The language used to debate drag performance was mutable on the turn of the Twentieth century. The more contemporary term “drag” applies to people performing gender expressions comparable to masculinity and femininity through makeup, costume or mannerisms. Until the mid-Twentieth century, nevertheless, newspapers referred to pull as “male impersonation” or “female impersonation.” Additionally they used the word “impersonator” each for people performing in drag and for people wearing clothes of the supposed opposite sex of their on a regular basis lives.

Minneapolis maintained a city ordinance against cross-dressing between 1877 and the mid-1900s, and St. Paul didn’t repeal its 1891 ordinance prohibiting people from wearing “clothes not belonging to their sex” in public until 2003. Theater allowed drag performers to evade these legalities in ways in which individuals “cross-dressing” in every day life couldn’t. Mainstream society allowed and accepted drag as long as performers were explicitly donning a fancy dress, maintaining a “fourth wall” between themselves and the audience. It didn’t make these allowances for people not attired in gender conforming clothing outside of explicit performance, who were much more subject to policing. The proven fact that costumes were temporary and restricted to the stage soothed many societal fears.

Many travelling performers stopped in Minnesota during tours that crossed the country. Popular “female impersonators” like Julian Eltinge, Karyl Norman and Paul Vernon performed in venues just like the Grand Opera House in St. Paul and the Metropolitan Theater and the Orpheum in Minneapolis. The elitism of the venues reflected the “fashionable society” that attended. But even during this early period of drag, performers weren’t exclusively men; women performed and received similar acclaim as “male impersonators.” “High-class vaudeville” artists like Mary Marble and Margaret Grayce toured nationally, stopping to perform in Minnesota in 1897 and 1908, respectively. Acts were tailored to the strengths of the performer, and sometimes appeared amid a lineup of variety shows. Wearing a jacket and bowler hat, Marble was noted for singing a comedic number, accompanied by dancers, and Grayce performed in a lineup amongst acrobats and marionettes. Karyl Norman moved between masculinity and femininity, singing in a “soprano voice” and “magnificent wraps, gowns, robes, and frocks” before becoming a “conventional tuxedo” and baritone.

Minnesotans also participated in drag performance, from college and community theater productions to skilled performers who toured the USA. Some participated within the performance tradition of the “womanless wedding,” popularized on the turn of the Twentieth century, by which an all-male solid made up of community members reenacted a comedic wedding scene by playing roles of each men and girls. At the identical time that these revues allowed for socially accepted manipulations of sophistication and gender norms, additionally they served as fundraisers hosted at local schools or churches, comparable to Fuller Elementary School and First Congregational Church in Minneapolis. They were popular in each urban and rural communities; the performers of “womanless wedding” revues held in Lanesboro, Renville, and Worthington were extensively photographed in costume.

Vaudeville and early drag overlapped with blackface minstrelsy through the nineteenth century. They were often a part of the identical productions, with white performers masquerading in identities that weren’t their very own for the aim of a comedic caricature. Unlike blackface, not all drag performances employed offensive stereotypes. When drag separated from vaudeville through the Nineteen Twenties, minstrelsy disappeared from the acts, but anxieties grew around performers blurring the expectations of female and male. Vaudeville developed a rough popularity, evident within the critical news articles published as vaudeville’s popularity lessened.

As vaudeville declined after 1930, drag performances moved from elite, high-capacity theater venues into smaller nightclubs, particularly in Minneapolis’s Gateway District. The newspapers’ reporting on drag performances shifted together with the situation. In 1886, the Stillwater Messenger described a production that included drag as “chaste and stylish and calculated to suit the tastes of probably the most refined and cultured lady.” Through the Nineteen Twenties, newspapers reported on drag with a comparatively positive attitude, treating it like other theatrical productions (though “male impersonation” disappeared from Minnesota newspaper reports after 1921). By the Nineteen Thirties, drag was written up in newspapers more because the reason for police raids than as a performance notice. Police interfered not a lot attributable to the content, but reasonably due to the interaction between performers and audiences. Police told Variety that acts contained “nothing obscene or immoral in show … but (we’d) prefer it stopped anyhow.” Once drag moved into nightclubs, there was more interaction between audience and performer, with artists often mingling in-costume with attendees after the show. The increased anxieties around nightclubs that featured drag were multiplied by societal backlash against sexuality, since lots of the clubs related to drag were considered gathering places for Minneapolis’s queer community.

In 1935, performers on the Stables nightclub in St. Paul were extradited to Chicago by police after mingling with “male customers” after their act. By 1949, Twin Cities police widely suppressed drag, closing shows and pressuring clubs to finish contracts with performers. The Jewel Box Revue, the primary integrated and longest-touring drag company in the USA, had a six-month contract with Curly’s Theater Cafe in Minneapolis during 1949. Although the show was wildly popular, Minneapolis police requested the termination of the contract. For the subsequent five years, drag shows were banned from the world to quell the supposed “immorality” of the individuals who attended them.

Regardless of the town actively attempting to suppress drag in nightclubs, those that were performing diversified. Because the Forties progressed, drag was not exclusive to white performers. Minneapolis’s Clef Club catered to Black patrons and featured Black performers, comparable to the singer Alma Smith and drag artist Carroll Lee, and the Nineteen Fifties and 60s brought acclaim to Black drag artists like Stormé DeLarverie, Dodie Daniels and Don Marshall, featured within the Jewel Box Revue.

Drag in Minnesota was available to each straight and queer performers and attendees, and early drag in theaters brought visibility to increasingly public queer life. It also allowed individuals to maneuver outside of strict societal norms, if only temporarily. Drag’s move to nightclubs, furthermore, contributed to the growing presence of queer bars within the Twin Cities. Its popularity continued to grow throughout the second half of the Twentieth century in bars just like the Gay 90’s and the Town House Bar, carving out a Midwestern space for drag queens and kings.

For more information on this topic, take a look at the unique entry on MNopedia.