So drag, as any cultural practice, has changed and proliferated and I think the word we want to use is flourished.
Female impersonation versus cross-dressing versus drag - drag has so many different forms,
it's almost individual to the actor and to the performer. I'm a teacher by training, but I'm also like a historian in my heart.
I started going through card catalogs and I started looking online and it took me many years -
almost ten years now. In the basement of this place called the steak house,
that was the first gay bar in Denver in 1933 called the pit. So the nucleus of the gay community
existed right about here around World War II and all the way out to Cheesman Park.
Starting in about 1950, we started to get things like McCarthyism and
crackdowns on communism in the United States.
This eventually leads to a period of time known as the Lavender Scare in which hundreds of people are
kicked out of the United States government for being gay. In Denver, they actually banned drag in 1954 by city ordinance.
So Denver was taking its cues from Washington D.C. What this meant was that the city, in order to make itself appear more appealing
to defense spending dollars - which were increasing exponentially at that point - they had to do a lot of things like keep crime off the streets.
They took an old ordinance dating from 1886 designed to clean up the streets from
prostitution, because prostitutes in the late 19th century used to cross-dress to advertise their services, and they - instead of making it anyone in public caught
in a dress not belonging to their sex - they made it men.
Essentially what they did was they tried to crack down on prostitution, but they began to be used more and more against the LGBTQ community.
After that,
you get the creation of the Imperial Court of the Rocky Mountain Empire, and drag really becomes central to the period known as gay liberation.
These Emperor's and Empresses in these monarchs, as they're called, create visibility for the LGBTQ community. In the
1970s, if you wanted a form of entertainment, the court was the place to go.
So the ordinance was actually defeated in 1973 at the Gay Coalition of Denver.
So the writing was kind of on the wall that that form of harassment was coming to an end.
Denver after 2000 was growing by leaps and bounds. We had gone through something called Amendment 2 which was an anti-gay ordinance.
We had gone through HIV. We had gone through so many battles that this was a period not a quietude but of Renaissance.
Drag has several purposes.
Drag is used for entertainment. Drag is used for political activism. Drag is used as philanthropy. Drag is used as identity.
Drag has benefited the Colorado LGBTQ community specifically because it has been the central driving force behind our community.
We essentially created a space where not simply did no one care, but people valued you for who you are.
In fact, they loved you for being different.
The importance for me as a person hearing these stories is not just a simple matter of historical
reference, but to liberate people who are younger and growing up. To know that this tradition has been around since the very beginning of Denver.
My name is David Duffield and I am Denver.
 
