Victorian drag did exist, but at least one of these is definitely photoshopped (by a Gender Role Reversal fetish artist, not that that matters)- the one with the man and the woman -so I’m skeptical of the others, too. the head proportions seem as weird in all of them as they are in the man and woman photo, and most drag back then was…you know…drag. the male performers were trying to look like their society’s perception of women, so wigs were in and visible facial hair was out
but if anybody wants to see actual Victwardian drag, here you go!
(Francis Leon, American drag performer born 1844. Photo undated, and since the dress seems faux 18th century, that’s not necessarily a good indicator of time period. Possibly 1870s given the jewelry and how exactly the historical dress is being interpreted?)
(Jack Brown, American vaudeville star, shown here in a Paris publicity photo. 1902, so not quite Victorian, but very close. This picture is often associated with noted drag performer William Dorsey Swann, who spent his early childhood enslaved and coined the term “queen of drag” during his career in the 1880s and 1890s. Sadly, no known photographs of Swann survive.)
(Ferdinand Horschelmann, a student at Tartu University in Estonia, dressed in drag sometime between 1876 and 1882. Here is a whole article about the popular drag scene at Tartu during the late 19th century, with plenty of photographs.)
and for some marvelous drag kings:
(Annie Hindle, American drag performer, pictured c. 1870s or 1880s.)
(Ella Wesner, drag performer, photographed in 1872.)
some actresses also played “trouser roles” onstage at times in their careers, but were not professional Male ImpersonatorsTM to the exclusion of playing female characters (Male/Female Impersonator is a good term to search if you want more information about drag back then, by the way, as it was more commonly used than “drag” or “crossdressing”):
(Actresses Lily Elsie and Adrienne Augarde in a publicity still for the 1907 play, “A New Aladdin.” Elsie played female characters more often than male. I see this photo mislabeled as a depiction of sapphic lovers so often that, having forgotten the names of the actresses, I found it by googling “Edwardian lesbian couple.” While many popular female performers of the era were queer, I can’t find anything to suggest that either of these specific women were- let alone for each other.)
(Actress Charlotte Cushman as Romeo in 1858. She most definitely WAS gay, with partners throughout her life including Emma Stebbins, the sculptor responsible for the famous Angel of the Waters statue in New York City. While she did sometimes play female characters, she first made her mark playing Romeo opposite her sister’s Juliet. No, that wasn’t An Incest Thing, and nobody saw it as such. I guess they were very very good at separating the art from the artists back then?)
Speaking of separating the art from the artist, it’s important to note that- just like today -drag was not always an indicator of gender identity or sexuality. As far as I know, all of the performers shown above were cis; many were also straight. (To be fair, there were people classed as drag performers back then who I’ve not included, because by modern standards they’d be considered trans and I don’t want to call their gender a “performance.”)
Drag could be seen as many things by cishet people back then: a joke of the “ha ha man in a dress” sort now likely to offend, a lark or a prank, a demonstration of a given performer’s impressive range, a heterosexual titilation (women wearing trousers are showing their legs to some degree, after all!), a solution for theatre societies in single-gender schools, a way to portray a female character as unpleasant or Unwomanly…the list goes on.
Although, of course, within all of those Socially Acceptable Drag Excuses, you always get people who end up in a “haha unless…” situation.
While many drag performers were queer- and, as I’ve said, many people we’d now call trans used drag as a way to express their true genders publicly -and the act of crossdressing certainly plays with notions of gender and sexuality no matter who does it, it didn’t always mean back then what it means today.
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