The world of drag has gone mainstream. From Instagram makeup to “throwing shade,” popular culture has adopted, or rather, capitalized on the distinctiveness of the drag community. Distorting the lifestyle of a traditionally rejected minority, the homogeneity in our generation’s vocabulary on social media (think “___ gives me life” or “yassss bitch werk”) has undermined the struggles of gender fluid and transvestite individuals and even more so, it has objectified drag culture to little more than a few pithy phrases.

Now, I know what you are going to think. You are probably anticipating some long rant about cultural appropriation and you are wondering, “wow, it’s only a few hashtags I learned off Twitter, what’s the big deal?” Don’t worry, I will explain.

Cultural appropriation by definition is the use of elements of one culture by members of another culture. Although this transfer of ideas and histories can be positive at times, appropriation is more likely to lead to misrepresentation especially if it is a minority’s culture in question.

The drag community is the implicit manifestation of the gay community (although people of all varying sexualities and genders participate). Throughout history, homosexuals have been targeted by various political, religious, and social factions, thus creating a polarizing socioeconomic spectrum in which those who identify as gay or lesbian have little to no means of climbing higher in the ladder, at least not financially. In many ways, gay culture, and responsively drag culture, is intricately linked with socioeconomic disparities in our society, with many queens coming from poor backgrounds. In the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, we see that much of this is racialized as well, as the film portrays a black/latinx drag community in some of the poorest parts of New York City.

As a minority in the country, and one with a history of being cast aside, the drag queen community has largely depended on itself; within each larger community, there are established “houses” where one can choose the family they wish to belong to, in lieu of their biological families whom had rejected them. Having this new support system, complete with a house “mother” and a place to sleep, young drag queens are initiated into drag’s very own cultural phenomena, the vogue ball, which goes far back into the 1940s with an origination in Harlem.

Popularized in RuPaul’s Drag Race, ball culture has recently been introduced to a larger audience. Raising awareness and appreciation for drag queens, the show has had a major influence on how society views the minority group.

However, with the increasing media coverage and unreality of reality television, those who are not familiar with what the community stands for, cast the queens in their minds as caricatures rather real people themselves. Similarly, we have a tendency to further dehumanize drag queens by borrowing their language in order to sound trendy or to invoke the grandiosity of a queen although we ourselves are not.

Drag, therefore, is diluted into incredibly quotable lines that we can comment under someone’s bomb selfie post.

You may be reading this and thinking, “well I didn’t even know these things came from drag culture, so how can I be appropriating?” Great point!

Most of how we internalize drag culture doesn’t come from drag queens themselves. In fact, OUR exposure to much of THEIR language comes from social media and celebrity slang. Much like how Madonna stole “voguing,” a stylistic modern dance from poor black and Latino Harlem communities, and claimed herself as the “mother of vogue,” social media personalities have adopted drag culture to make themselves more extraneously unique or “real.” This concept of “realness” is a very intriguing concept that I will save for another article. But in our emulation of those celebrity figures, there is only a copy of a copy of the genuine culture and by the sense, we are far from “real.” In this way, we are actively oppressing the individualism of the drag world and stripping them of their stake as real people.

I am not saying you cannot appreciate drag or use their language - there are queens that are very encouraging of this - but please think about the social and cultural implications of what you choose to imitate.