In Ancient Greece, Children Wearing Drag Was a Religious Obligation!

As I discuss in great detail in this recent post I wrote about the ongoing right-wing attack on LGBTQ+ people in the United States, in the past month, right-wingers have been having a full-on moral panic about the existence of child-friendly drag performances. These rightists perceive drag itself as inherently sexual and therefore inherently inappropriate for children. Many of them are claiming that allowing a child to view any form of drag is somehow “child abuse” or “grooming.” In the heat of this moral panic, neo-fascists have disrupted and even planned violent attacks on drag performances that are billed as child-friendly and Republican lawmakers in multiple red states have proposed bills that would make it a crime to allow any person under the age of eighteen to view any kind of performance involving drag.

As I have already explained at greater length in my previous post, drag is just a variety of costume; it’s a person dressing up as a different gender. There is nothing inherently sexual about it. Although many drag performances for adult audiences do make use of sexual humor and innuendo and are therefore inappropriate for young children, such innuendo is not integral to drag itself and some drag performances can be genuinely child-friendly. Moreover, laws banning drag performances in the presence of children, if they are vaguely worded enough, could be used to criminally prosecute trans and gender-nonconforming people for wearing clothes associated with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth in any public place where children could conceivably be present.

In this post, I thought I would mention, from an ancient historical angle, that the ancient Greeks would be absolutely baffled by twenty-first-century U.S. right-wingers’ paroxysms over child-friendly drag. All the female roles in Greek drama were originally portrayed by men in drag at religious festivals where at least older children were present, it was a religious custom for men to dress in drag for certain religious festivals and occasions where children could be present, and the ancient Athenians even had a festival at which two adolescent boys were religiously mandated to dress in drag themselves.

Why this matters

I would be the very last person ever to argue that anyone today should decide what is appropriate for minors on the basis of what the ancient Greeks thought was appropriate. Times have changed. The ancient Greeks were certainly wrong about many things, including, in some cases, what they thought was appropriate for minors.

After all, it was common for ancient Greek parents to force their daughters when they were in their mid-to-late teenaged years to marry adult men who were often more than twice their own age. Meanwhile, many, if not most, ancient Greek people regarded the practice of pederasty (i.e., erotic relationships between adult men and adolescent boys) as completely normal and acceptable. Both of these practices are abominable and should have no place in the modern world.

Nonetheless, there are two reasons why I think it is important to point out that the ancient Greeks had absolutely no problem with children viewing drag performances or dressing in drag themselves at least for certain religious occasions.

The first reason is because people on the right are trying to promote the narrative that children viewing or participating in any form of drag in any way is always an inherently “degenerate” social phenomenon, that decent people in all periods of human history have always held this opinion, and that this is a longstanding moral principle. By promoting this narrative, they seek to portray their own ongoing moral panic about children and drag as the natural, inevitable reaction of decent people to a depraved situation.

For instance, in response to a drag event billed as child-friendly that was held on 4 June of this year in the LGBTQ+ bar and nightclub Mr. Misster in Dallas, Texas, an article by the writer Micah B. Veillon, published in the paleoconservative online magazine The American Conservative, explicitly invokes this talking point, asking:

“Why is this [i.e., performing drag in front of children] something this performer has never done before? Some may answer ‘because we have had a prejudice against allowing children to be exposed to sexual content and environments.’ In fact, one drag queen wondered why parents would not let their children attend events like these, claiming it is hard for kids to grow up in such a ‘religious and conservative household.’ In other words, households where such prejudices would be learned. Perhaps, though, we have that prejudice for a reason. Perhaps it is a beneficial pre-judgment reformed over the millennia and percolated through a tradition.”

Veillon goes on later in the same article to specifically cite the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (who, it should be noted, never wrote anything about children and drag) for his idea that the human being is a “political animal” and for his theory of virtue ethics.

Veillon uses this theory of virtue ethics to praise Texas Republican lawmakers, who have proposed a bill that would make it a crime to allow any person under the age of eighteen to view any kind of performance involving drag, describing their effort as one “to use the teeth of the law to punish vice and, consequently, encourage virtue, and to help raise Texas youth to cultivate moral prejudices.”

