Are "drag shows" against Catholic teaching?

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Bruised_Reed said:
To perform and to have fun. I wanted try drag after the first show I went to and have played around with a creating a persona including my drag name and what I’d perform to, and my costume. It’s a art.
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Because it is fun for you, does this mean that there are no moral aspects about doing it?

Why is it fun for you?
Bruised_Reed said:
To be entertained, mainly. The drag show nearest me donated to charities so all the tips collected go to them and I like supporting that.
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Which charities?
 
Bruised_Reed said:
Have you been to a drag show? There is something between Dame Edna and RuPaul.
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There are also performers who are quite different from either. One being Conchita Wurst, winner of Eurovision a few years back. Conchita is clearly a man in drag (and sports a beard alongside the makeup and glamorous frocks, lest there be any doubt), and has the typically risque stage name to boot (if you know foreign languages). But also an amazing voice, performing original material without a hint of mockery or hamminess or pushing any agenda.
 
Doesn’t matter why they’re there, parading in drag before small children. What they are doing is exceedingly wicked. Don’t even try to rationalize it away. Evil, period.
 
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ricmat said:
Because it is fun for you, does this mean that there are no moral aspects about doing it?
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Dressing up like an exaggerated version of a pop star (who is pretty glam already) and lip syncing? No, I don’t see anything immoral.

I haven’t done it but doing it reminds me of theater the theater kid in me thinks it would be fun.
ricmat said:
Which charities?
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Before Christmas it donated tips to a local group that bought toys and other items for Christmas reaching 1200 kids. Others are organizations that help LGBT teens, and a domestic violence center; the proceeds of the last show went to Honor Flight.
 
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Good thing you weren’t born in the era when men played female characters in theatres.
 
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Salibi said:
Good thing you weren’t born in the era when men played female characters in theatres.
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Absolutely although I cannot stand the theatre, even as a child. The most annoying thing as a child for me twas that whole he’s behind you and they turn around and he is hidden , numerous times, children generally like it but it infuriated me.
 
I think the current mainstreaming is weird, because I think (?) part of the appeal of it is a kind of subversive subculture, right? A kind of seedy, “slumming” aspect of this entertainment?
Although there’s probably plenty of people who like seedy entertainment. 🙁
 
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It’s hard to see how it’s subversive or even that unusual when men dressed as women on stage for hundreds of years and in the last 100 years there have been all kinds of men dressing as women, and women dressing as men, in mainstream movies and plays. One might ask why it’s so awful for a man to dress as a glamorous princess, when it was okay for several adult female actresses to put on a Peter Pan costume and play the role of a young boy in front of audiences of children for decades.

If the issue is really that the drag act has suggestive content, then that’s a problem with the content of the act, same as if it was an actual woman performing a suggestive act - which is very common.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
when it was okay for several adult female actresses to put on a Peter Pan costume and play the role of a young boy in front of audiences of children for decades.
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I always found that odd. Why not just have a male in that role? And one that was closer to the age he should have been. 🤔

As a child watching Mary Martin, I wondered why a woman played Peter Pan.
 
I thought it was odd as a kid too. It was especially odd because Mary Martin or Sandy Dennis or whoever was not only the wrong gender, but much older than the age you’d expect Peter Pan to be (around 12 or 14) and then you had the whole romantic overtones thing with Peter-Tinkerbell and Peter-Wendy going on, which didn’t make much sense to me as a child if Peter was being played by a woman. From what I have read, it was a tradition of British pantomime.

They also had a similar tradition of a man putting on drag and playing the role of an older, matronly women in the pantos. There were actually men who specialized in these roles of “pantomime dames”. I imagine they were played for laughs.

en.wikipedia.org

Pantomime dame - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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It depends on if he would go there in the first place and they still do that sometimes.
 
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So you think today’s drag shows in general, do not have suggestive content?
 
There’s no such thing as “Today’s drag shows in general”. That’s like saying “Today’s rock n’ roll shows in general”.
There are many different variations of “drag show”.

It might be a better approach to just judge each show or performer on their own merits rather than trying to make some big blanket statement about “all drag shows bad”.
 
Since theatre is basically dressing up and playing someone you are not, I would think that the content is key. If what you are performing has no objectionable content, and the intent is not to deceive but to entertain, I don’t think there is a problem.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
The OP was in the other thread about drag shows at a high school objecting to “high school appropriate” drag shows, including the comedic kind where the football team dresses up in old ladies’ outfits from the Goodwill as a fundraising joke.
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I personally can’t get on board with that kind of puritanism. Cross dressing for entertainment is not inherently bad.
If you’re objecting to an obscene drag show, then you’re objecting to the fact that the content is filthy, not that someone is performing the obscenity and filth in a drag costume. It would be just as bad if they performed it dressed as their own gender.
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That was essentially my point.
 
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