GLITTER AND CONCRETE: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City, by Elyssa Maxx Goodman
In 1967, Crystal LaBeija, the third runner-up in the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant — a national contest for drag queens — stormed offstage in protest, believing the competition had been rigged in favor of white competitors. Afterward, she delivered a furious monologue, preserved in the 1968 documentary “The Queen,” which gave us the immortal line, “I have a right to show my color, darling. I am beautiful and I know I’m beautiful!” and concluded with the unequivocal dismissal of the pageant’s winner, delivered like a death sentence: “She looked bad.”
In “Glitter & Concrete,” the writer and photographer Elyssa Maxx Goodman traces the emergence of drag in New York City in the early 1900s, its descent underground after the Depression and its 1980s renaissance, spurred by club culture. It’s a sprawling book, a bit overambitious, but animated by the fire of a queen who knew she’d been wronged.
In 1845, New York passed a law aimed at tax protesters who dressed up as Native Americans. Promising arrest to anyone who had “his face painted, discolored, covered, or concealed, or being otherwise disguised, in a manner calculated to prevent him from being identified,” the masquerade law remained on the books until 2020, when it was repealed in light of Covid mask mandates. For generations, it gave the police leverage to harass anyone who played with gender in public.
When female impersonation became a popular stage trope at the turn of the 20th century, early stars such as Julian Eltinge — an international celebrity who performed for King Edward VII at Windsor Castle — used drag not to challenge the gender binary but to reinforce it. He played characters who dressed as women not for pleasure, not for art, but for farce.
“He had to make it clear that he looked down on ‘fairies’ whose presentations of femininity were considered ‘perverse,’” writes Goodman. “After his performance, he’d change out of his costume, light a cigar and welcome reporters backstage so they could see how ‘masculine’ he really was.”
Despite a renewed obsession with gender roles that followed the passage of the 19th Amendment, drag persisted onstage and in masquerade balls thrown by fraternal organizations like the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows’s Hamilton Lodge #710, which established Harlem as the apex of New York drag. It wasn’t until 1940, when performers of all stripes were required to carry the cabaret licenses that were routinely denied to Black and openly queer people, that drag was finally forced underground.
For the next decades, drag’s evolution echoed the divide in the nascent gay rights movement between assimilationists like the Mattachine Society and defiant revolutionary queers. Professional female impersonators who showcased their talents at the Mafia-owned Club 181 and the nationally-touring Jewel Box Revue took pains to distinguish themselves from drag queens, a term which at that time referred to amateurs, cross-dressers and trans women. This tension exploded in 1969, at the Stonewall uprising, where it was street kids, trans people, lesbians and drag queens — most famously Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera — who led the charge.
Goodman does a commendable job of writing about genderqueer performers who worked decades before the evolution of modern language to describe them. She describes drag as “a haven for any self-described freak who felt they didn’t fit in anywhere else, a playground for the artistry of gender nonconformity in all of its theatrical forms,” and refuses to exclude anyone from the party.
And, as drag is still too often depicted as belonging solely to cisgender gay men, it is refreshing to see so many pages devoted to the pioneering work of drag kings and male impersonators, from Florence Hines, a Black woman whom The New York Clipper called “the greatest living female song and dance artist” in 1890, to Johnny Science and Diane Torr, whose Drag King Workshops a century later taught aspiring kings to walk like they were surrounded by a “three-foot moat.”
But Goodman’s commitment to exploring every nook of the city’s drag history means her tale moves too quickly, rushing through major turning points, like Stonewall, so that the name of every club and every famous performer can be recorded. The book would benefit from being organized thematically instead of chronologically or by focusing on a handful of the biggest personalities, like Eltinge, Rivera, Hines and LaBeija. By giving everyone equal weight, “Glitter & Concrete” makes it hard to fully appreciate any of them.
This problem becomes acute as Goodman draws closer to the present and archival research gives way to “you had to be there” recollections of the party culture that launched drag into the mainstream in the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s. We’re told that “there was an anything goes atmosphere that simply can’t be duplicated today,” but we’re not given the narrative material to feel what we missed. Drilling down into accounts of specific performances would do more to bring places like the Pyramid Club and Bar d’O to life.
Though it reaches too far, any book that celebrates people like Crystal LaBeija is a valuable one. A few years after her cameo in “The Queen,” she was asked to organize a ball for Black queens in Harlem. Showing a star’s instinct for self-promotion, she said yes, writes Goodman, “on the condition that she could be the focus of the event.” She went on to found the House of LaBeija, inspiring the house system that has offered shelter, family and inspiration to queer people in the decades since.
Every time a queen snaps, “Darling!,” they honor her name.
W.M. Akers is a novelist, editor of the newsletter Strange Times, co-host of the film podcast I’ll Watch Anything and creator of the game Deadball: Baseball With Dice.
GLITTER AND CONCRETE: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City | By Elyssa Maxx Goodman | 357 pp. | Illustrated | Hanover Square Press
