Hello, and welcome! This is the digital component of my Ph.D. dissertation in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY. If you are interested in learning more about the dissertation, I am in the process of creating a large-scale digital edition of it, potentially even here on Observable. Reach out to me via email or on Twitter if you want to know more.

My dissertation research argues for the use of new digital methods in queer historical research, which allows us to see in new ways how the “pansy craze,” which “raged” in cities impacted the transitory and itinerant queer drag culture outside of U. S. cities in the 1930s. To some extent, I follow historian Chad Heap’s argument that with the repeal of the 18th Amendment, queer cultures in large cities did not simply disappear but instead relocated to an “elsewhere,” racialized and generally “othered.” But whereas Heap argues that the culture lived on in cities’ black entertainment districts like Harlem and Bronzeville, what my digital methodologies bring forward is an itinerant culture that does not negate Heap’s argument but increases the complexity of his argument. Although many of the performers in my archive indeed found more or less permanent venues in the cities’ black entertainment districts, large groups were also extensively touring the country, thus bringing the queer culture around with them. Summarily, then, with a data-assisted perspective on the queer historiography of drag performance, combined with my in-depth case study chapters, a more complex landscape emerges. The dissertation’s data-assisted methodology of building a social archive of queer nightlife performance brings to light a circuit of performers not previously recorded in theatre archives or considered interesting enough for prior scholarly analysis, due to their transient position traveling between major and minor cities, townships, and villages. The methodology, which I explain in detail in this digital component, allows us to move beyond the particular focus on the social organization in a particular city or in cities in general, and to know and describe what the culture of drag looked like across the United States in the 1930s. It better allows us to understand the routes of cultural translation and subjectivity traveling through the network as it emerged around the late 1930s. Thinking about these routes as a network, as I detail further in the dissertation’s text, also allows us to understand this network as a provider of security in and of itself, as a response to the precarious position that many of the performers were in. Perhaps such a rhizomatic idea of a network can be a comparatively better way to describe the relationship between drag performers than the often-used idea of “family,” rooted as it is in the idea of stability and linearity. What did this infrastructural condition look like—this support structure or social network that enhanced the livability of lives? How do we know who was connected to this network and who was not? We must turn to sources that have traditionally not been considered of much use to theatre historians: advertisements, short or en passant notices, and classifieds to find both the actors (nodes) and their relationships (edges). Drawing on such sources, what did the “landscape,” or “ecology” of drag look like in the Northeast region of the United States and the country as a whole in the 1930s, and how can we use such a concrete image of a “landscape” or “ecology” to situate in-depth case studies in an attempt to understand the role and importance of certain actors and their connection to New York City and other urban centers at the time?