitions and pictures of new wigs. Oftentimes my homepage is not suitable for the office, but that’s a small price to pay for keeping tabs on performers like Heroine Marks, Fay Slift, and Daytona Bitch.

I was scrolling through facebook the other day when I saw a photo of Daytona in brown face makeup, shiny peach lipstick, and a sparkly turban. Her hand, almost hidden behind a gigantic ring, was raised in a dramatic Carmen Miranda-type gesture. Under the picture were a number of hashtags including “#racist.” Both the makeup and the ‘exotic’ getup evoked blackface, the once popular entertainment in which mostly white actors darkened their faces with burnt cork and acted out racist caricatures like Jim Crow, Uncle Tom, and big-bosomed Mammy. I considered writing a comment, questioning whether Daytona really intended to evoke the loaded legacy of minstrel shows, but I held back. Unlike some people, I don’t enjoy provoking back and forth “no, you’re the racist!” comment fights on facebook.

Daytona performed that night at Crews and Tangos in a sketch inspired by Miss Cleo, an African-American TV psychic who, during the late 1990’s, was as ubiquitous on TV as Russell Oliver the Cash Man. Apparently, Daytona’s costume and performance inspired heated discussions online before she even left the stage. Two days later, the marketing company that booked her for Pride events fired her by email from all her planned appearances this weekend. It’s a big financial loss. A drag queen not working Pride weekend is like a department store Santa taking off the month of December.

“I asked a couple people if it was offensive because it’s not blackface in my eyes,” Daytona told Extra. “I went to theatre school. I know what blackface is. It was not a minstrel show. I was doing a character. The people I asked at Crews & Tangos thought it was hilarious that I was dressed as a big fat black woman.”

Minstrel shows, which reached the height of their popularity in the second half of the 19th century, were America’s first national popular culture. More common in the North than the South, they exaggerated and mythologized a Black culture unknown to white audiences. Slavery and poverty weren’t so bad, the musicals implied, because look at all the fun to be had in the cotton fields.

Although they began their steady decline at the turn of the century, replaced by vaudeville and film, their influence is everywhere. As John Leland explains in Hip: The History, the songs “Camptown Races,” “Oh! Susanna,” and “Dixie,” recognizable from Warner Brothers’ cartoons, were minstrel anthems. “Blackface played a key role in landmark movies like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer, the first talkie,” Leland writes. “Amos ‘n’ Andy, which translated minstrelsy for radio, was the most popular program in America in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s…The medium would not have proliferated as rapidly without it.” Seemingly innocuous cartoon characters like Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse may owe their dark skin and white gloves to the legacy of blackface.

There’s another, less documented inheritor of minstrelsy–the drag queen. Female impersonation was a constant in minstrel shows, with white men donning handkerchiefs and hoop skirts to play the motherly Mammy or the seductive “mulatto wench.” In turn of the century New York, blackface coexisted with female-impersonating comedians, tuxedo-clad lesbian blues singers, and “fairies” or “Nances,” gay men whose exaggerated effeminate behavior endeared them to mainstream audiences. (Nathan Lane, an actor who has done a similar thing in modern times, is currently playing a 1930’s Nance on Broadway.) Just as minstrels didn’t seek an authentic portrayal of African-Americans, drag queens weren’t trying to pass as real women so much exaggerating femininity to the point of absurdity.

Drag, which I like to think of as the queer community’s oldest tradition, has always pushed the boundaries of propriety. Like shock comedians, drag queens walk a thin like between humour and outrage, and they do so in platform heels. This makes them problematic representatives for the official, sanitized image of the community pushed by corporate-funded Pride committees across the continent. But it also makes them fun.

It’s integral to drag to poke fun at women, especially stars with the right combo of glamour and pathos–Joan Crawford and Judy Garland, Amy Winehouse and Sarah Palin. But a white drag performer doesn’t have the cultural distance to darken her face and act out a caricature of a Wise Caribbean Mystic.

Ivory Towers, another Crews and Tangos performer who shared the stage with Daytona that fateful night, has also defended her use of “tribal makeup” (whatever that is).

“Wearing tribal makeup is not racist,” she told Extra. “People do tribal makeup in makeup school, and other drag queens have done tribal makeup… It has nothing to do with being racist or attacking black people. To me, drag is an escape from reality… I am an artist and the least racist person that there is. I don’t regret it.”

Drag queens don’t exist in a vacuum. Like any other performing artist, they respond to what’s in the news and what’s going on around them, and they have to anticipate how audiences will react, especially in the era of viral internet sharing. I know that Daytona is a very talented comedian and, based on the comments of support fans have sent her, a beloved member of the community. But it wasn’t enough for her to ask a couple people before she went on stage if they were personally offended by her costume. (As has been pointed out, the fact that she tagged her photo #racist shows that she predicted the likely fallout and didn’t take it very seriously.) Nor is it fair for Ivory to say drag is an “escape from reality.” Drag has always offered a fantasy of larger than life glitz, but when it wades into historically racist tropes, for people of colour in the audience it’s anything but an escape.

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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.

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