The History of Drag in Napa

Napa Register

Katie DeBenedetti

August 17, 2023

ast Friday night’s “Fierce and Fabulous Drag Show” marked the first time the Napa Town & Country Fair has featured such a performance.

Hundreds turned out to enjoy the event, with a larger than expected crowd partly due to online murmurs of a protest. Though nothing of the sort actually took place, and extra security was brought in to protect the queens as they went to and from the stage, several attendees said they wanted to make showing up a form of counter-protest. 

Online opponents complained drag shows did not fit into the family-friendly, appropriate entertainment normally seen at the fair, though the show Friday was relatively tame, featuring mostly extravagant outfits, lip-synced performances and community engagement. 

So what is drag, really, and what is its history in Napa? 

Drag’s long, evolving history

Drag, in the modern sense, is thought to have started back in the 1860s in Harlem, New York. At the time, parties known as “drag balls” began to spring up, at which queer and trans people, many of whom were Black, would don dresses and wigs and gather for dances or performances.

One of the first known people to consider themselves a “drag queen” was William Dorsey Swann, a former slave living in Washington, DC, who began hosting such parties at his home in the 1880s.

Solicia Aguilar, the interim program director of the LGBTQ Connection here in Napa, pointed out that while this might have been the first time drag was labeled, its existence can be traced even further back to men dressing as women to act in plays or donning wigs to go out into the public sphere.

“Drag has always been around — I mean even if you think back to William Shakespeare,” Aguilar said. “It's always kind of evolved alongside the evolution of humanity and various different cultures. It's not something new that came up in the 20th century; it's always been around. It's always been a way to have an artistic expression, an outlet, … portrayal and commentary on society.”

The resistance to drag is not new, either. Back in Swann’s day, he was arrested multiple times in relation to the drag balls he threw, once for being “a suspicious character,” among other charges.

What is drag, and what is the resistance to it?

According to Heather “Coach” Bailie, the director of training and technical assistance at LGBTQ Connection, drag is, at its core, a form of art and expression. Similar to other art forms, like music or theater, this means performances and performers can have different goals. 

She explained that some drag performances draw on what is happening socio-politically, or use their shows as ways to satirize and draw attention to events happening in real life. 

For others, like Sasha Devaroe, who hosted and performed at the Town & Country Fair last Friday, drag is about providing pure entertainment to the audience.

“It wasn’t for pleasure or sex; it was always for entertainment,” Devaroe said. “It's been like that for me for my whole career.”

For Ava LaShay, a drag queen from San Francisco who performs at Be Bubbly Napa Valley’s monthly drag shows, drag is comedic. Throughout her performances, she integrates stand-up comedy into the song and dance.

While most drag includes lip syncing to feel-good, often feminine, pop music and elaborate costumes and makeup, the way queens make the art their own varies greatly.

“You're going to have your camp queen, you're going to have your elegant runway queen, your comedy queen, your clown queen, … your political queens,” Aguilar said. “There's a vast spectrum of what drag can be.”

Aguilar explained that a lot of the fear drag spurs is due to the misunderstanding that drag is just one thing.

“To maintain that fear and that polarity in the community, what the media does is it picks a queen that probably is on more of like a Vaudeville kind of circuit that maybe isn't kid appropriate and puts that as the forefront to say ‘This is all of what drag is,’” Aguilar said.

Bailie noted that, like many forms of art and entertainment, there’s a spectrum of appropriateness. Not all movies are rated “G” or “PG” and not all comedy shows are welcome to all ages — but some are.

Some drag events, like the one held at the fair or the ones hosted at library reading hours, are put on as entertainment for all ages. Others, like the monthly drag evenings at Be Bubbly Bar, are for people of legal drinking age.

Building community 

Drag has also been a way to form community since its inception. LaShay explained that often, drag performers form lineages — she has a “drag granddaughter” and “drag mother” whom she considers like family. 

