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Blackface vs drag

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What exactly is the difference between blackface and drag? If you think blackface is offensive to black people, whatever the context (and this is a widely held view), do you not also need to argue that drag, whatever the context, is offensive to women? Even, say, a life-affirming film like Priscilla Queen of the Desert?



It’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot this past week. A few days ago the Scottish playwright Jo Clifford wrote a post on SCOT-NITS, an online discussion forum for the Scottish theatre world, objecting to the marketing for Three Guys in Drag Selling Their Stuff, a show which opened this weekend at the Tron in Glasgow. The show has been promoted as a “raucous, raunchy, more than laugh a minute play” about three drag queens. It is directed by a gay man, Peter Screen. In the publicity, there are quotes from various reviews: “A trashy delight.” “Three Guys In Drag is side-splitting to say the least.” Here’s what Jo had to say…

“White performers used to blacken their faces to entertain the public. Thankfully, the racist attitudes behind this have been exposed and it’s not considered entertaining or acceptable. I cannot judge this show, because I have not seen it and certainly don’t intend to. But I find this publicity very offensive. I hope one day we achieve a shared level of awareness of the misogyny behind it, and an understanding that three men in drag is not necessarily ‘side-splitting’ or entertaining because it is ‘trashy’.”

The reaction on SCOT-NITS was interesting. On the whole, Jo’s objections were simply dismissed. The familiar phrase “political correctness has gone too far” was used. The director laughed off the criticism comments, saying: “I find it sad that people take life so seriously. The day I lose my sense of humour is the day I resign from life itself. So please I implore you get yourself a life and live it to the full.”

Was Jo being unreasonable? She hasn’t seen the show, as she admits. And she was arguably being oversensitive – the quotes say that the show is funny, but laughing at a show about drag queens is not the same as laughing at drag queens. She has good reason to be sensitive though. Until not that long ago, Jo lived and worked under the name John Clifford. For her, like any other transgender person, dressing in women’s clothing is very far from a joke. It is a vital part of her identity. “Throughout my life,” she wrote in a follow-up comment on SCOT-NITS, “the very few representations of people like myself that I have been exposed to have overwhelmingly presented us as being either evil or ridiculous. Right now, each time I go out my front door, I need to conceal the fact I am biologically male in order to avoid exposing myself to mockery or physical assault. So this is not simply a laughing matter; and it is not very helpful to be told to lighten up.”

Drag has long been a part of gay culture, but its politics are complicated – while most gay people embrace it, some think it reinforces a tiresome stereotype that gay men want to be women. Drag is, the vast majority of the time, played for laughs, but the impact it has very much depends on what the joke is. Is it that a man dressing up as a woman is ridiculous, as is often the case in panto? Or is it in the way drag plays with ideas of identity? Drag, at its cleverest, blurs the boundaries between male and female, showing that they’re not as rigid as many people would like to think. It is a way for gay people (usually men, but sometimes women too) to question heterosexual assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman.

Drag is now so strongly associated with gay identity, in fact, that some gay activists were outraged when John Travolta was cast as Edna in the movie Hairspray – because he is straight, and Edna is seen as an iconic gay role. This is, if you don’t know Hairspray’s history, a slightly peculiar idea. Edna is not supposed to be gay, or even biologically male – she is a heterosexual housewife and mother. But it is all about nuance. Cast a gay man as Edna – as John Waters did in the original film with his casting of Divine – and you’re saying, subtly, that gay people can be loving, loyal parents too. You’re making a statement about acceptance. Cast a straight man in the role and the nuance is lost.

But Hairspray does not belong to the gay community alone. Travolta’s view – expressed in the interview above – was that he wasn’t doing a drag act. “This is like Shakespeare, or Greek theatre, or Kabuki,” he says. “This is men playing women.” In other words, it’s not a man playing with ideas of sexual identity – it’s a man playing a female character. There is nuance here too, of course – Travolta’s casting in an all-singing, all-dancing movie, as the interviewer notices, is an obvious nod to Grease.

