User:B.raven222/Drag king

Drag kings have historically been mostly female performance artists who dress in masculine drag and personify male gender stereotypes as part of an individual or group routine. In more recent years, the world of drag kings has broadened to include performers of all gender expressions. A typical drag show may incorporate dancing, acting, stand-up comedy and singing, either live or lip-synching to pre-recorded tracks. Drag kings often perform as exaggeratedly macho male characters, portray characters such as construction workers and rappers or they will impersonate male celebrities like Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Tim McGraw. '''Drag kings may also perform as personas that do not clearly align with the gender binary. Drag personas that combine both stereotypically masculine and feminine traits are common in modern drag king shows.'''

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, several drag kings became British music hall stars and British pantomime has preserved the tradition of women performing in male roles. Starting in the mid-1990s, drag kings started to gain some of the fame and attention that drag queens have known.

Drag kings have historically been more marginalized by pop culture than drag queens, who began playing a larger role in mainstream pop culture from the late 20th Century onwards. Drag kings have also historically been marginalized in academic LGBT studies. Recently, drag kings have started to play a slightly more visible role in the LGBT community. Sleek Magazine described this renaissance of drag king culture in a 2019 article titled "What's behind the drag king revolution?"

The British drag king collective 'Pecs', a troupe made up entirely of women and non-binary people, was founded in 2013 and went on to perform at Soho Theatre and The Glory. In 2016, director Nicole Miyahara produced The Making of a King, a documentary film chronicling the lives of contemporary drag kings in Los Angeles. The first drag king to appear in a television show was New Zealand artist and comedian Hugo Grrrl who won the inaugural season of the New Zealand reality competition House of Drag in 2018. In 2019, American artist Landon Cider was the first drag king and cisgender woman to appear on a televised US drag competition when he won the third season of The Boulet Brothers' Dragula. In June 2022, three drag kings made a guest appearance in series one of Drag Race France, the first time the Drag Race franchise included drag kings.