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Drawing on research done in the 1960s, Esther Newton (1972) describes professional drag queens as “professional homosexuals“: “the persons who most visibly and flagrantly embody the stigma. … men who dress and act ‘like women’” (p. 3). They are thus at the “opposite pole” from the “ ‘masculine,’ ‘respectable’ homosexuals, [who are] engaged in proving … that persons in the stigmatized category can be just as normal and competent as heterosexuals, ‘… nice persons like ourselves’”(p. 3). But by the early twenty-first century, an audience member at a drag club says, “If you watch the show … you realize they're normal people that work … and love, and do the same things that you do, it's just that they have a little bit different way of expressing their sexuality.” How drag queens came to be seen as “normal people” “like ourselves” is the story of the mainstreaming of queer culture; one strand of that narrative concerns how the productions and representations of queerness serve the needs of a dominantly heterosexual culture. More particularly, how the “professional homosexuals” of the USA's oldest running drag club serve the psychological and social needs of their (predominantly straight) audience is the story of Queens of Heart: Community Therapists in Drag.
To be sure, this documentary about Darcelle XV in Portland, Oregon, offers its psychoanalysis of the audience playfully. (I must disclose that I know the director and assisted with her commentary on the DVD). A note at the beginning of the movie warns us that it “contains clinical terms that may be offensive to some viewers. Any relationship between diagnostic terms and actual audience members or groups is mostly accidental. For a real diagnosis, consult your personal physician.” But this attention to audience, reversing the approach of many other documentaries on drag asks not so much why the performers do drag as why people (and particularly why straight people) like to watch drag. This is not a complete answer to b