Joe E. Jeffreys: Drag Historian
Posted at 3:11 PM Jun 18, 2008
This Thursday at 6pm, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (Bruno Walter Auditorium, 111 Amsterdam Avenue at 65th Street) is hosting a video-illustrated talk about the history of drag. The talk features Joe E. Jeffreys, a theatre historian with several decades devoted to the study of drag - he's painstakingly collected videos to illustrate his talk and give shape to a very colorful history, one that's best told with pictures (and animated ones at that).
The presentation, Drag Show Video Vérité, gathers and screens rare film and video that documents the faces and places of New York City’s vibrant drag scene. This year’s edition offers more colorful and never before publicly screened footage from the 1950s to the present and offers a who’s who of NYC’s male and female impersonators. The video about is a preview of what will be shown on Thursday evening.
Naked City editor Audacia Ray had some questions for Joe about how he came to his field of study and where he gets all his material.
Audacia Ray: What does being a drag historian entail, and how did you become a historian of drag?
Joe Jeffreys: My becoming a drag historian began the first time I ever walked into a gay bar. It was in Durham, NC, in the early 1980s at a bar called Forty Second Street. It was overwhelming enough being in a gay bar the first time as a teenager but then there was also a drag show going on when I entered. A high school theatre fanatic, I was immediately transfixed with this new (to me then) performance form and its double illusion. I have remained so ever since. In fact, I consider drag to be the indigenous gay performance form.
I teach theatre history, dramatic literature, and gay and lesbian performance studies courses and lay claim to male and female impersonation as my area of expertise. As a drag historian it is my calling to research, document, analyze, collect, preserve and present the art form and its traditions like say a dance historian concerns themselves with that performance form. I have published on drag topics in encyclopedias, academic journals, book anthologies, and the popular press.
I focus my work on the tradition in New York City as there has always been a vibrant drag scene here and this is where I live and can be on the ground for fieldwork and primary research. I like presenting my findings in public forums and offering multi-media talks on drag subjects like one I put together last year on the history of the 82 Club. The 82 was a nightclub on East 4th St in the Village that offered lavish drag shows to primarily straight audiences for over twenty years beginning in the early 1950s. I debuted this talk in the old 82 Club space itself and have presented it elsewhere since.
Three more questions and their answers after the jump.
AR: What's the story behind Drag Show Video Vérité? How did you amass the footage that you screen?
JEJ: Drag Show Video Vérité is another way, and an entertaining one at that, that I can put drag history in front of people.
At Performance Space 122 I serve on the committee for an annual award named after drag legend Ethyl Eichelberger. A few years back some of the new committee members had never seen Ethyl perform live as they were not around NYC when Ethyl was and had no access to the video documentation that exists. They had heard stories of Ethyl’s shows and seen photos but had few other ideas or reference points about him or his work. I brought in some short video clips of Ethyl’s work to one of our meetings and saw the scales fall away from their eyes as the clips played. Those who had never seen Ethyl perform suddenly understood a lot of who and what this performer was about. It was an understanding that reading about him, seeing still images or hearing stories could not accomplish. Those who knew Ethyl’s work were delighted to see it again before them. It wasn’t the same as a live performance experience but it was as close as could be approximated. After this experience I realized an inherent power of film and video documentation and its ability to transport the past into the present.
One of my public programs a few years back at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center was a drag summit. It brought together for discussion a trans-generational congress of New York City male and female impersonators from Jewel Box Revue performer Storme to contemporary gender bender Taylor Mac. The library generously offered me their forum the next year and I thought of what I had observed showing the Ethyl video clips. I decided to begin searching out film and video clips of the New York City drag scene and show them to audiences as a way of creating a greater collective unconscious of drag’s history, present and future.
The clips come from all over the place. I seek them out through connections I have made with various drag performers and then people lead you to more people. Performers often lead me to folks who have shot their work and then there are film makers and archivists who often have rich stashes.