In reality, the ongoing right-wing moral panic about children and drag is a uniquely modern phenomenon arising from uniquely modern historical circumstances. For the vast majority of human history, this notion that it is inherently inappropriate for children to view or participate in any form of drag has simply not existed. The fact that the ancient Greeks had absolutely no problem with children viewing drag or participating in it themselves at least for certain religious occasions reminds us of this reality.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who is known for his view that the human being is a “πολιτικὸν ζῷον” or “political animal” (or, more accurately, a “polis-dwelling animal”) and for his theory of virtue ethics

The second reason why I feel it is necessary to write this post is because many of the very same people on the political right wing who want to condemn children viewing or participating in drag as inherently a “degenerate” abomination are also ardent admirers of the ancient Greeks. These are two opinions, however, that are rather difficult to reconcile when one considers just how widespread and common it was in ancient Greece for children to be exposed to drag.

Allow me to illustrate what I mean with an example. Over the past few years, many spaces have arisen on the question-and-answer website Quora that are dedicated to promoting neo-fascism, white supremacy, and other racist, misogynistic, anti-queer, right-wing extremist ideologies. One of these spaces is called “The Traditionalist.”

A user who goes by the mononym “Alexander” made a post in that space on 15 May 2022 claiming that “the government and degenerates” (by which he clearly means LGBTQ+ people) are “ideologically manipulating your children.” This assertion is accompanied by screenshots of various headlines that are apparently supposed to serve as evidence to support it.

One of the screenshots is of an article from May 2019 published by the right-wing propaganda website The Daily Wire reporting on a partnership that was recently announced at the time between the shoe brand Converse and the eleven-year-old drag queen Desmond Napoles, who performs under the stage name Desmond Is Amazing.

This article published by Gay Star News at the time describes the controversy and reports that, as soon as the partnership was announced, conservatives aggressively flooded Desmond and his family with all manner of abuse and violent threats and called for Child Protective Services (CPS) to investigate his parents for child abuse for allowing him to perform drag.

On 25 May, “Alexander” made another post in the space, which consists of two photos captioned and juxtaposed for propagandistic purposes. The top photo purports to show two white homeschooled children being properly educated in a wholesome environment by their loving, white mother. In reality, it is a stock photo that bears little relevance to what homeschooling is actually like in the real world.

On the bottom is a photo of a Drag Queen Story Hour that Neo-Nazis have used extensively in their propaganda. This photo is captioned to indicate that it supposedly represents children who attend public schools being indoctrinated into “degeneracy.” I am unable to identify the original source of this photo, but, typically, Drag Queen Story Hours actually take place at libraries, not public schools.

Moreover, the photo differs markedly from most other photos of Drag Queen Story Hours that I have seen. In most photos that I have seen of Drag Queen Story Hours, only one drag queen is present, she is reading from a children’s book, and there are children gathered around, usually sitting on the floor or on chairs, to listen to the story. In the photo that “Alexander” uses in his post, by contrast, there are three drag queens present, one of them has a shaggy beard and exposed hairy shoulders, and some of the children are actually sitting on the drag queens’ laps.

Nothing actually inappropriate is going on in the photo, but the fact that the drag queen with the beard and hairy shoulders is visibly masculine and the fact that the children are physically in closer proximity to the drag queens than usual makes it easier for Neo-Nazis to use this photo to elicit disgust and hatred. The fact that one of the drag queens happens to be Black and most of the children are white also plays into the far right’s instinctive fear of Black people being allowed to exist in the vicinity of white children.

Clearly, “Alexander” finds the idea of children being exposed to drag or gender-nonconformity in any form greatly disturbing. The exact same user, however, has also made multiple posts in the exact same space explicitly urging followers of the space to imitate the ancient Greeks.

For instance, he posted an image on 31 May bearing various instructions for “how to become a man” that includes a photo of a marble bust of the famously Philhellenic Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161 – 180 CE), who famously wrote a book of personal meditations on the Greek philosophy of Stoicism in the Greek language, which is generally known today as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The caption for the image reads: “BECOME STOIC.”