“What a lot of the queer community faces … is there's not always a lot of acceptance from … your biological family,” LaShay said. “With the queer community in general, you get to build your own community, your own family. Drag is very much the same. It's just kind of creating a support system.”

Bailie said hanging out with queens and her local queer community as a young person, this sense of community became extremely clear.

“What I saw was a lot of solidarity and a lot of people finding refuge from the harassment and discrimination and harm that they would experience in their lives being young queer kids that were kicked out of their home or trans individuals of color,” Bailie said. “It was people really just finding a space and a home. It's a sanctuary and a place of safety.

Drag has always been a way for communities to form. Back in the 1880s, drag was featured at parties and dances that brought trans and queer people together. Today, it’s found at library story times, boozy brunches and on bar stages.

Here in Napa, multiple types of drag events can be found today.

The history of drag in Napa

There has been a strong queer community in Napa for decades, which has pushed forward representation in the city and surrounding area. Drag’s history here, like its history more generally, has evolved alongside the queer community.

According to Bailie and Aguilar, a big contributor to this evolution has been Rob Doughty, who grew up in Napa himself and has made a name for himself in the Napa Valley as a DJ.

Doughty, who goes by “DJ Rotten Robbie,” inspired by the regional gas station chain of the same name, said that his work to support and increase representation of the queer community in Napa stems from his own experiences growing up here and not feeling safe being out as a young person. 

Doughty said queer activism in a more formal sense began here around the late 1980s, when a group of volunteers began hosting annual Academy Awards watch parties to raise money for the AIDS crisis beginning in the late 1980s.

Doughty said it was first hosted in a member’s living room, but once it grew bigger, the group began renting out a ballroom in the Clarion (now the Marriott on Solano Avenue in Napa) to hold the event. After a few years, the event grew so popular that the AIDs Network at Queen of the Valley Medical Center began to help host. Eventually, they had to expand to yet another larger venue, Chardonnay Hall at the Napa Valley Expo.

Around that time, the North Bay Unity League (NBUL), a group Doughty was in that was created to form community and support for queer people in the larger Napa area, was also formed.

In 1998, RuPaul, a popular drag queen — now even more famous for the show "RuPaul’s Drag Race" — was the featured guest at the AIDs fundraising. This seems to be the first time an event in the Napa area featured entertainment resembling modern-day drag, though the first full drag show in the city didn’t take place until 2018.

In the years between the city's first AIDs fundraisers and the 2018 drag show, Doughty said local groups like the League, which no longer exists, and other organizations that have been founded since, like LGBTQ Connection in 2010, have fought for more progressive events and policies in the city.

Twenty years ago, in June 2003, NBUL helped put on Napa’s first pride events, and in 2013, over 1,000 Napans signed a petition in an effort to raise a pride flag at city hall to mark pride month in June. 

This petition helped bring about the city’s first recognition of an official “Pride Week.” City council didn’t vote on raising a pride flag as the petition-signers hoped they would, but rainbow banners were hung from the downtown lampposts to mark the festivities. 

A pride flag did end up hanging from city hall for the first time in 2018, the same year Doughty helped host the city’s first full-scale drag show to celebrate pride month.

This past June, Doughty said throughout Pride Month, Napa had 36 events celebrating the queer community. He explained that since he began DJing at some of the first events held in Napa supporting LGBTQ communities, Napa has evolved a lot, but often, forward progress has included slow change or compromise.

“The way Napa has evolved and grown and changed with the times is really great, but it's been a lot of work,” Doughty said. “A lot of people have done a lot of gentle protesting when we wanted marriage equality and when we wanted to get a flag raised at the city hall. (Sometimes), it was a little too soon in the cultural movement for that sort of thing. [...] But now, we get the banners as well as the flags flown outside of city hall and at all the school districts.”

He said that Friday's show at the fair was a reminder of what he and other leaders in Napa have worked for over the past three-plus decades.

“When that young kid got up on stage and danced with all the other mostly adults, I felt like we were just uplifting them and showing them that it's OK to be here and be queer and that we support them,” Doughty said. “It was powerful.”