What is a Drag Queen?
Or - when is a TV not a TV?
What makes a drag queen tick? Angela Brown goes hunting on their trail...
When I started to think about this article my first problem was to decide what a drag queen actually is. I know the name conjures up a vision in my mind, and no doubt in yours, but is it the same image? Is it a true image or one clouded by appearance and missing the underlying character?
I felt I needed a definition to work from, so I talked to an ex-music hall performer now living in retirement. He was at first quite adamant about the definition.
"A Drag Queen" he said, "is a man who performs as a female and never as a male. The difference between them and female impersonators is that a female impersonator will also appear as a man on occasion."
During the conversation I got the distinct impression that he thought drag queens also dressed as women off-stage and were all homosexual.
This made me wonder how accurate my friend's observations really were and it struck a chord in my mind about the general image of transvestites and drag queens. It appears that most people still consider both groups as homosexuals.
One of the earliest practitioners in dealing with sexual problems, Kraftt-Ebbing, a 19th century German psychologist, considered that transvestism was a link between an ordinary fetish and homosexuality, and went so far as to say that homosexuality was always involved.
Later studies by Magnus Hirschfeld, also a German working in the early part of this century, indicated clearly what I think all transvestites will agrede with: that the incidence of homosexuality, bisexuality and heterosexuality is as diverse in transvestites as it is in the rest of the population.
Hirschfeld's students did a study of his cases which showed that 35% were heterosexual, 35% homosexual, 15% bisexual and 15% monosexual.
But it must be remembered that his case files were confined to patients who felt they had a problem and had come for help. There was bound to be a bias towards homosexual cases, as Hirschfeld first became known in Germany for writing a book in 1896 called 'Sappho and Socrates', which dealt with the suicide of a homosexual army officer.
In a much more recent survey by 'Accord' magazine of its transvestite readers, they discovered that 44% claimed to be heterosexual, 34% bisexual, 19% monosexual and only 3% homosexual.
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