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“Drag,” observes Edmund White, “was once a major gay pursuit throughout the country …” (White, 1980). He contrasts this with the increasing masculinization of gay life today; some also would point to a growing preoccupation with leather, S-M, and the insignia of violence. This change in manifest mores from a caricature of femininity to one of identifiable masculinity is deserving of scrutiny because of what it reveals about some dynamics of gay life. But the phenomenon of cross-dressing, although it may no longer be a “major” element of gay life, still persists. This paper is about “drag,” but not about the drag that was — and in some places still is — completely elective or fashionable. Nor is it about professional drag. We propose here to address drag as practiced by homosexuals for whom cross-dressing has significant psychological meaning irrespective of the current gay trend toward a hypermasculine lifestyle.
We define homosexual cross-dressers as those homosexuals for whom cross-dressing plays a central role in their psychological life. We are not including in this group homosexuals who dress in women's clothes on rare occasions for a “lark,” such as attendance at a masquerade party or just to see how it feels. A lark of this