Good ( drag) queen Bess

There are many drag icons lost to herstory, and one queen who isn’t aff orded the credit she deserves is Elizabeth I. Celebrated as an inspiration for drag ( Quentin Crisp and RuPaul have riff ed off her androgyny), The Liz is rarely acknowledged as doing drag herself.

Hang on, she was an actual queen and an actual woman, and men did it first, right? Being one of the most powerful women in history doesn’t have to preclude her from being a pioneer of the art of drag. Maybe even the first drag superstar.

Good queen Bess took OTT to an extreme. Her hoard of costumes consisted of more than 3,000 gowns and head- dresses. It’s said that with kirtle, farthingale, bodice, wig and all, it took two hours to get her dressed.

Her face, neck and hands were painted using a mixture of white lead and vinegar, eyes lined with khol and lips stained striking red. The look was dramatic, you might even say deadly because lead poisoning very possibly caused her death. How many other queens have died for their look?

But it’s not the eff ort that makes the drag, it’s the eff ect. From the cut and colours, to incorporating male and female styles, her look was designed to make her larger than life, neither man nor woman, king nor queen. This freed her from the restrictions of her sex, and was a strategy to amplify her voice in a male- dominated court. She wasn’t showing off , she was mobilising her inner diva to survive. All drag is, to an extent, power play, whether within our community or throwing bricks in a riot. We become powerful performances of ourselves allowing us to defy restrictions of gender, class and age.

Elizabeth’s audience was her courtiers, and the scene she ruled was an empire. Rank that on your power list Sunday Times. So successful was her gender play that some sexist ( and fairly silly) historians have questioned the gender she was assigned at birth.

Ironically, it was the explosion of theatre in Elizabethan Britain that led to the popularised ( and incorrect) origin of drag, that often excludes women.

At the time, women weren’t allowed on stage so men played the female parts, ergo drag as an acronym for “dressed as a girl” or so the story goes. The issue with this is that acronyms didn’t appear in the English language for another few centuries. It’s more likely that the term

described the way a large theatrical costume ( worn by anyone) dragged on the fl oor.

Saying women can’t be drag queens perpetuates the older tradition of patriarchal oppression that kept women off the stage in the first place — and which continues today. In fact, it’s possible that the male- dominated drag world we know emerged from a bunch of blokes forced on stage in big dresses to imitate the original genderfuck pioneer: an AFAB ( assigned female at birth) queen named Elizabeth.

“How many other queens have died

for their look?”