States and local governments across the United States have used laws on sexuality to target queer and transgender people since the mid-1800s — a precedent, experts said, for the country’s recent spate of bans on drag shows. This year, at least six states passed laws to restrict drag shows, and at least eight more introduced similar laws.
Some bills seek to ban children from drag performances, block the shows from public venues or force local businesses that host drag events to register as “adult-oriented businesses.”
The laws from the 19th century and today, experts said, are similar in their language that gives police a wide berth in enforcement. Both eras’ laws built off model bills written by interest groups or other states. And both sets of laws spread rapidly across the nation.
The laws demonstrate “an effort by states to symbolically reaffirm traditional sex, gender and sexuality roles,” said William N. Eskridge, a law professor at Columbia University and author of “Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet.”
The first cross-dressing law was passed in St. Louis in 1843, said Clare Sears, a sociology and sexuality studies professor at San Francisco State University, and dozens of cities soon followed in a “tidal wave” of similar laws.
Sears said the motivations behind the laws carry another similarity.
“The anti-cross-dressing laws were an attempt by a particular set of people, the White middle-class merchants, to seize and hold on to local government power,” Sears said. “It was a way for them to consolidate power by imposing the vision of what an orderly city life looks like. This has parallels with today.”
The stars of modern drag shows often are people from diverse backgrounds who identify as LGBTQ, and who may use the performances to “challenge conservative ideas of gender and sexuality, not to mention race and class, in a very public way,” Sears said.
The anti-cross-dressing laws, they said, were of various types. At the local government level, cross-dressing was embedded within broader “decency laws,” Sears explained, that “were initially concerned with making prostitution less visible.”