Entertainment That Drags

Look, I'll just come out and say it: I don't get those TV programmes full of drag queens.  I'm sorry, but I really don't see the point - I don't find them remotely entertaining and I'm pretty sure that I'm not in a minority here.  But they seem to have become a 'thing', with various 'celebrities' seemingly wearing it as a badge of honour that they've appeared on them as a guest.  Don't misunderstand me, I don't have a problem with trans people (which sounds like a dance group from 1970s Top of the Pops) - I'm not going to be so crass as to go down that 'some of my best friends are trans' route, but I am acquainted with a number of trans people locally and have no problem with them.  I'm very happy for them to express themselves through their exploration of their cross-gender identities.  The question is whether these shows represent entertainment.  To be fair, if the same sort of format was employed with non-trans people dressing outrageously and 'performing', I still wouldn't find it entertaining.  It all reminds me too much of those drag acts you used to get in pubs and clubs - they could be mildly entertaining but ultimately repetitive and tiresome.

Damn it, I never saw the point of Danny La Rue, to be honest and he was the biggest drag act around when I was young.  (OK, I know that he wasn't trans and that sort of drag act isn't really the same as the stuff we get nowadays, but at the end of the day, the kind of shows both end up producing are pretty much the same - blokes in dresses singing badly).  I'm not denying that there was real skill involved in a bloke impersonating a woman as well as Danny La Rue did, but I just never understood, why?  (To be honest, I quite admire blokes who can pull this sort of thing off - I remember that at the only work Christmas party I ever attended, when I worked for the MoD, this Army captain I knew turned up in drag (although it wasn't a fancy dress part) and he made an amazingly convincing woman.  Indeed, as both myself and another male colleague observed, if we hadn't known that he was a bloke we might have tried our luck.  I've never seen a man walk so well in high heels.  As a postscript, said captain was later cashiered after he was caught stealing ladies' underwear from Woolworths).

I suppose that it's a bit like Marty Feldman's remark about the 'Black and White Minstrels': surely they could have found half a dozen real black men who couldn't sing and couldn't dance?  (I never understood the point, let alone the entertainment value, of them, either).  At least with stuff like Drag Race, the participants have a perfectly legitimate and understandable reason for dressing in drag: they identify as women.  I never got the impression that Danny La Rue, or any other old time drag artist, identified as a woman any more than any of the Black and White Minstrels identified as a person of colour.  (That said, while there are obvious reasons as to why it is wrong for white people to black up, I don't think there is anything wrong with men wearing women's clothes, if that's their thing.  They don't have to identify as a woman to justify it.  I mean, Hermann Goering allegedly dressed in women's clothes in private and he identified as a Nazi.  Oh, and Cary Grant wore women's underwear). Anyway, to get back to the original point, I just don't find this sort of TV show entertaining, any more than I ever found those old time variety shows or Jack Hargeaves in Out of Town entertaining and I don't really understand why anyone does.  I just wanted to get that off my chest without appearing to be transphobic, (because any suspicion of the latter would nowadays be incitement for a mob to descend on me, calling me a bastard, amongst other things and throwing bricks through my windows).