Working in this organic, grassroots, plenty of leg work way, has created a program of materials this year spanning five decades of NYC drag. There is definitely a mass of materials on all formats from 8mm film to open reel video to Hi 8, VHS, mini dv, you name it. This year we even worked with some PAL format materials. I haven’t worked with cell phone video capture yet but look forward to it. Around the time consumer vhs cameras hit the market in the 1980s there is much more material to select from as more people had the ability to easily capture a high quality moving image. From some 1950s drag home movies to a 1965 film by under ground film maker Avery Willard 
documenting 82 Club performer Adrian’s drag dance of the seven veils to clips of the Hot Peaches in the 1970s, Pyramid Club and Wigstock scenes from the 80s, the drag king explosion of the 1990s to the work today of performers including Justin Bond, Rose Wood, Glenn Marla,and La JohnJoseph, Drag Show Video Verite’s goal is to present content as unique as possible and offer clips that can be seen nowhere else not on YouTube, not in commercially released films or documentaries.
The program is now in its second year and since its first year I have acquired a video camera and go out there now myself to capture drag in its native NYC habitats. The clips in the program range from slickly produced video packages (drag movie shorts really) to verite style hand held single camera documentation of performers, shows, parties or events like Night of A Thousand Gowns. It is edited all together in an edgy quick cut style that the project’s genius editor Seth S. Hauer and I have developed for a hour and a half or so film.
AR:What kind of changes have you seen in the drag performances over the past 30 years or so?
JEJ: Drag is still a very localized performance form as it is generally offered live in front of small groups at bars or clubs. Thus drag stars in their community are often unknown elsewhere. There are very few performers, like Jackie Beat or Kiki and Herb, that tour the country and even world. Some drag performers today, like Shirley Q. Liquor or Britney Houston, have begun to cast wider nets via places like YouTube.
In New York City there are any number of establishments across the five boroughs that offer drag shows from The Monster in Greenwich Village to Club Atlantis in Jackson Heights, Queens. Each tends to have a particular style of drag associated with it. These may range from serious realness to over the top ironic pop infused sensibilities.
In general with so many styles in so many bars it is hard to pin down trends like lip-synch versus live signing. I would suggest, however, that drag seems once again to be embracing on several levels a style that was popular in the 1970s-- gender fuck. Gender fuck is a sensibility where the persona presented is really neither male nor female but some of both. This can mean wild make up or surgical work. This is connected to the gender queer movement that sees gender not as binary, or one or the other, but rather something that is much more fluid and playing along a scale. Drag also continues to apply itself to performance forms it has never really explored like live rock and roll and live work or acts other than standard lip-synch are staying strong.
AR: What is the relationship between drag performance and burlesque?
JEJ: Drag has always been part of the burlesque and vaudeville scenes. On today’s neo-burlesque scene the devoted drag queen and king performers are not over abundant but they are present and include stars like Rose Wood. More burlesque performers, like Tigger, do not primarily identify themselves as drag performers but do incorporate drag elements into their routines. Today’s burlesque scene has also given rise to the so-called biological or female drag queens. Some also call themselves faux-drag queens or ftf (female to female). These are women, like burlesque star World Famous Bob, who identify as female impersonators. They hinge this on their attitude toward femininity and hyper-femininity and a drag sensibility. There is a party around town, Victoria, that celebrates this drag form that has really evolved out of today’s burlesque scene.
Burlesque defies convention just as drag does. Burlesque often parodies gender just as drag does. Burlesque is transgressive just as drag is. The traditional burlesque tease and strip is turned on its head when the performer turns out to be a sex other than what they first present as. Again drag’s double illusion packs its punch.
Images: Adrian as Salome. Avery Willard's 1965 8mm film of this 82 Club performer's licentious dance of the seven veils is part of the all new edition of Drag Show Video Verite. Photo by Avery Willard.
Anyone interested in collaborating or providing footage should contact Joe at drj247@hotmail.com
