Experts see parallels between modern restrictions on drag shows and the cross-dressing laws that led police to arrest Babe Bean over 120 years ago in California.
Some bills seek to ban children from drag performances, block the shows from public venues or force local businesses that host drag events to register as “adult-oriented businesses.”in their language that gives police a wide berth in enforcement. Both eras’ laws built off model bills written by interest groups or other states. And both sets of laws spread rapidly across the nation.
The stars of modern drag shows often are people from diverse backgrounds who identify as LGBTQ, and who may use the performances to “challenge conservative ideas of gender and sexuality, not to mention race and class, in a very public way,” Sears said. Babe Bean, who in 1869 was born Elvira Mugarrieta and assigned female at birth, identified as a woman to the two detectives in 1897. Despite the long search and much-awaited arrest, police freed Bean after about an hour. Bean persuaded them that, despite their cross-dressing, there was no attempt to conspire to commit crime or deceit, Eskridge wrote in “Gaylaw.”
But San Francisco in 1903 became the first city to enact an ordinance directed specifically at cross-dressing, Eskridge said, and as laws got stricter, Bean couldn’t safely switch between presenting as masculine or feminine in public. Bean lived the last three decades or so of their life as Jack Bee Garland, presenting as a man and working as a journalist and philanthropist.
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