William Dorsey Swann was the 1st drag queen in the US
qvoicenews.comWilliam Dorsey Swann was known to his friends as “the Queen.” Swann reigned over a secret world of drag balls in Washington, D.C., in the 1880s, and is the first known person to dub himself a “queen of drag” or a drag queen.
He also was the leader of possibly the world’s earliest-known queer liberation group. William Dorsey Swann’s amazing and little-known life was uncovered and explored in an article in The Nation by Channing Gerard Joseph, a journalist focusing on the history of queer Black people in the United States. “That impulse led me to dig through all of the archives and records I could find.
That led me to a Washington Post article from 1888, describing a police raid on a drag ball,” Joseph told the BBC in 2021. “I didn’t know drag balls existed that far back.” “William Dorsey Swann is the first documented person to use the term queen to describe himself in the context of a ball or party that was described as a drag,” Joseph said.
In the 19th and early 20th century, drag wasn’t about public performances, it was about leading a group of people, Joseph said.
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