Talk:Drag queen

Early Russian gay community, crossdressing, performance

This note is just to alert the community to an interesting BBC article which could be useful as a source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41737330

While the focus is ostensibly on the early Russian gay community, a lot of it covers cross-dressing and performance. I don't know which articles it would fit, and I'm having to limit my screen time,so I'm just putting it out there. Two editors who are knowledgable in this area are SergeWoodzing (talk · contribs) and 4meter4 (talk · contribs)

Humpster (talk) 19:15, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

I am not knowledgeable on this. We must, in any case, be careful in using the word community in such a regard as this. There were no organized communties of people with similar sexual interests until quite recently in world history. SergeWoodzing (talk) 18:17, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Agreed. The BBC referred to the "gay community" of Russia.

I posted it here for the interest of the Wikipedia community. It is an overused word.

Humpster (talk) 21:25, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

@Humphrey Tribble To be honest, I'm not really impressed with the scholarship in this. The dating of things is very vague, and so is the who, the what, the where, and the why. There are no names of Russian performers and no locations where they performed or in what setting. The article claims periods of freedom at certain times which are contradicted in later paragraphs. Putting together a well crafted narrative, or even citing a definitive fact would be difficult with the article because it is so vague. The wedding is the main focus of the article, and we don't even know the context of why the individuals in this case were dressed as they were. Were they trans or non-binary and therefore dressing like they would normally? Were they performing at the wedding, and therefore in some sort of costume for performance? or were they just dressed up for the fun of it, as in party clothes? There's really no indication about the meaning of what they were doing. To me that is what matters when writing on people in this context, and the article fails that. Additionally, the tie in to crossgender performance in Russia later is very vague. Where were these individuals performing? Who were attending these performances? Who were the performers? When was this happening? All of this to say, there isn't much substance to this article for our purposes. It raises more questions than answers.4meter4 (talk) 23:10, 17 June 2025 (UTC)