“Alexander” also made a post on 7 June with a message for white women that reads: “Love your people [i.e., the white race]. Embrace femininity, not feminism.” This is accompanied by an image that bears the caption “BE WHAT YOUR ANCESTORS DREAMED OF BECOMING” and shows a modern color photo of a white woman who I am not able to identify directly next to a photo of a marble bust of a woman that appears to be Greek or Roman style.

I am sadly not able to identify the exact location or provenance of the sculpture in the photo, but, from what I can tell, it looks like it is probably a variation of the Athena Lemnia or Lemnian Athena type, based on a bronze cast made by the Athenian sculptor Pheidias at some point between c. 450 and c. 440 BCE, depicting the ancient Greek goddess Athena.

This particular choice for the photo is amusingly ironic, considering that Athena is famously a masculine warrior goddess who blithely flouts basically every norm the ancient Greeks had for how real-life women were supposed to behave. She is most commonly portrayed in ancient Greek literature and art dressed in battle armor, carrying a spear and a shield—attire that the ancient Greeks considered inherently masculine. Thus, by ancient Greek standards of dress, Athena is literally a cross-dresser.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a plaster cast of a reconstruction of what Pheidias’s original Athena Lemnia might have looked like, currently held in the Gallery of Classical Art in Hostinné

The extensive presence of drag in ancient Greek theatre

Given the combination of the right wing’s fury toward drag and simultaneous fawning admiration for the ancient Greeks, it is worth reviewing just what an important traditional religious custom drag was for them. Let’s start by talking about the nigh-ubiquitous presence of drag in ancient Greek theatre.

In Greece during the Classical Era, women were never allowed to be actors or chorus members. All the actors and all the members of the chorus in ancient Greek theatre were always men. Consequently, every female character in every work of ancient Greek drama was originally played by a man in drag. This applies to tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays alike. All the iconic female characters in Greek drama, including Klytaimnestra, Elektra, Antigone, Alkestis, Medeia, Lysistrata, and so on, were originally portrayed by men in drag.

Additionally, at least partly because drag was such a huge element of the actual staging of works of Greek drama, the trope of men dressing themselves in women’s clothing recurs throughout many surviving works of ancient Greek drama, especially the works of the comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) and the tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE).

In Aristophanes’s comedy Thesmophoriazousai or The Women at the Thesmophoria Festival, which was originally performed in Athens in 411 BCE, most likely at the City Dionysia, Euripides (who is a character in the play) believes that the women of Athens are plotting against him, so he asks his fellow tragic playwright Agathon, who supposedly cross-dresses in secret, to disguise himself as a women and infiltrate the Thesmophoria festival, which only women were allowed to attend. After Agathon rebuffs him, Euripides disguises his elderly relative Mnesilochos as a woman and sends him to the Thesmophoria instead. Hilarious hijinks ensue.

In Aristophanes’s other comedy The Frogs, which was first performed at the Lenaia festival in Athens in 405 BCE, the god Dionysos appears on stage wearing a saffron dress and, in one scene (which occurs in lines 45–59), he explains to the hero Herakles why he is wearing it.

ABOVE: Detail of Side A of the so-called “Krater of the Gluttons,” attributed to the Choregos Painter, an Apulian red-figure bell krater dating to between c. 380 and c. 370 BCE, discovered in Bari in southern Italy in 1883, now held in the Civic Archaeological Museum in Milan, depicting a scene from a Phlyax play. The actor shown at center is a man dressed in a woman’s costume, portraying a female character.

In Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in 405 BCE, shortly after the playwright’s own death, Dionysos causes the women of Thebes to go mad and go out into the wilderness to worship him through ecstatic rites. Dionysos’s cousin King Pentheus of Thebes refuses to acknowledge him as a deity and believes that the women in the wilderness are engaging in all sorts of drunken sexual depravities.

