Drag in the Windy City

Multiple labels have been used to refer to queer people since Chicago was first incorporated as a town in 1833: some are derogatory, others more neutral, and some are terms invoked by queer individuals to refer to themselves and each other. All have changed over time. With respect to images of cross-dressed individuals, it might be obvious the subjects are in “drag” but we cannot know whether these individuals gained pleasure from these performances. Indeed, we do not know whether they are homosexual, even though cross-dressing is closely associated with the gay community. This project – any project - cannot eliminate such ambiguity. Indeed, queer scholarship should call attention to these issues and simulatenously also allow these tensions to persist.

A few terms are included here to help guide the exploration of the history and practice of drag in Chicago. Many of the older terms come from two excellent books that focus on the queer history of Chicago: St. Sukie de la Croix's Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall and Jim Elledge's The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers and Sex Morons in Chicago's First Century.

• Bulldagger: Many blues songs performed in Bronzeville in the early 1900s used the term as coded reference to women who dressed as men. 
• Butch/Femme: This refers to a rigid dichotomy of binary gender roles within a specific subculture of same-sex relationships among women.   
• Drag King: Refers to a female dressed in conventionally masculine clothing, typically during a performance on stage.
• Drag Queen: Refers to a male dressed in conventionally feminine clothing, typically during a performance on stage.
• Gay: Initially a term conveying cheerfulness, homosexual men began to use this term to refer to themselves in the 1960s to refer to their sexual orientation. By the end of the 20th century, most LGBT recommended adopting this term. 
• Gender: A practice/performance of self-identification that is expressed outwardly. Traditionally, expressions of gender that adhere most closely to the binary of masculine/feminine are encouraged.

• Gender Fuck: A gender performance that does not adhere to either side of the gender binary, this practice was undertaken in the 1980s/1990s by politically active queer communities, such as Radical Faeries, in an attempt to confront hegemonic norms about matters of sex, sexuality and gender.
• Homophile: Emerged in the 1950s/1960s and was used in association with explicitly politically motivated homosexual groups seeking legal equality and emphasizing love (phile) instead of sexual pathology.
• Homosexuals/homos: First appeared in print in 1869 but did become common until the 1920s (Elledge, xiv). The Defender, Chicago's black newspaper, first used the term in 1949 (Windy City Media). 
• Impersonator, Transvestite and Cross-Dressing: “The term ‘impersonator’ is more closely aligned with theatrical expressions of gender, which have been a longstanding and often acceptable form of entertainment by people who were not presumed to be transvestites. Cross-dressing is also a carefully chosen term, distinct from cross-dresser, because it indicates a practice, rather than an identity” (Rawson, 337).
• Inverts: First appeared in Havelock Ellis’ 1897 book, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion Some Chicago queer spaces were labeled "invert clubs" in the early 1900s (Sprague, 81). Sociologists from the University of Chicago, including Ernest Burgess from 1916 to 1952, focused on documenting queer sexuality in Chicago and used the term "third sex" was used to refer to homosexual men and women (78).

• Lesbian: The term references the Greek island of Lesbos, home of the poet Sappho in the 6th Century. Havelock Ellis used the word in his 1897 book and argued that female same sex attraction was a medical condition or form of insanity that did not last a lifetime. Rather, Ellis felt once women experienced marriage to a man, their desires for other women would end. The denigration of the term was such that the Daughters of Bilitis, a homosexual women's advocacy group, rejected using the in 1956. Historically, women's sexual pleasure and practices have been overlooked, denigrated or criminalized. The term became popular for use by homosexual women to refer to themselves in the late 1960s. 
• Pansies: During the late 1920s/mid-1930s, mainstream newspapers in Chicago reported on the Pansy Craze in the city. In June of 1929, no less than 35 "pansy parlors" opened in Chicago's Towertown neighborhood featuring drag performances for both kings and queens (Elledge, 81). The term pansy was first used by Variety to describe Bronzeville in 1911 when the publication reported on a "mask" ball in Chicago by noting that the "world's toughest town was going pansy. And liking it" (104).
• Queer: The term signifies “a rejection of the normal or normative in relation to sexuality and gender…. Queer allows us to talk about people who did not identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, but nonetheless had same-sex desire or expressed their gender in defiant ways” (Austin and Brier, 2). This term began to be used by scholars and activists in the late 1980s in a positive manner. Prior to this, it was primarily a derogatory term to refer to gender non-conforming expression or homosexuality.

• Sex: Relates to the biological make up of any given person. Approximately 1 in 2000 infants born are intersex. 
• Sexuality: The expression of both gender and sex in seeking pleasure through intimate relationships. 
• Transgender: Refers to “a broad and inclusive range of non-normative gender practices. We treat transgender as a practice rather than an identity in order to bring together a trans-historical and trans-cultural collection of materials related to trans-ing gender” (in Rawson, 333).