Cuz I want one.
I’ve been very close friends with gay men throughout my life, but none of them were seriously into drag outside of Halloween, so I’ve never really had a chance to probe into the drag mind, and after watching some RuPaul’s Drag Race, I’m burning with questions.
Any volunteers?
Aren’t most drag queens actually heterosexual? I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere.
I’ve never met or seen or heard of a straight drag queen in my entire life.
Transvestite? yes.
Drag queen? No.
No shade, Ru’s show is amazing. Be sure to watch Untucked too.
Yep.
Drag Queens are all gay.
Transvestites–men who get a boner from wearing women’s clothing–are all straight.
Some transsexuals prefer men, others prefer women. I’m not going to get into which preference would be gay or straight.
My Roomie was a cross dresser, and was primarily Het…well, before the rest of his life went spiraling down the crapper. No telling if, what, or how he experimented.
He was quite the womanizer, too.
So… it’s about terminology? I’ll admit I thought drag queens and transvestites were the same thing.
I’d say it’s more than just terminology. A drag queen typically cultivates a persona associated with being in drag and sees it as a piece of performance art. There’s no erotic element typically, and passing as a woman is not the objective (although a drag queen is expected to bring a certain amount of skill, craft, and glamour or camp).
Whether it’s exclusively a gay thing or not? Well, there’s Dame Edna Everidge, who is also Barry Humphries, a straight man, but I don’t think Dame Edna ever been described as a drag queen. On the other hand, nobody denies that Divine was most certainly a drag queen.
And of course, you have the term itself, which includes the word “queen” and which definitely sheds some light on the matter.
At any rate, drag certainly has played a very large role in the American gay experience (including for gay men of color with ball culture), far outpacing its influence among heterosexuals or mainstream culture at large.
Listicle without commentary?
Their translations are almost the same thing in Spain. The difference is that a reinona is a transvestite who has a complete persona (which is not himself and not copied from someone else), whereas a “lower level” transvestite doesn’t.
A dude who dresses up as Dolly Parton or Rocío Jurado for a varieties show would qualify as “un travesti”; I remember seeing someone pointing to a comic duo (Los Morancos: they’re brothers and straight) that the success of two female characters they use often makes them “reinonas” - and them saying “hell, now that you mention it, yes! Hey bro, do you think we should try our hand in Tenerife?” “Nah, nowhere near pretty enough” (the two characters are a housewife in hair rollers and her mother in law).
Google carnaval tenerife drag queen for a drag queen show which definitely does not require the participants to be gay but does require them to have stage personas as well as stage costumes. Results NSFW unless you work in Private.
Humphries is a satirist, and whilst I’m not sure what his predilictions are, I doubt that drag was ever high on his career agenda. 
Edna is one of many of the personas that Barry Humphries has taken on over his career. In her early days, Edna wore ordinary middle-aged shapeless clothes and daggy accessories, as was the norm for ordinary middle-aged women in Australia at that time. It’s been his most successful character, initially intended to ‘take the piss’ out of the typical Australian suburban housewifely lifestyle, but later taking on a life of her own you might say. Once she became famous, she got all glam and stuff. Not quite how she started out.
Two of his other characters are Sir Les Patterson, Sandy Stone. Now they never reached the heights of stardom that Dame Edna did, but are IMHO more believable characters than Edna could ever aspire to.
Now, back to the Drag Queen thread…
No, drag is a stage persona, an act, and in that sense is no different from Sly Stallone pretending to be a boxer or Colin Firth playing a King, except that Drag Queens (and Kings, lest we forget) tend to have characters that they carry with them across multiple shows. It’s a particular form of entertainment associated with the gay scene, but it’s not compulsory to be gay OR to have desires to BE a woman in order to play a drag queen.
A transvestite is someone who takes on the dress or persona of a member of the opposite sex for their own personal reasons, not for performance.
It’s possible to be both a drag queen and a transvestite, but is pretty rare compared with drag acts that dress as their own sex off stage.
(For the record, I would say that Dame Edna IS a drag act).
But to answer a little for the OP, I don’t personally know any drag queens, but know plenty of gay men and women (including myself) who will happily don drag for fancy dress parties, pride parades and the like. I have two friends who performed as drag kings back in their student days and even appeared in a Frankie Goes to Hollywood video as such, but in their everyday lives, whilst they are lesbians, they do not dress or behave remotely masculine. It’s just for fun and is all part of the gay scene’s penchant for challenging gender stereotypes.
As SanVito mentioned, there are also drag kings (usually cis women, but sometimes trans men or genderqueer female-assigned people, who dress up in exaggerated male costume for performance purposes), as well as faux queens (cis women who dress up and perform as drag queens).
As I said, I’ve got lots of gay friends, and almost all of them have donned drag occasionally for special parties. But that’s different. I’d like to hear from someone who is committed. A RuPaul wannabe.
matt, can you explain what ‘cis’ means?
cis = person born with matching gender identity and genitalia. The opposite of trans.
Sure, it’s the opposite of “trans,” as in cisalpine and transalpine. Someone whose gender identity is congruent with that assigned at birth and is therefore socially affirmed and accepted.