Meanwhile in the bible belt the ACLU is fighting a city's ban on drag shows.

A Brief History of Drag in the Art World

Drag has a rich cultural history, spanning cross-dressing performances and deliberate parodies of fixed roles of gender and sexuality. Men have been performing on stage as women since the Ancient Greek tragedies, Shakespeare famously cast men as women, and Baroque operas featured early examples of drag.

The term “drag queen” was first used to describe men appearing in women’s clothing in Polari—a type of British slang that was popularized among gay men and the theater community in the late 19th and 20th centuries. And while drag has long maintained a powerful presence in popular culture, more recently, it has developed a strong foothold in the art world as well.

Today, in the wake of the popular television program RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag queen Conchita Wurst winning the Eurovision Song Contest, and new drag-themed club nights popping up across London, New York, and L.A., one could say that drag is in the midst of having a mainstream moment. Riding this wave of popularity are art galleries and museums. Recently, drag has been identified as an influence among major art exhibitions, like the Whitney Biennial in New York, and performance programs, like “Contemporary Drag” at NADA New York this past March. It also serves as one of the themes in the new show “Queer British Art” at Tate Britain.

Artists have historically created work that might not be considered or intended to be “drag,” but nonetheless similarly challenge and deconstruct rigid social and sexual archetypes. Take, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, who first appeared in 1920. The character’s name was a pun on “Eros, c’est la vie” (meaning “eros, it is life”) and she appeared in several portraits taken by photographer Man Ray. Sélavy was an expression of Duchamp’s love for subversion and enigma. Similarly, the artist Claude Cahun was the male alter ego of the Surrealist Lucie Schwob, who took self-portraits dressed in male garments.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-history-drag-art