It wasn’t until the ’60s or ’70s that drag became affiliated with the gay community. The popularity of drag performances dwindled in the 1940s and 1950s with the Lavender scare, the witch hunt and firings of gays in the U.S. clubs like Bohemian Caverns and Republic Gardens put on drag shows, and the Dunbar Theater hosted The Jewel Box Revue. Then, the pansy craze of the 1920s and 1930s swept through D.C., New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and the public reinvested in drag shows. “Drag performers were popular in theater venues in D.C. “ While most might associate drag’s popularity with the gay rights movement - or more recently, with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” - Meinke says the first big boom of drag in D.C happened a bit earlier. Meinke is a wealth of knowledge about D.C.’s drag history, much of which he outlines in his pamphlet “ Drag in D.C. Meinke went to three or four shows each night, sometimes seven nights a week. Mark Meinke’s newsletter, The Drag Rag, documented D.C.’s shows.
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