Features

Well girls will be boys and boys will be girls

It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…

- The Kinks

Jacque’s Cabaret advertises its ten-dollar cover charge on a piece of printer paper, encased in a paper-protector, and fastened to one of its double metal black doors. The show starts in five minutes and the bouncer is busy checking an ID, taking his time with the license as an older man sitting near the door collects the money. The club actually consists of two bars, one in the left corner, a straight counter with five or six stools and a flat-screen playing the Celtic’s game. From there, the bar extends to the middle of the space and branches out into a rectangular station, a peninsula that acts as a divider between the long countertop and the cabaret in the back. Small round tables are scattered in front of a modest stage with a short runway, outlined by shimmering wallpaper and strings of Christmas lights. Looking around at the steadily filling seats on this Friday night, the bartender brags a bit about the club’s current prosperity. “You should see it on Saturdays,” he yells, leaning in a bit so his voice isn’t overpowered by the opening act of the show just visible past his right shoulder.  Long layers of bleached blond hair bounce and swing as a performer in sequined drag belts out Destiny Child’s “Bootylicious.”

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Jacque’s Cabaret opened in 1938 and has evolved as an establishment in the seventy-one years since, always making itself a home for nightlife in Boston, but never transforming into a version of one of the many sports bars, wine bars, cocktail lounges, and dance clubs that might be considered mainstream destinations. Currently, the nightclub confidently advertises itself as “New England’s favorite place for female impersonation 7 nights a week!”  Monday: Mizery Loves Company. Tuesday: Boyz Will Be Girlz. Wednesday: Jacques’ Angels. Thursday through Saturday: Miss-Leading Ladies. The week is occasionally rounded out by a Sunday “Night of Mizery.” The schedule makes it clear that drag at Jacque’s is not gender neutral, despite the fact that it challenges gender’s boundaries, male to female entertainers dominate the stage. Jacque’s didn’t become a drag club until the 1970s, but drag as a comedic medium—with a man thinly veiling himself in women’s clothes, lifting and lilting his voice to deliver a monologue, or belting out songs onstage—was established as far earlier.

What makes a man in a dress useful for comedy has not been based necessarily on sight alone, but on its combination of physical comedy, with its undertones of stripped masculinity, and overplayed femininity. Men have always had a type of monopoly on comedy (as they have had a monopoly on nearly everything) from the times of court clowns and jesters. The trend was not bucked by drag, but instead further established by it in the 20th century. Even, if not especially, acts that used a woman’s social position as comedic content, commenting on that position in the process, were performed by men: the use of drag for the dame role, a persona particularly popular in London in the early 20th century, didn’t just entertain through the frocks an actor wore, but through the parody of a frustrated, nagging middle-aged woman.  The requirement that a man play the nagging housewife, dame role, in order to make the joke laughable, was a symptom of the overarching patriarchal nature of society. Patriarchal practice both established men as more fit for the stage and hemmed women into social roles set out for them. And the staged display of those roles was laughed at because, under it all, it was a male impersonating a female position, providing the audience with just enough distance to enjoy the persona rather than be forced to reflect on it too deeply.