Dress Code: Drag

When I first came to Getty in the fall of 2019 under the newly launched African American Art History Initiative, one of the largest acquisitions in African American visual culture was well underway: the Johnson Publishing Company Archive (JPCA).

The JPCA is a one-of-a-kind collection of photographic, print, and ephemeral materials that constituted Ebony, Jet, and other major publications on African American life and culture. With nearly four million images, the JPCA is the most significant existing chronicle of Black American cultural representation to date, with unquantifiable entry points into 20th century history writ large.

In those early days of bubbling enthusiasm—and doctoral aspirations—I eagerly awaited any opportunity to get an early glimpse of the JPCA’s composition and contents, even if just to understand where a researcher like me might one day begin to probe the many layers of this staggering archival undertaking. In my mind, though issues of Jet and Ebony were fixtures of my upbringing, the JPCA itself revealed an unprecedented pathway into historical and visual artifacts of Black photography, a central touchstone of my graduate research on how the technology of photography and the conventions of portraiture have historically framed spatial, temporal, and cultural receptions of Black subjectivity.

By the beginning of 2020, nearly halfway into my graduate internship in the Getty Research Institute’s (GRI’s) curatorial department, my aspirations as a researcher waned under a growing awareness of how archival processing actually works at this scale. Though the JPCA acquisition was indeed finalized, there was still much to consider for a collection representing three quarters of a century of cultural production, notwithstanding the enormous structural and operational processes that needed to be resolved to ensure its safety and future accessibility. And then, when shelter-in-place conditions were in full effect, any first-look hopes I clung to were swiftly humbled.

Six years later, as I’ve continued in curatorial roles at the GRI, work on the JPCA has progressed immensely. On one occasion, my senior colleague Glenn Phillips shared some photographs on his phone from a visit to Chicago, where the JPCA was being processed. It was just a small sample of views, but I was stunned: here were black-and-white images of Black drag queens, somewhere in Harlem, in all their glory. Glenn and I were already working on an exhibition on the dancer and choreographer Blondell Cummings, and there was still extremely limited access to the JPCA, but these pictures were seared into my mind, and I was determined to know more about them.

This moment was the root of my research into the JPCA’s photography of drag performers, which over time has developed into an unrelenting curiosity into the JPCA’s queer representation wherever available. Recently, my project has found new life as part of my work as the curatorial assistant for the GRI’s current exhibition, $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives, a multidisciplinary and expansive review of the GRI’s archival holdings in 20th- and 21st-century LGBTQ art and history. As part of my ongoing research, I recommended that the show feature these rarely seen photographs of drag performers and drag balls from the JPCA.

The JPCA is a crown jewel of American visual culture and history not only for its impressive documentation of milestone moments in 20th-century African American life but also for its lesser-known, or simply forgotten, stories of Black cultural existence around the world, including the queer histories represented by drag performers. Among countless file folders meticulously organized by a range of subject matters, I learned that the photographs featured in $3 Bill were arranged in the archive under the heading “Female Impersonators,” a now-antiquated term to refer to drag’s feminine forms of dress, styling, and makeup typically assumed by male performers and artists.

The pictures that first drew my attention were taken between the late 1940s into the mid-1960s in New York and Chicago and are largely black-and-white prints documenting performers at annual drag balls in their finest, most fashionable looks. Bejeweled bodices in sparkling gemstones contrast with delicate textures of silk, taffeta, lace, and fur in ensembles that range from the most luxurious adornments to the skimpiest revelations. Across an array of dramatic portraits and candid snaps, performers are envisioned in the height of womenswear glamour and fashion.

At face value, the photographs highlight many aspects of drag culture that we as contemporary onlookers have probably come to expect. Over-the-top costuming and artfully exaggerated makeup are tailored to create unique spectacles of feminine embodiment and entertainment, challenging conventions around gender presentation and how biological sex determines one’s physical expression. Yet despite its unmistakable disavowals of social norms, the flamboyance and exquisite transformation of drag is by now a relatively accepted form of mainstream popular culture pioneered by figures like Divine and RuPaul, whose Emmy-winning reality television competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race has spawned a massive resurgence of drag performance in today’s cultural landscape.