Dionysos, disguised as a mortal sorcerer from Asia Minor, persuades Pentheus to disguise himself as a Mainad (i.e., one of Dionysos’s female devotees) and go out into the woods to spy on the women and see what they are doing (ll. 810–861). In a humorous interlude, after Pentheus comes on stage wearing a woman’s dress (ll. 912–917), Dionysos, who has also changed into women’s clothing and seemingly taken the physical form of a woman as well, gives him advice on how to pass as a Mainad (ll. 925–949).

After leading Pentheus out into the woods dressed as a woman, Dionysos causes the Theban women to see him, mistake him for a lion, and violently tear him limb-from-limb in an act known as σπαραγμός (sparagmós). Pentheus’s own mother Agave mounts his head on a thyrsos (i.e., a kind of staff associated with the cult of Dionysos made from a fennel stalk with a pinecone mounted at the top) and she bears it to her father Kadmos, who is Pentheus’s grandfather, boasting about the lion she has killed (ll. 1030–1152).

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing an Attic red-figure lekanis lid dating to between c. 450 and c. 425 BCE, now held in the Louvre Museum in Paris, depicting two Mainads tearing Pentheus limb-from-limb

The social composition of ancient Greek audiences

Although women were not allowed to perform on stage as actors or chorus members in Greek drama, they were almost certainly allowed to attend plays and at least some women were almost certainly present in the original audiences for all surviving works of Greek drama.

Although some scholars of previous generations argued that women were not allowed to attend plays, no ancient source ever says that women were not allowed to do so and many ancient sources independently attest that they were. For further reference on this, see Jeffrey Henderson’s arguments in his paper “Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals,” which was originally published in 1991 in the academic journal Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. 121, pp. 133-147, and is available on JSTOR if you have access through an institution.

Additionally, the Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE) indicates in his philosophical dialogue Laws 2.658d that at least some older children were allowed to attend plays as well. In the dialogue, the unnamed Athenian speaker and Kleinias of Krete are discussing which genders and ages tend to prefer various kinds of performances, imagining a hypothetical scenario in which people are asked to choose between a puppeteer, an exhibitor of comedy, an exhibitor of tragedy, and a rhapsode performing epic poetry. They have this exchange:

Ἀθηναῖος: “εἰ μὲν τοίνυν τὰ πάνυ σμικρὰ κρίνοι παιδία, κρινοῦσιν τὸν τὰ θαύματα ἐπιδεικνύντα: ἦ γάρ;”

Κλεινίας: “πῶς γὰρ οὔ;”

Ἀθηναῖος: “ἐὰν δέ γ᾽ οἱ μείζους παῖδες, τὸν τὰς κωμῳδίας: τραγῳδίαν δὲ αἵ τε πεπαιδευμέναι τῶν γυναικῶν καὶ τὰ νέα μειράκια καὶ σχεδὸν ἴσως τὸ πλῆθος πάντων.”

This means, in my own translation:

Athenian: “If, therefore, the very small children are judges, they will choose the shower of puppets, won’t they?”

Kleinias: “For how would they not?”

Athenian: “And, if at least the bigger children are judges, then they will choose the shower of comedy. And the educated of the women and the young men and likewise the vast majority of all people will choose tragedy.”

The speakers go on to conclude that only the men who are old and distinguished—who, in Plato’s view, are naturally the most intelligent and therefore have the best judgement—will pick the rhapsode performing epic poetry.

Although the specific scenario Plato’s characters are discussing is hypothetical, this conversation strongly implies that, in real life, at least in the fourth century BCE when Plato was writing, at least some older children and possibly some younger children as well could and did attend performances of plays. Since nearly all ancient Greek plays involved drag, this means that, in ancient Greece, minors were commonly allowed to attend drag performances—and there is no record that anyone ever thought there was anything wrong with it.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait head of Plato, based on an earlier Greek original

Widespread cross-dressing at ancient Greek festivals of Dionysos

Children in ancient Greece would not just have seen men in drag on stage at the theatre, but also at certain festivals and on certain religious occasions, especially, but not exclusively, those in honor of Dionysos.

Throughout the ancient Greek world, during festivals of Dionysos, men would parade giant representations of erect penises known as φαλλοί (phalloí) through the streets in honor of the god. These phallic processions were known in antiquity as φαλλοφόρια (phallophória), which literally means “phallos-bearing.”

