Departmental Honors Project Title

Drag Magazine: A Study of Community

Date of Award

Spring 2021

Degree Type

Honors Project

School

College of Liberal Arts

First Advisor

Susie Steinbach

Abstract

This research aims to understand the trans/drag community and its relationship to political activism and the lesbian and gay community in the 1970s and early 1980s. I aim to answer the following questions: How did Drag perceive the relationship between the gay/lesbian community and the trans/drag community? How did Drag function in the trans/drag community? How did Drag benefit its readers? Transgender individuals and drag queens were at the forefront of activism in the1960s during the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and the Stonewall Inn Riots. Recently, there has been more attention to the critical transgender activism by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Still, there is little academic research on other drag queen activism historically between Stonewall and the start of the AIDS epidemic. I conducted archival research at the Tretter Collection at the University of Minnesota. To conduct my research on trans/drag activism, I examined the magazine Drag. In my research, I found that Drag played an important role in the building of a trans/drag community. During the 1970s, the trans/drag community was met with hostility from the gay and lesbian community, who often ostracized them from their activism. Drag created an expansive drag community that encompassed a wide spectrum of transfeminine/drag identities and provided support to that community.

dc_type

text

dc_publisher

DigitalCommons@Hamline

dc_format

application/pdf

dc_source

Departmental Honors Projects

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