The JPCA images contribute to how audiences might further understand and appreciate drag’s sartorial inclinations, but as my research evolved, I was allured by the unexpected settings and backdrops framing the performers. Notably, the venues where the photos were gathered are magnificent: stages draped in velvet curtains and stacked with a full big band overlook a large theater where marble Corinthian columns glow under the light of hanging chandeliers. Outside, large marquees announce the evening’s main attraction as hordes of people gather on the street waiting to get inside. Through photo captions in Jet and Ebony, I tracked down places like the Rockland Palace in Harlem and the Pershing Hotel on Chicago’s Southside, which led to names like Phil Black’s Funmakers Ball and Finnie’s Halloween Ball. These were enormously popular annual events celebrating drag within major cities in the US, and in many cases they drew thousands of attendees and much attention from the press. If my assumption was that drag in the age of McCarthyism would be a covert, underground operation, these images attested that (at least for one night) drag could be on full public display, with great anticipation and fanfare.

As the research continued, perhaps my greatest surprise was observing the incredibly multiracial composition of the drag performers and the other individuals surrounding them. It was one thing to witness rarely seen photographs of Black drag queens from the 1950s, but it was quite another to see them intermingling with and even embracing their white counterparts. Instead of a completely siloed subculture of Black drag, these images suggested that drag performers eschewed the strict codes of Black-white segregation while simultaneously eluding dominant gender expressions. Even more proof that these environments were unusually integrated were the images of spectators and crowds surrounding the drag queens; in one set of pictures, Black men and women fill the front rows of a stage where white and Black drag contestants glide down a long runway in their best attire. In another, candid portraits of drag queens among a sophisticated crowd show a racially integrated scene of men and women in evening wear gawking at the performers but remarkably unfazed by gender or racial diversity.

In even rarer instances, some photographs show drag performers with their male companions or other same-sex couples who attended in open displays of romantic intimacy, offering a stunning defiance of the period’s de jure prohibition of homosexual acts and congregation.

Taken together, the photo documentation of these drag balls was a pivotal awakening in my historical assumptions about American culture in the mid-20th century. Though entertainment venues like jazz clubs or concert halls were the most likely scenes of integrated public space I could imagine in the age of Jim Crow, drag balls would have seemed too farfetched as occasions where thousands of Black and white Americans comingled without caution. And while I believed myself to be well-versed in the rebellious and revolutionary ways Black and/or queer people have resisted systems of discrimination in the US, I was taken aback by the scale of queer visibility and pride that the JPCA photographs put into high relief. The 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s are not usually described as years of racial and sexual liberation (nor should they be), but these photographs support a more textured perspective into how historical realities were not absolutely detrimental to the beauty of belonging.

Though these images may come as a surprise to the contemporary viewer, they are not altogether unknown—some of them were published in original issues of Jet and Ebony as early as 1948 and have since made rare appearances as digitized scans in articles or blog posts highlighting the marginalized histories of drag in the US. Now, for the first time in nearly seven decades, both published and unpublished original photography illustrating this crucial moment in drag’s obscured history will be reintroduced to the public in the first exhibition at Getty of material from the JPCA since its acquisition in 2019.

In no uncertain terms, the opportunity to debut JPCA materials after years of tireless effort by teams at the GRI (both in Los Angeles and Chicago) and the National Museum of African American History and Culture is historic. But to also present this ever-important collection in the context of an exhibition that unapologetically asserts the significance of LGBTQ artists and performers is revolutionary, especially when queer embodiments like drag are increasingly threatened by a growing political disillusionment with people and cultures that betray the status quo.

To see my research manifest in this particular historical moment has viscerally reconfirmed its necessity for myself as a curator and art historian and, I hope, for the sustainability of all queer Black histories.