Hello folks, I'd like to start with a song and the lyrics of the song are: "Walk light, ladies, the cake's all dough. You need not mind the weather if the wind don't blow." So if you can repeat after me, "Walk light ladies, the cake's all dough."
Audience: "Walk light, ladies, the cake's all dough."
CGJ: "You needn't mind the weather if the wind don't blow."
Audience: "You needn't mind the weather if the wind don't blow."
CGJ: Ok, so you got it. So I’ll sing.
(Singing) “Walk light, ladies, the cake’s all dough, you needn’t mind the weather if the wind don’t blow. Walk light, ladies, the cake’s all dough, you needn’t mind the weather if the wind don’t blow. ... Walk light, ladies, the cake's all dough, you needn’t mind the weather if the wind don’t blow.”
Hardly anyone knows that song anymore, but it was a popular one during the slavery era. Black Americans sang it on holidays and during a dance contest called a cakewalk. But what you may not know is that drag queens probably sang it at some of the earliest queer balls in the United States. And you also may not know that drag culture shares a history with African-American emancipation.
The reason you don't know is that Black queer communities have largely been erased from history. That's in part due to the fact that so much historical research begins with genealogy. And what is genealogy? It's basically a record of heterosexual behavior: mother, father, child; birth, marriage, inheritance. But another reason is that historians of all colors have looked down on Black queer folks like me as immoral, deviant, distasteful, diseased, even dangerous.
And the long-term impact of that is that many of us don't learn how Black queer people have shaped history. People like Bayard Rustin, a gay Black man who organized the March on Washington in 1963, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Or Frances Thompson, a formerly enslaved Black woman, assigned male at birth, whose harrowing congressional testimony about the Memphis race riots of 1866 helped shape the course of Reconstruction and galvanized support for the 14th Amendment, which provided Black Americans with citizenship rights and the promise of equal protection.
As an effeminate Black kid growing up in Louisiana, I was bullied a lot. In elementary school, the other kids called me a girl and I felt out of place almost all the time. If I had learned in school about the contributions of Black queer people, it would have made an enormous impact on my life. I think recovering these histories can save kids' lives. But after spending the last 15 years researching and writing about these topics, I would like to make the case that learning Black queer history is crucial to understanding our shared history.
So you've probably heard that the fight for queer liberation began with the Stonewall uprising. New York police raided a queer bar in 1969. Riots followed and magically, a celebration of pride was born. The problem is, that's not true. (Laughs) Queer pride did not arise out of nowhere. There had to be a foundation of self-acceptance and solidarity in place already. And in fact, many people had been working for decades to build the courageous and confident community that made Stonewall, pride and eventually, marriage equality possible.
One of those people was William Dorsey Swann, the first drag queen. Swann was born into slavery in Maryland just before the Civil War. In the 1880s, as a young adult, he moved to Washington, DC to find work to help support his parents and siblings. In Washington, he found the Emancipation Day parade, an enormous annual celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the US capitol. The highlights of the parade were called queens: Beautiful, crowned Black women who personified African-Americans' newfound freedom. The queens of Emancipation Day so inspired Swann, that he adopted the title "queen" for himself at the secret dance that he and his friends called "a drag." The word "drag" possibly comes from a contraction of "grand rag," which is an early term for a masquerade ball.
So although people assigned male at birth have dressed in feminine clothing for all sorts of reasons throughout the centuries, the term "drag queen" began with Swann, who was the earliest documented person to call himself a queen of a cross-dressing party described by its participants as a drag. The title queen signified that Swann held an honored place in the community. But the term "queen" is even more important because it's one of the earliest positive terms that queer people had to describe ourselves.
In the 1880s, positive terms like "transgender" and "non-binary" didn't exist yet. "Homosexual" was a word only used by Germans. And although "gay," "lesbian" and "bisexual" were English words, they didn't mean what they mean today and they weren't used to self-identify. So it can be tempting to apply modern identities to people of a distant past. But if we do so, we often fail to consider and respect the ways that they thought of themselves. Right? If we fail to consider how our ancestors thought of themselves, we risk erasing a crucial element of our shared history.
Swann's balls were raided numerous times by the DC police leading to jail time and eventually a public petition and a bid for a presidential pardon. That makes Swann the earliest documented American activist to take legal steps to defend the queer community. But the authorities couldn't stop Swann and couldn't stop the balls from continuing and expanding to other cities. Today, queer drag is mainstream. From “Paris is Burning” to “Pose” to “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the houses of 21st century ballroom culture, which feature queens who preside over beauty and dance contests, have maintained the same basic structure as Swann's 19th-century community.
The history of DC's Emancipation Day has largely been forgotten, but the power to choose how we define ourselves, as Swann did, is more important now than ever. And as long as the term "queen" lives on, anyone who participates in or enjoys watching drag competitions is paying homage to a century-and-a-half long celebration of African-American emancipation. And William Dorsey Swann is just one example. How many other Black queer stories have been erased from the historical record? And what could those stories teach us about who we are?
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)
