Chappell Roan is suddenly famous. Since her breakout song came out earlier this year, the pop star has been called the next big queer pop icon, the new Lady Gaga, and Gen Z’s Madonna. Her costumes are elaborate, her music is danceable, her lyrics are Sapphic, and, perhaps most interestingly, Chappell Roan isn’t a real person. She’s the drag alter ego of a 26-year-old woman from Missouri named Kaleigh Amstutz.
Drag, traditionally, is the art of exaggeratedly impersonating the opposite sex. But Kaleigh Amstutz is a biological woman, who identifies as such, and her drag persona, Chappell Roan, is a female character. There’s no cross-dressing involved here. So why does she call herself a drag queen?
As Amstutz explains in an interview that recently went viral on TikTok, Chappell Roan—which she’s used as a pseudonym for nearly a decade—became a “drag project” last year, in June 2023. Drag queens frequently open Chappell Roan’s shows, and around that time, a (male) drag performer saw Amstutz putting on makeup backstage before a show in London and “declared” her a drag queen. It may have been a joke, but Amstutz took it to heart. “That was very altering and I’ve taken this on as an identity,” she told the interviewer.
This is unusual. Female-impersonation-as-performance goes all the way back to the plays of ancient Greece, but the modern idea of a drag queen arose with the gay nightclubs of the mid-twentieth century. The prototypical drag queen was (and still is) an effeminate gay man in a face full of makeup and high heels, fluttering about a stage, cracking jokes with the audience and lip-synching pop tunes for tips.
On the rare occasion a biological female were to do drag, she’d have been called a drag king: a woman, usually a lesbian, who dressed up as a man. This never really caught on, probably because there’s nothing particularly glamorous or interesting about being a man. But either way, cross-dressing was always at the heart of drag as an artform.
So ever since Chappell Roan burst into the discourse, I’ve been wondering: What is a drag queen, if not a cross-dresser? And: Can a woman be one?
“A few years ago, I probably would have been like, ‘Uh. . . no,’ ” Marcus Gullate, a male drag queen, told me. It was happy hour at The Roundup, one of my local gay dive bars in Pensacola, Florida, where he performs as Aalora Banks.
“Back in the day,” said Marcus, who is in his 30s, “the definition of drag was basically: ‘This is a man dressing up as a woman.’ ”
But these days, he’s fine with women doing drag—if they do it well. “As long as you’re delivering a show and delivering drag, I’m okay with it.”
The evolution of his thinking is mirrored by a lot of people in the drag community—including the world’s most famous drag queen. When RuPaul was asked whether he’d allow women to compete on Drag Race in 2016, he responded: “That show already exists, its called #MissUniverse.”
Angry articles proliferated in the gay press. But in 2018, RuPaul doubled down, telling an interviewer:
Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony when it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and big f-you to male-dominated culture. So for men to do it, it’s really punk rock, because it’s a real rejection of masculinity.
But soon, criticism of RuPaul’s stance spread from gay blogs into the mainstream press. Australia’s equivalent of PBS, for instance, blamed RuPaul for the fact that “drag can still feel like a boys club.”
Eventually, RuPaul gave in, casting Victoria Scone on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in 2021. She was greeted with headlines like, “Victoria Scone Shatters Stereotypes,” but she came in 10th, which is bad. Since then, though, female drag queens—alternatively known as “bio-queens” or “AFAB queens,” for “Assigned Female at Birth”—have been flooding the scene. And last year, bioqueen Pandora Nox won RuPaul’s Drag Race Germany, with mainstream gay publications like Out covering it as a win for inclusivity.
When I called Nox at her home in Austria, she told me that when she got into drag a decade ago—with another drag queen, who is male—“there were maybe two drag queens” on the circuit in Vienna. This small scene, she says, is inclusive: She has never been criticized for being a bioqueen in real life—only online. “People feel stronger when they are behind the screen [than] when they’re anonymous,” she said.
However, she does feel as if female drag queens are generally held to higher standards. “For a man, it’s okay if they just put on some eyeliner and then a random wig, and they can call it drag,” she told me. “For a woman, you have to put in way more effort—like with makeup, with your styling, with the wigs—so that people accept it as drag.”
This echoes the complaints of TeTe Bang, a female drag queen interviewed by the Independent, a British newspaper, in a 2021 article. According to her, bio-queens “can’t be lazy with our drag—we can’t just throw on a Primark dress and a wig because people would call us out for it than they would a cis man doing the same.”
But some of the female drag queens interviewed for the same article report something worse than double standards; they report discrimination. “There is a demographic of gay men that think I should shut up and sit down,” said Apple Derrieres, one female drag queen from the UK, while another, Fancy Shrews, claimed she had “experienced misogyny in many ways,” continuing: “I find that there’s a certain bunch of gay dudes who are just not ready to experience women and have a really hateful thing going on.”
It’s perhaps easier to be accepted as a female drag queen if you’re already in the LGBT community. Most of the most famous bioqueens are lesbians, including Chappell Roan, Victoria Scone, and Pandora Nox. The latter told me: “Drag culture came from the queer community, so lesbians have more opportunities to get in touch with it than straight girls.”
But the question remains: What is drag, if not cross-dressing?
“To me, drag is a hyper-performance of gender; a fun exploration of these ridiculous notions of ‘men’ and ‘women’ that society thinks we should perform in our everyday lives,” wrote Bronwyn, an AFAB drag queen performer, in a 2020 essay called “Can Women Be Drag Queens? You Bet We Can.”
“Transforming myself, my face, my body into this extreme idea of how we think women should appear and behave,” she writes, “gives me the chance to address what it is to be a ‘woman.’ ” (Bronwyn updated the blog two years later with the statement: “I no longer identify as a woman but as genderqueer.”)
RuPaul saw drag, in 2018, as “a real rejection of masculinity;” for some women, perhaps it is a rejection of femininity.
Still, is it really “hateful” to wonder whether gay men are the most authentic performers of an artform that was made by and for them? RuPaul’s 2018 statement that “drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony when it’s not men doing it” was echoed by Vanity von Glow, a London-based male drag queen, who spoke to me via email.
“Sadly the majority of female drag queens I’ve seen seem to lack the liminal perspective that makes for the razor wit we expect from drag,” she wrote. (It is customary to use the “she” pronoun when referring to a drag queen, even if they are male.) “In female drag queens, I often see talented entertainers, but also sometimes lost girls looking to attach themselves to the current thing,” von Glow added. “Like zebras galloping along with a herd of giraffes—not wholly unwelcome, but not entirely in the right place.”
She also wrote that there is “a genre of ‘female queen’ who CLINGS to the ‘identity’ of being a drag queen and sees it as some great victory for feminism that they have ‘queered’ drag for women”—and argued that “it should be possible to criticize” this kind of political angling.
At the moment, such conversations are taboo in the generally very inclusive drag scene. Von Glow wrote, “I already anticipate the strained objections of female drag queens to these comments.”
But for bioqueens, she has an ultimately encouraging message: “Who cares what anyone thinks of your art, be bold and unrelenting regardless.”
That’s what a drag queen would do.
River Page is a reporter at The Free Press. Follow him on X @river_is_nice, and read his piece “Stop Saying Florida Isn’t Safe for Gay People. It’s Fine.”
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