I like to think of myself as a pretty practical person. I don’t really go in for heroes or Hollywood crushes (at least, not in the sweet platonic Tiger Beat way). That said, there is one group that fills me with envy every time they’re brought to my attention. One lifestyle. One profession.

Drag queens.

From my extremely limited experience and exposure, I’ve learned that drag is one of those things that everyone can do and very few can do well. Like starting a personal blog. You’re not ready to slap on a pair of pumps and hit the stage just because you and your friend played dress-up with lipstick in your dorm once or twice. Real drag sovereignty takes the indomitable will of Tina Turner, the stylistic flair of Grace Jones (or, sigh… Lady fucking Gaga), and the sensitivity to anguish of Billie Holiday.

That, and you need to know that after your fourth drink, if a homophobic redneck runs at you between sets, you can take a motherfucker down using just one shoe, and if you break that heel you know it’s gonna cost to get a new one that holds up a two-hundred-pound man. So there’s some Bruce Lee in there (or, wait for it… TUCK Norris! Ah I kill me…)

Bear in mind as you read this, I am not at all qualified to talk about the world of drag. I’ve never really performed, I don’t have an inkling of the talent it requires, and I don’t personally know many professional performers. However, that isn’t going to stop me from gushing with my own perspective; feel free to correct me or add to what I’ve said in the comments. Now then:

1. Drag queens started Stonewall, along with other ‘undesirables’

Though it makes perfect sense given the historical context, a lot of people don’t realize the sort of crowd a gay bar would have attracted in 1960’s America, the kind of crowd that would have struck the first blows at the Stonewall Inn. For every fine, upstanding suit-and-tie homo, there were probably twenty hustlers, dressed-down cruisers, junkies, hippies, trans people, and especially drag queens.

Given that the police raids of the time were meant to demoralize and publicly shame patrons of gay bars, it would have taken incredible nerve and the right kind of crazy to fight back. Lucky for us, drag queens were the heroes New York deserved. For several days, the patrons of Stonewall raised hell against the police, and with none of this honorable, peaceful sit-and-get-pepper-sprayed shit; we’re talking throwing rocks and screaming in the streets. And if you’ve ever been to a gay pride event and seen the hosting line-up, you know who started it and who intended to end it.

A drag queen with balls as big as the rocks she was throwing.

2. Drag performance is an art form that we own

Unlike, say, paintings, musical theatre, regular theatre, television, choir (secular and religious), pop music, poetry, classic literature, modern fantasy lit, female acoustic guitarists, the fashion industry, rugby…

The point is, there’s no conjecture about where drag performance comes from. There’s no “I heard such-and-such fancies gentlemen, but I’m willing to overlook his proclivities in light of his art” or any of that hypocrisy. When you go to a drag show, you know you are getting a farm-fresh LGBT-grade quality performance. We can take a lot of pride in our drag, from the street-side cross-dressing to the highly academic performative exploration of professional fabulists. It’s the one field where spectators from outside the gay community have to concede that it’s worthwhile because it belongs to the gays, not in spite of it.

Not that you can’t say that about all the other media we command, but that battle’s yet to come.

3. It’s not just for dudes anymore!

That’s right, you no longer need to have testicles to tape down to be a drag artist. In my recent travels I’ve found brilliant stirrings in the areas of drag kingship and faux queenery. Drag kings aren’t anything new to our culture, but until recently I haven’t seen them taken seriously as primary performance figures. Let me promise you, a biological female dressed as a non-biological male can own a stage just as well as a drag queen; there’s just as much make-up to master, as much swagger to learn, and as much sexual confusion and delight to sow in the crowd.

I’ll confess, I’m more interested faux queens right now. A faux queen is, in the words of one of my favorite Dublin performers, Bunny: “a biological female dressed as a biological male dressed as a non-biological female.” At first I thought I was just drawn in by the novelty, but after seeing a few shows, I can promise you that it’s no easier to be a faux queen than a drag queen, even with the ‘natural’ curves to fill out whatever you’re wearing. It takes a special touch for a woman to pull of drag without looking like a cheap whore or, far worse, just a dolled-up woman on stage.

4. They are guardians at the tomb of pop culture

After a certain age, you start to realize that when most people ask you what music you listen to, you have to filter out everything that came before a certain year. Nobody likes to come across as stuck in the past, and the easiest way to do that is admitting how much old-school Madonna you have on your Top 25 playlist.

Drag queens have always been there to tell us that it’s okay to treasure the oldies. Drag shows are notorious for set lists of the sappiest ballads and diva numbers from decades gone by. For every strut to “Born This Way”, you’re going to get two or three performances to the one-hit wonders of yesteryear like Vanessa Williams (yes you are, Vanessa, just stop it) or Alicia Bridges. Also, Whitney Houston. So much Whitney. All of it essential.

5. Drag performance is not just one talent, it’s a series of difficult to master skills

Make-up artist. Designer. Seamstress. Dancer. Actor. Contortionist. Motivational speaker. Sex education expert. Community leader. Pop culture curator. Model. Bargain hunter. Comedian. Public relations. Plus you’ve got to hold your liquor.

Lip-syncing and dressing up is easily less than half of the work a real performing drag queen does. And if you think even that’s easy, see how well you can sing along to your favorite song on the radio. I guarantee at least one verse will trip you up. Now imagine doing that in front of a room of drunk, critical gays. In heels.

