The Origin and History of the Term "Dressing in Drag"

Oh, those British comedians. They certainly do love to dress up in women's clothing and act like girls, don't they? Ever get the feeling something more is going on there than a commitment to entertainment excellence? The term given to a male dressing in women's clothing is drag. Ever wonder what a man wearing a dress has to do with such an apparently non-appropriate description?

Drag was originally a word used to describe the actual clothing actors wore on stage when they performed as women. As you no doubt learned by watching Shakespeare in Love, female roles used to be played not by actual females, but delicate young male actors. Even so, the term doesn't actually date back to Shakespeare's time. Instead, it came into popular usage during the age of British vaudeville shows when the cross-dressing was used for comic effect. The men would dress in drag and the women wore breeches as a theatrical method of satirizing the qualities unique to the opposite sex. It would not be until almost the middle of the 20^th century that drag was specifically used as a term to describe female impersonators and this was also the era in which drag began to become more closely associated with homosexuality.