The Athenian orator Demochares (lived c. 355 – c. 275 BCE; FGrHist 75 F2), the historian Semos of Delos (fl. c. 200 BCE; FGrHist 396 F24 = Athenaios, Deipnosophistai 622b), and several other ancient sources attest that, at least by the fourth century BCE, during these processions, the men bearing the phalloi would routinely dress in women’s clothing.

The scholar Margaret C. Miller argues in her paper “Reexamining Transvestism in Archaic and Classical Athens: The Zewadski Stamnos,” which was published in the American Journal of Archaeology 103, no. 2 (1999), pages 223–253, and is accessible on JSTOR through this link, that some ancient Greek vase paintings depicting men wearing women’s clothing may depict ritual phallos-bearers of this kind.

ABOVE: Photograph from Margaret C. Miller’s paper “Reexamining Transvestism in Archaic and Classical Athens,” page 248, showing Side A of an Attic red-figure kylix by the Sabouroff Painter dating to c. 460 BCE, now held in the J. Paul Getty Museum, depicting men dressed in women’s chitons whom Miller speculates may be ritual phallophoroi

At the Ptolemaic royal court in the city of Alexandria in Egypt during the Hellenistic Period, it was supposedly a royally mandated custom for all the men to dress in women’s clothing during celebrations of Dionysos.

The Syrian satirist and rhetorician Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) in his On Slander 16 tells the following story about how King Ptolemaios XII Auletes (ruled c. 80 – 58 BCE) supposedly would have put a philosopher to death for not getting drunk with wine and cross-dressing during the festivals of Dionysos like he was supposed to:

“ὁπότε καὶ παρὰ Πτολεμαίῳ τῷ Διονύσῳ ἐπικληθέντι ἐγένετό τις ὃς διέβαλλε τὸν Πλατωνικὸν Δημήτριον, ὅτι ὕδωρ τε πίνει καὶ μόνος τῶν ἄλλων γυναικεῖα οὐκ ἐνεδύσατο ἐν τοῖς Διονυσίοις· καὶ εἴ γε μὴ κληθεὶς ἕωθεν ἔπιέ τε πάντων ὁρώντων καὶ λαβὼν ταραντινίδιον ἐκυμβάλισε καὶ προσωρχήσατο, ἀπολώλει ἂν ὡς οὐχ ἡδόμενος τῷ βίῳ τοῦ βασιλέως, ἀλλ᾿ ἀντισοφιστὴς ὢν καὶ ἀντίτεχνος τῆς Πτολεμαίου τρυφῆς.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Once, at the court of Ptolemaios who was called ‘Dionysos,’ there was a man who slandered the Platonic philosopher Demetrios, [saying] that he drank [only] water and was the only one of the others who did not put on women’s clothing during the festivals of Dionysos. And, if he [i.e., Demetrios], having been summoned at dawn, had not drank wine with everyone watching and, putting on a diaphanous dress, played the cymbals and danced, then he would have been put to death for not enjoying the lifestyle of the king, but rather being a disparager and critic of Ptolemaios’s luxury.”

Loukianos was, of course, a satirist writing centuries after the events he describes supposedly took place and he does not cite any specific source for this anecdote. This anecdote should therefore not be treated uncritically as a factually accurate account of a real historical incident. Nonetheless, cross-dressing was almost certainly still a major part of how festivals of Dionysos were celebrated at the Ptolemaic court.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a marble portrait bust depicting Ptolemaios XII Auletes dating to the first century BCE, now held in the Louvre Museum

Cross-dressing in other ancient Greek religious contexts

Dionysos, however, was not the only ancient Greek deity whose cult involved cross-dressing. A fragment from the Atthis of the historian and Atthidographer Philochoros of Athens (lived c. 340 – c. 261 BCE) that has been preserved through quotation by the Roman antiquarian Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, who lived in around the early fifth century CE, in his Saturnalia 3.8.2, attests that, by the fourth century BCE, in Athens, men made sacrifices to a male form of the goddess Aphrodite known as Aphroditos while wearing women’s clothing and women made sacrifices to him while wearing men’s clothing.

