Performers Who Helped Bring Drag into Mainstream Culture

Dan Leno was the music-hall comedian who defined the pantomime dame, playing the leading women in the Drury Lane Christmas pantomimes from 1888 until shortly before his death in 1904. His dames were sharp, chatty and very funny, and the British tradition of men in exaggerated frocks at Christmas still follows his pattern.

Julian Eltinge was the most famous female impersonator in American vaudeville and one of the best-paid stage performers of the 1910s, admired for glamorous gowns rather than burlesque. A Broadway theatre opened under his name in 1912, and he carried the act into silent films, proof of how mainstream the form was a century ago.

Arthur Lucan created Old Mother Riley, a fiery Irish washerwoman, on the British variety stage and took her into a long run of popular comedy films from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. The character carried the pantomime-dame tradition to cinema audiences across Britain.

Milton Berle, nicknamed Mr. Television, regularly appeared in dresses and wigs on Texaco Star Theater from 1948, when his show was the reason many American families bought their first set. Broad and slapstick rather than glamorous, his drag sketches put the form into millions of living rooms in the medium's first years.

Barry Humphries first played Edna Everage as a timid Melbourne housewife in 1955 and over six decades turned her into Dame Edna, a gladioli-throwing megastar with her own chat shows on British and American television. Edna's mix of glamour and savage politeness made a drag character one of the best-known comic creations in the English-speaking world.

Danny La Rue ran his own glamorous nightclub in London's Hanover Square and in the 1960s became one of the highest-paid entertainers in Britain, filling West End theatres and appearing on prime-time television. His sequinned impressions of stars from Elizabeth Taylor to Margaret Thatcher made drag a fixture of family light entertainment, and in 1982 he took the title role in Hello, Dolly!

Flip Wilson's sassy, confident Geraldine Jones was the breakout character of The Flip Wilson Show (1970 to 1974), one of the most-watched programmes in American television at the time. Geraldine's catchphrases spread nationwide, and Wilson's success made him one of the first Black performers to headline a hit prime-time variety series.

Divine, the stage persona of Harris Glenn Milstead, starred in John Waters's underground films from Pink Flamingos (1972), with the shaved-back hairline and dramatic make-up designed by Van Smith. Her turn as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray (1988) brought that confrontational drag to multiplex audiences shortly before her death that year.

Lady Bunny founded Wigstock in 1984, an outdoor drag festival in New York's East Village that grew into a huge annual event and the subject of a 1995 documentary. With her towering blonde wigs, disco singles and filthy humour she helped take the downtown club scene out into public view.

Paul O'Grady developed Lily Savage, a brassy Birkenhead barmaid, at London's Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the 1980s and took her to The Big Breakfast and to hosting Blankety Blank on BBC One. Lily made a sharp-tongued working-class drag act a teatime favourite, and O'Grady went on to become one of Britain's best-loved broadcasters.

RuPaul came out of the Atlanta and New York club scenes to score a hit with Supermodel (You Better Work) in 1993 and became the first face of MAC's Viva Glam campaign in 1994. Since 2009 RuPaul's Drag Race has turned drag into a global television franchise and launched hundreds of careers.

Matsuko Deluxe moved from magazine columns to become one of the most visible personalities on Japanese television from the late 2000s, appearing in voluminous gowns as a frank, funny commentator on several prime-time shows. She became a household name and the best known of the cross-dressing television personalities who are a long-standing part of Japanese entertainment.

Courtney Act competed in drag on the first series of Australian Idol in 2003 and then released a top-thirty, gold-certified single, a rare mainstream break for a drag artist at the time. After finishing as one of the runners-up on RuPaul's Drag Race in 2014, she won Celebrity Big Brother in the UK in 2018, appearing with ease as both Courtney and Shane Jenek.

Jinkx Monsoon won RuPaul's Drag Race in 2013 and its All Stars series in 2022, then made her Broadway debut as Matron Mama Morton in Chicago in 2023. In 2024 she played the villain Maestro in Doctor Who, taking a drag performer to the centre of a flagship British drama.

Conchita Wurst, the bearded stage persona of the Austrian singer Thomas Neuwirth, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014 with the Bond-style ballad Rise Like a Phoenix. Watched by a vast European audience, the win made a drag performer a continental headline and an emblem of tolerance, and Conchita went on to address the European Parliament and the United Nations in Vienna.

Bianca Del Rio, a former theatre costume designer from New Orleans, won RuPaul's Drag Race in 2014 and turned her insult comedy into arena tours, becoming the first drag queen to headline Wembley Arena in 2019. The same year she joined the West End cast of Everybody's Talking About Jamie as the retired queen Loco Chanelle.

Bob the Drag Queen won RuPaul's Drag Race in 2016 on the strength of quick stand-up wit, then took drag into small-town America as co-host of HBO's We're Here from 2020, staging shows with local residents. Acting roles in Tales of the City and A Black Lady Sketch Show and a 2025 novel have widened the audience further.

Sasha Velour won RuPaul's Drag Race in 2017 with a finale lip sync to So Emotional in which rose petals poured from her wig and gloves, one of the show's most replayed moments. A trained illustrator, she has since taken the art-house drag of her Brooklyn revue NightGowns and solo show Smoke & Mirrors to international theatres.

Pabllo Vittar became a Brazilian pop star in her own right with dance hits from 2017, the year she featured with Anitta on Major Lazer's Sua Cara, whose video drew 25 million views in a day. She has since become the most followed and most streamed drag performer in the world, and joined Madonna on stage in Rio de Janeiro in 2024.

Trixie Mattel, whose look borrows from vintage Barbie dolls, won RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars in 2018 and built a career far beyond it: folk and country albums that charted on Billboard, the web series UNHhhh with Katya, and her own make-up brand, Trixie Cosmetics, launched in 2019. She shows how a drag persona can sustain an entire entertainment business.

The Vivienne, from north Wales, won the first series of RuPaul's Drag Race UK in 2019 and became the first drag performer to compete on Dancing on Ice, finishing third in 2023. Touring as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz in 2024, they took drag to family audiences across Britain before their death in January 2025, aged 32.