Make drag innocent again!

One of the most regrettable things about the last decade of general cultural awfulness has been the politicisation and sexualisation of drag. The crude and frequently obvious art of blokes dolled up in women’s clobber has been a golden thread running through British comedy for centuries, from Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor to Jack Duckworth as Ida Fagg in Coronation Street. Now, like everything else we used to enjoy, it’s wrapped up in the suffocating shroud of American identity politics. Astonishingly, drag is regularly referred to as a way for a man to find his ‘authentic self’. This surely is the opposite of its primal function – to dress up as something you are evidently not, for a giggle.

We have to suffer the instant ‘tradition’ of Drag Queen Story Hour, where said entertainers visit school libraries to raise awareness of something or other – it’s not clear exactly what – to tiny tots.