This is problematic too, though. Men played female roles in Shakespeare’s time because women weren’t allowed on stage. What’s the excuse now? The writer Jill Nelson has argued that Travolta’s casting is offensive to women: “It seems not only are we to be made fun of and demeaned in films, but we are also being put out of work.”

It’s interesting, how discussions about drag very rarely seem to involve the views of women. On the SCOT-NITS debate, the assumption was that Jo was saying drag (or the way drag is often talked about) was offensive to transgender people. But the word she used was misogyny; the idea that’s being put on the table here is that drag is demeaning to women the same way that blackface is demeaning to black people. (Make of this what you will, but everyone who dismissed Jo’s comments on SCOT-NITS was male. Women were conspicuously silent.)

And here’s the rub. Blackface and drag do have obvious things in common. Both involve people in power (white people, in the case of blackface, or men, in the case of drag) colonising the identity of people with less power. Arguably, the fact that many of these men are gay is neither here nor there.

By that logic, if you want to speak up for drag surely you have to say that blackface is sometimes acceptable too. And yet most people don’t. Here in Scotland, it was recently decided that Jolson and Co, a touring musical telling the life story of Al Jolson, should not include scenes of Jolson in blackface, even though blackface is what Jolson is probably most famous for. In an ironic twist, Jolson was played in the show by Allan Stewart, who has been a panto dame in Edinburgh for many years now. So Stewart dressing up as a woman is fine, but Stewart dressed up as a black person is not. (To be fair, Stewart is on record saying he was against the decision not to use blackface but bowed to pressure, so at least he’s being consistent).

Blackface

In Japan, meanwhile, a performance art group called Red Spiral City were criticised recently for using blackface in one of their shows. The point, they argued in the Japan Times, was to “revisualise the liberation of blacks through as Pop a lens as possible”. But this was not enough for the paper, which tuttingly noted that the Japanese performers ‘seemed unaware of the potentially incendiary nature of blackface representations outside of Japan’. The important detail here is that Red Spiral City were not criticised for the way they were using blackface, but for the fact they were using it at all.

I stumbled across the Red Spiral City story via Momus’s excellent daily blog, Click Opera, from where I also borrowed the montage above (I hope Nick doesn’t mind). The blog includes a spirited defence of Japanese performers who have used blackface, like Red Spiral City and the Japanese girl group Trippple Nippples (the other picture above), which I’m going to quote in full: “A world in which you can imitate anyone except a black person because that’s assumed to be inherently cruel is a much more racist world than a world where you can imitate anyone you like, because the former implies there’s some sort of inherent abjection in negritude.” By that logic, censoring blackface, as the producers of Jolson and Co did, was arguably a racist act.

Like drag, ultimately, it’s all in the nuances. Take the film Tropic Thunder, from last year, in which Robert Downey JR plays an actor who blacks up in order to play a black character, and becomes so immersed in the role that he thinks he actually is black.

The joke here is not about skin colour as such, but about method acting. It’s about the vanity of a pampered Hollywood star thinking they can “become” a character whose life is completely different from theirs. To reassure the film’s audience of its good intentions, there is a real black character who constantly objects to what Downey JR’s character is doing.

Is Tropic Thunder racist? Hardly. If anything, it calls time on the kind of casual racism that Hollywood has been getting away with for years. I watched Gandhi for the first time recently, and was struck by the irony of a white movie star, Ben Kingsley, blacking up to play an iconic Indian figure – an act of blatant cultural colonialism at dead centre of a film about India trying to break free of colonialism.

Ultimately, at the risk of sounding trite, this debate is not about what should or shouldn’t be allowed - I’m not a believer in censorship and neither, I imagine, is Jo Clifford - but about how deeply we think about art, how it is presented, and yes, about what how we dress while making it. I’ll leave the final word to Jo. “Humour matters. What we find funny can help us understand better who we are and the values that underpin our culture. So however trivial or laughable this might seem, it actually connects to issues that profoundly matter. As theatre artists, we have a duty to think on these things and do what little we can to make this world a better place.”

Andrew

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