Drag queens were hugely popular in WWI — remember them as the current war on drag intensifies
'Every single division would have had a female impersonator as part of their concert troupe'
Queeries is a column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.
On November 26, 2022, a dozen or so men — dressed in all black and wearing balaclavas — marched across a parking lot toward a bookstore in Sarnia, Ont. They reached their destination, where they would stand militantly in protest for the duration of the event inside. Their mission? To destroy the joy of young children being read a picture book by a drag queen.
As anyone paying attention knows, this is not even close to an isolated incident. The war on "drag queen storytimes" has become as rampant and relentless as it is ridiculous. And for any Canadian desperately clinging to the notion that this is largely an American problem, may I present to you this map. Created by queer historian and researcher Sarah Worthman, it charts the drag protests that happened in this country in 2022.
By Worthman's count, there were at least 16 protests, including one incident of attempted arson (in which a protestor used bolt cutters to access the roof of a library in Brockville, Ont. and then proceeded to try and set the building on fire). And 2023 is showing no signs of slowing down, with 15 protests happening in five different provinces in the year's first three months alone.
"The numbers are quite shocking," says Worthman. "As is the escalation of violence."
It is very notable that these protests really only started happening in Canada last June, even though drag storytimes have been a regular fixture at libraries and bookstores in this country since at least 2016. Over the six-year period between 2016 and 2021, Worthman was only able to find a couple instances of protests. Yet in the ten-month period between June 2022 and today, she found at least 31.
"You can really see the attitude toward queer people start to change, specifically in media around people like Ron DeSantis and a lot of the American governors who have started to really depict the inclusion of queer people and trans people as a form of grooming, a form of pedophilia," Worthman says. "And of course, this is not a new phenomena; people have equated this nonsensically for years."
Something else that is also not a new phenomena? The art of drag. Despite becoming more mainstream (and controversial) than ever in the past decade or so, drag has been around a lot longer than you might think.
Worthman certainly has some notes on that, too. Last month, her extraordinary report 2SLGBTQ-plus Persecution and the First World War: The Untold History of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was released via the LGBT Purge Fund. Instead of documenting the new war on drag, one of the many findings in her extensive research is how much drag was celebrated during a very old war.
"In the First World War, drag was just this massive component," Worthman says. "Every single division in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and the British Expeditionary Force would have had a female impersonator as part of their concert troupe."
"That means that there were potentially hundreds of professional female impersonators that were hired during the First World War to serve as troupe entertainment. And so a lot of queer men in particular were drawn to this because it was a way that they could receive affection and attention from members of the same sex and even show queer public displays of affection during these drag shows, which is quite fascinating to me."
One specific person Worthman focuses on in the report is Ross Hamilton, a performer from Pugwash, N.S. who enlisted in the Canadian Army Medical Corps as an ambulance driver. It was almost 106 years ago that Hamilton gave birth to one of World War I's drag superstars: Marjorie.
"He created Marjorie in April 1917 on the road to Vimy Ridge," Worthman explains. "Tensions were quite high, and everyone was very, very stressed about this upcoming offensive."
So the character of Marjorie came alive to help relieve that tension as part of a concert troupe called the Dumbells. Hamilton created her first costume out of tent canvas, beads from rosaries and feathers from pillows.
"They were a smash hit from that moment on and performed throughout the war, all along the frontline," Worthman says. "There are even instances of Ross having to change out of costume because she was so popular as Marjorie. She was one of the most famous performers from the war; if he didn't change, he would actually get mobbed on his way back to the barracks."
After the war, Hamilton would perform as Marjorie on Broadway, in the Colosseum and even for the king and queen of Belgium. He would go on to enlist in World War II to serve once again as a performer.
"But he was not as lucky in the Second World War," Worthman says. "And after one of his shows, he was actually outed to military officials and then subsequently dismissed."
Hamilton retreated back to Nova Scotia after that, and passed away in 1965 at the age of 76. His death was noted in obituaries in newspapers across Canada, which heavily referenced Marjorie. Vancouver's The Province even wrote specifically of Marjorie, saying that she "sang and clowned her way into the hearts and memories of hundreds of Canadian soldiers" in an obituary dated September 30, 1965.
Hamilton's story is just one of many about queer people in World War I that Worthman has detailed in her report, which you can read in its entirety online. Since its publication, she's done some press related to her findings — and has come up against some pushback to the truths it has to tell.
"I think this research angers a lot of people," she says. "Although we consider commemoration very non-political and we often see it as just memorialization and honouring people in the past, commemoration is a very political thing. It has the capacity to rewrite narratives into a certain light. And we've seen that with the First World War, where the narrative around this war is very straight, white and cisgender. Typically, it's kind of the epitome of masculinity. And so in bringing out that queer people exist, I have found that it's actually upset the balance of that and upset this narrative that contributes to modern heteronormativity in a really big way."
Worthman ties this back to the mentality behind the ongoing drag protests.
"For a lot of these people, the idea, especially with the drag protests, is that you can transform someone into being queer," she says. "That being queer and trans is not something you're born with, but something that you can groom. That you can convert someone to. It's a lifestyle. And showing this and showing that queer people have existed for centuries and all of human history demonstrates the lie in that."
When Worthman was interviewed by Jim Bronskill of The Canadian Press, she was met with "hundreds and hundreds of just these violently homophobic and transphobic comments that dominate any of the articles that are posted."
"And most of them are trying to tie in the drag storytime narrative, which is worrying," she says. "Because the interview I did with Jim didn't even mention drag. I was mostly talking about Frederick Hardy, who is the only known queer man on The Vimy Memorial."
Worthman rightfully warns that this surge of hatred from the extreme right is on its way to "impacting every component of queerness."
"We'd be naive to think that it's just going to stop at drag, just like some people were naive to think that it's just going to stop at the exclusion of trans people. It's not. It's an attack on the community at large there really needs to be something to stop that. And one of the biggest things we can do to counter it is visibility and showing that queer people have always been here."
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