For instance, Carpenter and Eppink (2017) found that between 20, the average annual earnings for heterosexual men were $57,032, for gay men $59,618, for heterosexual women $39,902, and for lesbian women $47,026. This contributes to unequal pay and wealth between genders. One, as I discuss in the book, is related to gender pay inequality in work. There are several reasons for these inequities. There are no movies about drag kings that come close to the popularity of To Wong Foo or The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Drag queen story hour at libraries do not generally include kings. There is no equivalent to RuPaul’s Drag Race for drag kings. Drag king culture has, for instance, in no way approached the same level of pop culture visibility as drag queen culture. Drag queens continue to have more influence, status, and resources than drag kings, both in the world of drag as well as beyond. That is, those people performing femininities hold power over those performing masculinities. Consider the following: drag queens have always been dominant in the world of drag. The “reversal” in equality between drag kings and drag queens suggests that even the assumption of a penis is more important that the purest expressions of masculinity, at least in some contexts.
Philosophically, I totally agree with Hayden, a 32-year-old multiracial pansexual man and respondent from my book, Trans Men in the South: Becoming Men, that being a man is “definitely not defined by the anatomy that you have and the little thing that’s between your legs.” Despite this philosophical belief, my findings from my research with drag kings in the American South largely disapproves Hayden’s thesis (and my own as well). While my upcoming book, King of Hearts: Drag Kings in the American South, discusses myriad of these issues, in this essay I take up one lesson about gender that may be overlooked in reading this work: drag proves that the true power of masculinity still lies between your legs in many ways.
Drag is political and can teach us many lessons about gender in our society.