All told, being a drag queen is basically being a volunteer superstar. Even Britney lip-syncs at her shows.

6. Drag transcends class

This is actually a really big one: it doesn’t matter where you come from, how educated you are or how much money you have, all it takes to succeed as a drag queen is the right attitude and talents you have to learn the hard way.

The documentary Paris Is Burning explains this better than I can. Queer youths from rough backgrounds in the mid-80s NYC found a home and an escape in the established drag ball circuit. This group essentially established voguing; through emulation of high fashion, in a way they created it. This despite the fact that many of these youths and even the older queens who established the arena grew up in the poorer parts of the city, likely didn’t have access to higher education and even more likely were put out of their homes for their queerness.

Even today, all the money and education in the world can’t help you succeed as a drag queen if you don’t have the knack for it. This distinguishes it from most other media forms, where more money means better production values or better marketing. In many ways, succeeding by your own means and creativity with limited materials is the proving ground for lasting talent. Drag succeeds by word of mouth, performers by their own merit.

7. You are in drag right now

Business attire is professional drag. You are deliberately modifying your natural image (sweat pants and a stained t-shirt) to appear to your boss and co-workers as someone who is competent at what they do. You could edit spreadsheets buck-naked, but you’re putting on a constrictive dress-shirt, a tie that serves literally no purpose, a blazer that doesn’t even keep you warm like any real jacket, and some shiny uncomfortable shoes that will scuff clean through if you even look at them too hard. Why? Because professionalism is a performance that has nothing to do with your job, the same way that prom dresses and eyeliner aren’t attached to a particular sex or personality.

Dressing up to go out to bars is casual drag. If I catch you on a Sunday afternoon in front of the TV, you are not going to smell like jasmine blossoms, and the only make-up on your face will be whatever you were too lazy to wash off from last night. Every conversation point you raise at the club is a performance designed not to reveal just how obsessed you are to mozzarella sticks and True Blood.

Hell, even those sweatpants are drag. If it weren’t for your neighbors, you’d probably have your bare hairy ass right on the couch cushions.

The point is, your entire appearance is structured to project a personality you want others to believe about you. Just because your style genuinely reflects your personality doesn’t mean it isn’t contrived. You don’t need to cross-dress to be in drag. Just check this clip from Paris Is Burning:

8. Drag keeps the community from taking itself too seriously

In recent years (or maybe it just seems recent to me, being 23 and all), I’ve heard a great deal of noise about how drag perpetuates a number of stereotypes about both gay men and women that we’d all be better off forgetting for the sake of progress. In a post-Stonewall world, it seems that the ideal for gays is to quickly integrate into society at large, and stop all this nonsense about rouge and lip-syncing. And isn’t it offensive to reduce womanhood to a series of mannerisms, tastes and styles?

As for the first point, that’s cowardly assimilationist bullshit, and I won’t have any of it on my doorstep. The second point deserves a closer look, though. What, if anything, is being reduced or belittled by drag performance? Some dresses, make-up, general cattiness? These things aren’t women, and to ever have equated them with womanhood was what truly belittled the gender in the first place. On one front, drag takes the styles of the last few decades, and demotes them (or promotes, depending on your view) to stage make-up. Both women and men should see this as an opportunity for freedom. If the styles and behaviors you’ve been bound to are suddenly transferable, even between genders, what ties do you really have to them? What new frontiers of self-expression are opened by realizing that your sex doesn’t restrict your presentation?

And if that weighs you down, a woman with a five o’clock shadow poking through her foundation is brilliant, too.

That is the crucial role that drag fulfills for the gay community: they are at once a realization of radical gender theory in a common space, ready to open minds, and they are a group of men in heels, poking fun at your dry values if you are too stuffily either invested in queer theory or heteronormativity. They are ridiculous and vital, and not to be underestimated.

9. Drag queens are natural leaders

Being a drag queen is hard. The stresses of performance aren’t the only thing that can wear a girl down; most performers have to put up with ignorant straight douchebags at one point or another, whether it’s a mid-show heckler who came for the novelty or a basher waiting outside the clubs to follow someone home and ‘teach them a lesson’. Stress even comes from within the community, in the form of rival queens with a real grudge, an ungrateful or belligerent crowd, or the fear of being minimized when anyone finds out about your interest. In short, surviving the drag scene takes real backbone.

So it’s no surprise that so many gay events are hosted and run by drag performers. In addition to providing great entertainment and brilliant emcee work, drag queens have earned the community’s respect and can deal with anyone who gives the event shit. Any assimiliationists or homos trying to de-fem the community would do well to remember how much we owe drag performers, what they’ve been through and what they do for us.

10. Tandi Iman Dupree’s Split

Skip to about 0:25 and look at that entrance. Bonnie Tyler couldn’t do that in her prime if you soaked her legs in WD-40 all day. And I don’t know how she doesn’t just explode blood over the stage when she hits the ground, but that’s the kind of tuck the bards should be singing about for centuries to come. Bitch has earned her own spot at the top of this list. If you think that’s a once-in-a-lifetime impressive feat, I promise you, it’s not. Go to any drag show worth the price of admission, and you’ll see that at least one of the queens has a trick up her sleeve to make sure you remember her name. The point is, this spot really goes to all the unsung feats in drag performance that never hit the light of day because of margin interest.

Wow, I went on and on. Again, feel free to throw in your own opinions in the comments and tell me how right I am. As always, I reserve the right to yell at you in caps if your opinion is bad.