Would Bowie Have Been Banned?

I have been hearing about Republicans in state legislatures across the country trying to ban drag shows (Tennessee just succeeded). This is apparently a resonant issue with people who are very different than myself. The first question that occurs to me, of course, is why? Why would this be a good thing to do even if it wasn’t a waste of time and public resources? Did these people know how Shakespearean plays were performed in the time of the Bard? Did they ever hear of the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard? Did they ever see one of their heroes, Rudy Giuliani in drag on Saturday Night Live? What exactly is the harm that these bans are supposed to be rectifying?

Bowie, of course, dressed in drag on numerous occasions. He posed in his “man’s dress” on one of the versions of the cover for The Man Who Sold the World. Three versions of Bowie as women served as his own backup singers for the “Boys Keep Swinging” video. He sang, “TV C15” in a skirt on Saturday Night Live in 1979. Other times, highlighting the difficulty of even identifying what it is to be in drag at all, Bowie adopted a feminine appearance that was deliberately ambiguous— the cover of Hunky Dory, the heavy makeup in the “Life on Mars” video, almost everything about the Ziggy Stardust persona. Was Bowie in drag when he was doing one of his Ziggy shows?

It’s all not only stupid, but malicious.

The video I’m using, ironically, does not feature Bowie in drag. I was looking for a good clip of him from that 1979 Saturday Night Live and came across this one, another live performance from the same year. I had never seen this clip before, which is pretty high quality, and although Bowie wears fairly ordinary masculine clothing here, the official video is already in this blog and I think the song itself is associated with the topic at hand. Plus his performance is terrific!