A series of shrill drag-positive movies ensued, including La Cage Aux Folles, The Birdcage, The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar. The comfort level with drag was sufficiently high that directors moved on from making worthy movies about straight men who were forced to wear drag – learning life lessons in the process – and began to make movies about drag queens and trans people. One year later, Barbra Streisand directs and stars in Yentl, an award-winning film about an earnest young lady who drags up in order to be permitted to study the Torah.ĭrag movies snagged awards and became big business. Thanks to Tootsie, dragging up is now equated not with madness and death, but with consciousness-raising. Through his covert transformation he gains insights into sexism and is forced to reflect upon his own previous temperamental ways. In 1982, Dustin Hoffman played a neurotic actor who is driven to drag – he transforms himself into a beloved soap queen, Dorothy Michaels, aka Tootsie – in order to keep working. Movie drag became upbeat, non-sexual, non-homicidal, and worthy. Kinky or sordid drag characters were not going to win Academy Awards during the Reagan years, the years when AIDS was ravaging the gay and trans communities. When they weren’t listening to Def Leppard and Twisted Sister, they were donning black corsets and attending midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Pink Flamingos. Straight lads were wearing turquoise Lycra and bleaching their heavy-metal tresses. There is something deeply perverse about this conceit: an obvious man in a frock, kvetching about female problems in an en passant mannerīy the 1980s, drag – no longer so remote or threatening – was losing its power to communicate any kind of sinister agenda. There is something deeply perverse about this conceit: an obvious man in a frock, kvetching about female problems in an en passant manner, daring the audience to question the premise. In many of Waters’ movies – Female Trouble, Polyester, Hairspray – Divine loudly laments the burdens of womanhood. "I’m still the top model in the country," proclaims the obese and scarred Divine in Female Trouble, forcing us to see the utter pointlessness of respecting conventional beauty standards. This audacious piece of poetic licence is a strangely successful recipe for humour and satire. A man playing women’s roles." The unique magic of the Waters oeuvre comes from the fact that Divine stomps and wiggles through these movies – shopping, copulating, shooting people, cooking, stealing, having children – and is never acknowledged to be a man. As Waters explains in his autobiography Shock Value, "Divine is simply an actor who is cast as a woman. With Divine, John Waters created a whole new genre. The empress of underground-movie drag was, undeniably, a tubby chap from Baltimore named Harris Glenn Milstead, aka Divine. Plots were thin but the screen magic is undeniable. Warhol’s genius was to plonk these unconventional attention junkies in front of the camera and let their natural charisma do the rest. Oozing hooker street style, Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis and the glam-but-dentally-challenged Candy Darling enlivened various Warhol/Morrissey movies, such as Flesh, Trash and Women In Revolt, not to mention their immortalisation in the Lou Reed anthem "Walk On The Wild Side". Warhol, along with his cinematic collaborator, director Paul Morrissey, showcased the marginal drag queens and trans women in their orbit and packaged them as "superstars". He famously said, "If everybody is not a beauty then nobody is," opening the door to the notion that even a drag performer with stubble and a crappy wig should be seen as an object of beauty. The most drag-committed underground film director was undoubtedly Andy Warhol. What was unsavoury and objectionable to a mainstream audience – as we’ve seen, drag was acceptable only as laughable slapstick or the prelude to a homicidal bloodbath – was given a warm and rousing reception in the art houses of yore. During the second half of the last century, drag became a staple of "alternative" movies by such directors as Jack Smith, Rosa von Praunheim and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Meanwhile, below ground, the avant-garde was having a love affair with drag.
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