‘They helped to win the war’: the surprisingly mainstream history of drag

• Over the past year, conservative commentators and activists in the UK have identified a new enemy in the culture war: drag performance. Traditionally involving men dressed as women or women dressed as men in the context of a performance, present-day drag is readily defined, more capaciously, as a kind of performance that comments on gender. The Honor Oak Pub in London, which hosts events where drag artists read children’s books aloud, attracts a regular crowd of Right-wing protesters, who in tur