| has gloss | eng: Drag in its broadest sense means any clothing one wears. However, the traditional use of the term is for any costume or outfit that carries symbolic significance. This usually refers to the clothing associated with one gender role when worn by a person of the other gender. Wearers of drag in this sense are divided into drag kings and drag queens, depending on the gender of the clothing adopted. The term originated either in gay or theatre slang in the 1870s, where the official long-established theatre term for "cross-dressing" on-stage was travesti (French, "cross-dressed," giving rise to "travesty" which took on further connotations as a genre of critical vocabulary). The term "drag" may have been given a wider circulation in Polari, a gay street argot in England in the early part of the 20th century. |