Hairspray, makeup, high heels, camp: I don't care for any of these things, so contemporary drag performance holds little interest for me. It is, apparently, of the greatest interest to some members of our state Legislature, in the sense that television dance shows were of interest to the great moralist Ignatius J. Reilly, who felt compelled to sit before the TV set in his bedroom and catalog every offense, every last lurid move by the depraved teenaged dancers.
Drag's enthusiasts and detractors would be well served by a look at the work of Brock Thompson. In his book "The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South" (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), Thompson finds deep roots in small-town Arkansas for the practice of dressing up in the clothes of the opposite sex for the sake of entertainment. It started out surprisingly mainstream, and not all hearts and rainbows and groovy free expression.
The womanless wedding was a farcical performance that appeared on Arkansas' cultural scene in 1917. An all-male cast would enact a "wedding" in which the bride and female wedding party members were usually portrayed by prominent white business and professional men. (Youth groups and college students also conducted womanless weddings, and at least one was put on by an African American church group in Little Rock, at Metropolitan Baptist in 1953.)
Performances were held in respectable venues: churches (especially Methodist churches), civic auditoriums, and school gymnasiums. As a fundraising activity, the womanless wedding was often a great success. The American Red Cross was a common beneficiary.
Themes of crude, craven, domineering women and cowed, henpecked men abounded. Brides were often portrayed as pregnant. Hillbilly themes were popular, notable because womanless weddings appear to have been much more popular on the eastern side of Arkansas' southwest-northeast diagonal, at least at the beginning. From May to December of 1917, womanless weddings were held in Earle, Marion, Crossett, Arkadelphia, Jonesboro, Arkansas City, Dumas, Helena, Brinkley, Batesville, Little Rock, and Carlisle. Only Ozark and Clarksville offered womanless weddings west of the SW-NE divide.
Thompson begins his consideration of Arkansas drag at Rohwer in August 1944, when staff at the incarceration camp put on a womanless wedding for the Japanese American inmates. The cast was drawn from employees of the camp and the greater Rohwer community.
The superintendent of schools portrayed the groom, while a low- level camp administrator and kitchen assistant portrayed the bride. Inmates paid admission (a nickel for children, a dime for adults) to the show, which was held on Aug. 23. According to camp newspaper The Rohwer Outpost, the show had audience members "rolling in the aisles."
The cast of the performance at Rohwer worked from a script by Hubert Hayes called "A Womanless Wedding." Analyzing the script, Thompson finds that "the comedic value is built upon a visible and performed difference of gender and class."
Though the "staged gender confusion" is the most obvious source of difference, Thompson writes, "the script also paints the characters as members of another class, with general mockery of the uneducated, the hillbilly mountain folk who by all accounts know no better than to involve themselves in such foolhardy endeavors."
I believe the key word here is "mockery."
When a rural Arkansas church hosted a womanless wedding in the early 20th century, Thompson writes, that church for a few hours became "a queer space that allowed for church-sanctioned institutions such as marriage to be mocked by the members of the community."
Since the emergence of highbrow culture in the 19th century, we are all too willing to accept theater (and performances of classical music) as a kind of nutrition we receive while hiding our boredom, when theater is supposed to be an occasion for catharsis for both the audience and the performers. So it's good that these shows were fun.
But while it may be heartening to think of a small-town church becoming a "queer space" for a little while, we must remember that these performances were like an engineered release of steam pressure or a controlled burn. "Whereas queer behavior is primarily seen as a reaction [against] accepted social norms," Thompson writes, performances such as womanless weddings "operate well within and are even sanctioned by" enforcers of those norms.
We must remember who gave permission for the mockery, who enacted it, and who got mocked. On the morning after a womanless wedding, the early 20th-century rural Southern power structures were still in place. Not everything that appears subversive is. Just think of the rainbow-washed products and experiences available for purchase, on credit, in our own day.
Thompson turns his attention from Rohwer to Wilson. While Rohwer in the 1940s was unlike any place but Jerome, Wilson in the early 20th century was like no other place at all. A timber operation turned cotton plantation and company town, Wilson was like a medieval fiefdom financed by Northern capital. Its sharecroppers lived in company housing and were paid in "doodlum script" that could only be spent at company-owned stores. Wilson was a town of unfree labor, a racial hierarchy maintained by threatened and actual violence, and beautiful English revival architecture. I don't know if any other place in America ever achieved its near-totality of economic and social control (all carried out under a mask of benevolence).
The auditorium of Wilson's white high school held numerous womanless performances to raise money for the white schools. Photographs from the 1930s "show white men in a seasonal beauty pageant sharing the stage with other white men in blackface," Thompson writes. The photos must be seen to be believed. (Several are reproduced in "The Un-Natural State.")
As Thompson says, "in the thick of the American South, this suggestive mingling of 'black' men and white 'women' went to the core of both racial transgression and sexual disobedience."
Thompson believes that drag and blackface were far more popular in the flatter, more racially diverse parts of the state because that is where "those in power, who were often the performers, saw... illustrating class and race control through low-brow entertainment as entirely necessary."
"The Un-Natural State" contains accounts of womanless performances by GIs at Camp Robinson, Camp Pike, and Fort Chaffee during World War II, as well as a few instances of bold and marvelously deceptive cross dressing by women.
The popularity of womanless weddings declined in the 1950s, and the Arkansas Gazette mentions only two in the 1970s and two in the 1980s. In 1983, the Democrat and the Gazette gave notice of the "Silver Streaks Jamboree" to be held at the junior high auditorium in Redfield to raise money for the Silver Streaks senior citizens group's trip to Eureka Springs.
"Tommy Robinson will be a guest for the day's last event," the Democrat reported, "an old-fashioned Womanless Wedding."