Creative License
When stupid laws have unintended consequences
When I was in high school, I dressed like a boy…
For on-stage performances.
I went to an all-girl Catholic high school, and I got involved in theater because some of my friends did it and it looked fun. I did crew my sophomore year, and in my junior year, I decided to audition. Even though I was neither a good singer, nor a good dancer.
My school was affiliated with an all-boy Catholic school, and for things like school plays with male characters, we extended an invitation for them to audition. We usually got a couple of takers, and they were usually cast without much question.
When I was originally cast, I was just in the chorus, which was fine with me. I was nervous about choreography — I was not the most graceful or coordinated person. I figured since I was also tall, they would stick me in the back, and that would be that.
However, what the director hadn’t counted on was of the two boys who had been cast, one of them would drop out.
This resulted in boy #2 getting promoted to the male lead, and me, the tallest girl in the play, getting cast as a man.
It was a bigger role than a dancer in the chorus, that’s for sure. I had to learn how to waltz. I had to sing a love song to/with my close friend Hope. (Hi, Hope!) I wore a suit, slicked my hair back, and had a mustache drawn on my face.
I must have acquitted myself nicely. I have a fairly low-pitched voice for a girl, and, as I said, I was tall, and frankly, rather flat-chested. A mother of one of the girls in the play told her, “Oh, those two boys did so well!”
I was one of those boys.
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The history of theater, television, and movies is full of characters who dress as the opposite sex. In Shakespearian times, women weren’t allowed to be on stage, and men played all the parts. Even today, All’s Well That Ends Well and Merchant of Venice (and possibly others; my Shakespeare knowledge isn’t comprehensive) feature women who dress as men in order to realistically travel alone or speak authoritatively in a role as a lawyer or doctor.
From Some Like It Hot to Tootsie to the Madea films, from Bugs Bunny (Bugs Bunny!) to “Bosom Buddies”, from Monty Python to Kids in the Hall — male characters have been dressing in women’s clothing for decades. This Is The Army, a 1943 film based on an Irving Berlin musical, whose stars included the future president Ronald Reagan, contains several scenes of military men performing in drag (as part of a revue staged to boost morale).
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Another instance of me dressing as a man in high school was when my school put on a “lip sync” talent show. Myself and three of my friends (all girls), dressed as men and lip synched The Righteous Brother’s “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” to a girl — acting out the song as if we were trying to win her back for our buddy.
No one panicked. No one was worried about “exposing” anyone to drag, or thought we were being “groomed” to become trans or gay (because that’s not how that works). Laws, like the one passed in Tennessee, that ban drag shows could also have an impact on theater programs that need to or choose to have kids dressing up as the opposite sex, either out of necessity (as in my high school in the 1980s) or because, you know, the characters cross dress as part of the plot (as in Shakespeare). (Source.)
The current moral panic about drag shows, transgender people, and bodily autonomy in general, is dangerous. If the GOP sincerely wanted to “protect children,” they would be legislating reasonable gun control, free lunch programs, and healthcare access for everyone.
But we know the people who want to ban drag also want to control many aspects of education, and simply use inclusive books and the phantom threat of sexually explicit reading hours, as well as the “threat” of CRT, to whip their base into a frenzy. Then they go on to pass laws that aren’t in the interest of children, but in the interest of control.
Hint: drag performance is entertainment, and like any entertainment, 1) caters to the audience appropriately and 2) is one hundred percent optional to attend. No one’s dragging (pun intended) young kids to adult themed shows.
I sincerely wish politicians were more interested in protecting and helping children instead of policing people and the choices they want to make (the ones that don’t harm other people). But as we inch closer to fascism, I think we’ll see more performative laws against phantom threats than anything that will actually help anyone, including, maybe even especially, children.
