Welcome to this installment of Context Clues, where we share excerpts from past episodes

to give you a more complete background on the new topic at hand.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American History.

Hello, my queens. I'm excited to announce our upcoming series on early drag queens,

those who are often called female impersonators. We will be giving you the history of the English

theater cross-dressing panics of the 1500s, the drag balls thrown by previously enslaved black

men who fought the police, the female impersonators of the Vodville stage who were hell-bent on

proving their masculinity, the swishy performers who made drag queens the hottest trend of the 1930s,

the shockingly sexy soldier drag shows of World War II, and the womanless weddings once thrown

all over the south. We'll also look at a moment in time in the 1970s when the movements for women's

rights, gay rights, and transgender rights changed everything the nation believed about the archetype

of the female impersonator of the drag queen, transforming this institution into the fantastically

queer staple we know today, the one apparently threatening the very fabric of American society.

You see, before our modern era, these performances required serious safeguards in order to prevent

a moral panic from forming. You could do drag, but you couldn't do drag because you wanted to

do drag because you liked wearing women's clothes. You had to do drag because it made you money

and gave you fame. You had to jump through a lot of flaming hoops to prove that you weren't a

fairy, a common term at the time for queer people. This didn't mean that there weren't those who

practiced drag because they wanted to, because they loved it, because it made them feel good,

because it made them feel true. But those queens were living out on the farthest margins of society,

moving quietly through the night so as not to arouse suspicion, less they be locked up in jail or

worse. A quick aside, you'll hear me use the terms transvestite and transsexual in these excerpts,

...