As I have discussed in several previous articles, including this one from August 2020 and this one from February 2022, from the third century BCE onward, an order of mendicant eunuch priests of the Phrygian goddess Kybele known as Galloi existed in Hellenistic Asia Minor. These priests habitually dressed in women’s clothing, wore their hair long in styles that Greek and Roman authors perceived as effeminate, wore makeup, jewelry, and perfume, and were sometimes known to speak in deliberately high-pitched voices.

Possibly the earliest explicit description of a Gallos dressing in women’s clothing occurs in a poem by the Hellenistic poet Antipatros of Sidon, which most likely dates to the late second century BCE and is preserved in the Palatine Anthology 6.219. Antipatros describes the Gallos’s appearance as follows in lines 1–6:

“ἐκ ποτέ τις φρικτοῖο θεᾶς σεσοβημένος οἴστρῳ
ῥομβητοὺς δονέων λυσσομανεῖς πλοκάμους,
θηλυχίτων, ἀσκητὸς ἐϋσπείροισι κορύμβοις,
ἁβρῷ τε στρεπτῶν ἅμματι κεκρυφάλων,
ἴθρις ἀνήρ, κοιλῶπιν ὀρειάδα δύσατο πέτραν,
Ζανὸς ἐλαστρησθεὶς γυιοπαγεῖ νιφάδι.”

This means, in my own translation:

“When, goaded by the sting of the frightening goddess,
shaking his twirling tresses, raving,
dressed in women’s clothing, adorned with well-plaited locks
and a delicately wreathed one of the pliant women’s hairnets,
a eunuch man took shelter in a mountain cave,
driven by Zeus’s numbing snow.”

The ancient Greek and Roman literary authors who write about the Galloi were all deeply hostile toward them, regarding them as effeminate foreigners and their practice of dressing in women’s clothes as proof of their effeminacy. If these sources were our only evidence, it might be possible to dismiss the claim that the Galloi dressed in women’s clothes as a fabrication of hostile Greek authors.

These sources, however, are not our only evidence; surviving artistic representations of Galloi that Galloi themselves actually commissioned depict them dressed in women’s clothing, indicating that the Galloi really dressed this way and wanted to be depicted as such.

Most famously, a votive relief found in the city of Kyzikos in northwest Asia Minor bears a Greek-language inscription stating that a Gallos named Soterides dedicated it in the year 46 BCE and bears a relief carving that depicts Soterides dressed in women’s clothing while performing rites in honor of Kybele. The relief is now held in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

ABOVE: Photograph from Lynn E. Roller’s paper “The Ideology of the Eunuch Priest,” published in Gender & History 9, no. 3 (1997), pages 542–559, showing a votive relief from the site of Kyzikos in Asia Minor dating to the year 46 BCE, depicting a Gallos worshipping Kybele while wearing women’s clothing

In addition to the Galloi, other religious functionaries in the Greek world were also traditionally required to dress in women’s clothing for certain ceremonial occasions. The ancient Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) records in his essay Greek Questions 58 (Moralia 304c) that, according to legend, at one point, the hero Herakles was beset with many enemies, so he went into hiding in the household of a Thrakian woman on the island of Kos by disguising himself as a woman and, in this way, managed to evade his enemies.

For this reason, Ploutarchos notes that, on the island, even in his own time, the priest of Herakles was required to always dress in women’s clothing anytime he conducted a sacrifice and that grooms were required to dress in women’s clothing at weddings when they received their brides.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Roman mosaic from Llíria in Spain, dating to the first half of the third century CE, now held in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, depicting Herakles dressed in female clothing (left) in service to Queen Omphale, who is dressed in Herakles’s lionskin and holding his club (right)

The Oschophoria

Minors in ancient Greece wouldn’t have merely seen men in drag in dramatic performances, at religious festivals, and on other occasions; for at least one prominent religious festival, minors were actually religiously mandated to dress in drag themselves.

