Drag Collection

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Cross-dressing elements of performance traditions are a widespread and longstanding cultural phenomena. For the moment, we will focus on Western performance traditions. 

The ancient Roman playwright Plautus' (c. 254 – 184 BCE) play 'Menaechmi' includes a scene in which Menaechmus puts on his wife's dress, then wears a cloak over it, intending to steal the dress from his house and deliver it to his mistress:

Menaechmus: "Look at me. Do I look the part?" 

Peniculus: "What in the world have you got on?!" 

Menaechmus: "Tell me I am gorgeous." 

In England, actors in Shakespearean plays, and all Elizabethan theatre (in the 1500s and 1600s), were all male; female parts were played by young men in drag because women were banned from performing publicly. Shakespeare used the conventions to enrich the gender confusions of As You Like It, and playwrite Ben Jonson manipulated the same conventions in Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (1609). During the reign of Charles II of England (latter 1600s) the rules were relaxed to allow women to play female roles on the London stage, reflecting the French fashion, and the convention of men routinely playing female roles consequently disappeared.

In the United States, early examples of drag clothing can be found in gold rush saloons of California. The Barbary Coast district of San Francisco was known for certain saloons, such as Dash, which attracted female impersonator patrons and workers.

William Dorsey Swann was the first person to call himself "queen of drag". He was a former slave, who was freed after the American Civil War, from Maryland. By the 1880s, he was organizing and hosting drag balls in Washington, D.C. The balls included folk dances, such as the cakewalk, and the male guests often dressed in female clothing

In the 1890s the slapstick drag traditions of undergraduate productions (notably Hasty Pudding Theatricals at Harvard College, annually since 1891, and at other Ivy League schools like Princeton University's Triangle Club or the University of Pennsylvania's Mask and Wig Club), and many other universities in which women were not permitted admission, were permissible fare to the same upper-class American audiences that were scandalized to hear that in New York City, rouged young men in skirts were standing on tables to dance the can-can in dive bars like The Slide.

Drag was also a popular form of entertainment in gold rush Victoria, as you can see from the following articles.

Introduction edited from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(entertainment) 

Image is famous male impersonator Vesta Tilley, image from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_Tilley