Ploutarchos in his Life of Theseus 23.2–3 summarizes an account (FGRHist 327 F6) by the earlier Greek historian and Atthidographer Demon (fl. c. fourth century BCE) about the Oschophoria, a festival of Dionysos that was celebrated in Athens during the month of Pyanepsion in autumn.

Ploutarchos reports that, during this festival, the Athenians had an ancient and revered custom supposedly instituted by the great legendary hero Theseus for two adolescent boys dressed to look exactly like girls to lead the procession in honor of Dionysos and Ariadne. He writes, as translated by Bernadotte Perrin, with some minor edits of my own to make the passage more closely match the Greek:

“It was Theseus who instituted also the Athenian festival of the Oschophoria. For it is said that he did not take away with him all the maidens on whom the lot fell at that time, but picked out two youths of his acquaintance who were girlish and youthful to see, but eager and manly spirits, and changed their outward appearance almost entirely by giving them warm baths and keeping them out of the sun, by arranging their hair, and by smoothing their skin and beautifying their complexions with unguents; he also taught them to imitate maidens as closely as possible in their speech, their dress, and their gait, and to leave no difference that could be observed, and then enrolled them among the maidens who were going to Krete, and was undiscovered by any.”

“And when he was come back, he himself and these two youths headed a procession, arrayed as those are now arrayed who carry the vine-branches. They carry these in honour of Dionysos and Ariadne, and because of their part in the story; or rather, because they came back home at the time of the vintage. And the women called Deipnophoroi, or supper-carriers, take part in the procession and share in the sacrifice, in imitation of the mothers of the youths and maidens on whom the lot fell, for these kept coming with bread and meat for their children.”

“And tales are told at this festival, because these mothers, for the sake of comforting and encouraging their children, spun out tales for them. At any rate, these details are to be found in the history of Demon. Furthermore, a sacred precinct was also set apart for Theseus, and he ordered the members of the families which had furnished the tribute to the Minotaur to make contributions towards a sacrifice to himself. This sacrifice was superintended by the Phytalidai, and Theseus thus repaid them for their hospitality.”

The Greek word that Ploutarchos uses to describe the boys who dress as girls for the Oschophoria is νεανίσκοι (neanískoi). Perrin translates this word as “young men,” but I have more accurately translated it here as “youths.”

The “youths” Ploutarchos describes are most likely adolescent boys, who could realistically be anywhere between the ages of roughly twelve and eighteen, since he describes them as “θηλυφανεῖς μὲν ὀφθῆναι καὶ νεαρούς” (“girlish and youthful to see”), which, in an ancient Greek context, probably means that they are old enough to be considered adolescents, but still young enough that they have not fully developed facial hair.

Multiple other ancient sources confirm that the Athenians of the Classical Period really practiced this tradition of having two adolescent boys dressed in drag lead the procession at the Oschophoria, including Philochoros of Athens (who was a contemporary of Demon, Ploutarchos’s source for the description quoted above) in his Fragment 44.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust from Delphoi that has been questionably identified as possibly a representation of the biographer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia

Conclusion

Regardless of how you interpret the evidence I have presented here, no ancient Greek person ever seems to have thought there was any problem with minors viewing or participating in drag. On the contrary, for them, drag was a traditional and normal aspect of certain festivals and occasions.

Similar evidence can be presented for basically any and every society up until the present day, from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the modern era. In nearly every society, drag has been acceptable at least on certain occasions and the notion that it is inherently inappropriate for children has basically never arisen until very recently. I have merely chosen to focus on ancient Greece because it is my area of specialty.

The only reason why the notion that drag is inherently inappropriate for children has arisen recently is because, in the specific historical and cultural context of the twenty-first-century United States, drag has become associated with queer people and queer culture and, meanwhile, right-wingers have spent decades believing and propagating the canard that queer people are dangerous pedophiles and a menace to children. In this context, right-wingers have come to view the existence of queer people as inherently inappropriate for children and, because they associate drag with queer people, have come to view it as inherently inappropriate for children also.

When right-wingers engage in this whole anti-drag crusade, they are actually inventing a totally imaginary tradition of viewing drag as inherently inappropriate for children to suit their present-day agenda of demonizing queer people.