People are afraid of clowns. Where are the people afraid of drag queens?
An exploration of cultural differences, not only between how Japan and the US see clowns, but in how different sexual minorities see ourselves.
1/6: Introduction
I was listening to my music library on shuffle and came across Checklist by Max featuring Chromeo, whose music video features a drag performer. And as I saw the video thumbnail on my phone screen, the thought came to me: Why am I way more uncomfortable with drag queens than with clowns? And why aren’t others the same way?
はるる (Haruru) / Haley
@2gd4.meon Bluesky:
A fundamental mystery I’ve never understood is why so many people seem to be afraid of clowns, but virtually nobody seems to be afraid of drag queens except me, despite their similarly (and I’d argue more) exaggerated uncanny make-up and behavior.
For one, I’m Japanese, born to two Japanese parents, and raised in Japan. (My writing style suggests I’m an anthropology major / linguistics minor from California, but I’m not one, and that’s beside the point anyway.) I’ll be rehashing some cultural arguments I’ve heard to describe how clowns turned evil in US pop culture in a way they didn’t in Japan.
But also, I’m a stealth trans woman (at least I want to be stealth) and my first exposure to drag was through English-speaking LGBT communities, in high school before I knew I was trans, if I recall. The more I mulled over this question, the more I realized that my relationship with gender and encounters with LGBT communities contributes to my discomfort with drag.
I’ve talked this out with several chatbots and friends (Thanks to Rei and Mason!) and here are some personal reflections on the two halves of my question: “Why do clowns creep Americans out?” and “Why do drag queens creep me out?”.
2/6: The United States made clowns scary
I’m just gonna start by setting off drag to the side for now, and by asking “Why are Americans (generally) so scared of clowns?”.
Even in the US, when you dial back the clock far enough (to like the mid ’70s), clowns are jolly ol’ performers who just want to make people smile. As actual cultural anthropologists (not just someone who sounds like one) have researched and pointed out, the concept of a clown hasn’t undergone the same transformation in Japan—at least not fully—in social expectations that it has in the US.
When a Japanese person thinks of clowns, they’re more likely to think of Ronald McDonald than of Pennywise, and “scary clowns” and “insane clowns” are an ironic combination. But to an American, clowns being scary is normal and expected, and there’s even enough Insane Clowns for them to form a Posse and beef with Eminem.
(On that side-note, I’d say Joaquin Phoenix’s rendition shows just what it takes to make an American clown ironic these days. I think, back when The Joker first became a thing, a clown being scary/insane was still per se an ironic concept. After scary/insane clowns became expected, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker subverted expectations by making him not want to be insane or strike fear into Gotham’s people. And that second layer of irony only happened because of the cultural shift I’m about to briefly chronicle now.)
The chatbots I’ve talked to suggested three main reasons why clowns are scary by default in American culture:
John Wayne Gacy
I didn’t know much at all about John Wayne Gacy before writing this blog post—and that’s kind of the point—but going off of his Wikipedia page, it seems that he’s a 33-count serial killer (starting 1972, arrested 1978) with a long history of grooming teenage boys, as well as with volunteer experience as a party clown (since 1975). This is completely beside the point, but that Wikipedia article has an actual photo of Gacy performing as “Pogo the Clown”, but I bet if you showed it to a Japanese person with zero context, they wouldn’t be scared of it.
I’ll spare you the details in case you don’t know them yet, but folk historians ascribe John Wayne Gacy (or rather, the news coverage about him) as the first step in solidifying nationwide fear of clowns. He got the country thinking “What are they hiding behind that colorful face paint, unwavering smile, and gigantic shoes?”
Pennywise
The second reason is Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the main antagonist/horror from Stephen King’s hit horror novel It (1986), its TV adaptation (1990, played by Tim Curry) and its movie adaptation (2017, played by Bill Skarsgård). Actually, let me clarify: Pennywise is just one of the many forms that the shapeshifting horror takes, but it’s by far the most iconic one.
If Wikipedia’s timeline is to be trusted, Stephen King wrote It between 1980 (2 years after John Wayne Gacy’s arrest) and 1985. He designed the character of Pennywise the Clown as a form that would A) be not off-putting enough to children to lure them down into the sewers, and B) be scary enough to children (and TV/movie watchers) to scare them. I suspect that it was soon enough after Gacy’s arrest that the American public wasn’t agreed yet that clowns are scary; when comparing Tim Curry’s 1990 portrayal to Bill Skarsgård’s 2017 portrayal, you’ll note that Curry looked and acted mostly like a conventional clown with a big forehead and exaggerated facial expressions, only getting uncanny when he attacks the Loser’s Club kids, as opposed to Skarsgård’s portrayal, after clowns became scary by default, which was nightmare fuel starting from the movie poster.
Regardless, the success of the 1986 book and the 1990 TV series further cemented the idea of clowns as scary into the collective subconscious of the US. John Wayne Gacy set the stage in recent events, so that Pennywise could own that fresh new stage. In other words (with maybe a bit too much AAVE levity than is warranted) “John Wayne Gacy walked so that Pennywise could run”.
The Clown Scare of 2016 (and other clown scares)
But the final piece of the puzzle that cemented that public fear was the invention of the clown sighting: pranksters (or in some cases, criminals) leveraging this fear of clowns to scare or terrorize people. The “scary clown” breached the containment of fiction and spilled over into everyday life.
The Clown Scare of 2016 was a boom in “clown sightings” in English-speaking countries across the world. A lot of them were hoaxes or harmless pranks, but in the Misinformation Age, the existing collective fear of clowns ended up spreading these sightings all around social media and striking fear into everyone (or at least, weirding them out enough to keep them talking).
By this point, clowns were scary per se, divorced from John Wayne Gacy and Pennywise. These clown sightings were probably the tipping point from “some clowns are scary” to “clowns are scary”; scary clowns had upstaged jolly clowns in the public consciousness.
It kicked off in August 2016, and ended up causing the head of the World Clown Association (Yes, that exists) to condemn these creepy clowns as not real clowns, and McDonald’s to send Ronald McDonald to a McDonaldLand upstate.
A bit of nuance
That being said, clowns and related character archetypes (like jesters and harlequins) being troubled or evil behind the disguise isn’t anything new.
Probably the most high-brow example is the 1892 opera Pagliacci (Clowns) by Ruggero Leoncavallo, in which the main character Canio murders his wife Nedda and her lover Silvio on stage during a performance. It’s probably the most well known for the tenor solo Vesti la giubba (Wear the Costume), sung by Canio while heartbroken finding out about his wife’s infidelity, but needing to “wear the costume” and put on a smile because he has to play the part of Pagliaccio soon after. People unfamiliar with Italian opera may still know this character referenced in the joke that goes “But doctor, I’m Pagliacci!”.
There’s also a 1975 hit song by Alla Pugachyova (Алла Пугачёва, also transcribed “Alla Pugacheva”) titled Arlecchino (Арлекино, also transcribed “Arlekino” or translated as “Harlequin”). The lyrics, from the perspective of an anonymous, unsung circus clown in despair . . .
Ah, Harlequin, Harlequin
He must be funny for everybody!
Ah, Harlequin, Harlequin
There is only one recompense: laughter!
. . . are interspersed with what I can only describe as “laughter solos”.
Counterexamples from Japan
There are also, indeed, villainous clowns in Japanese media. The Big Bad in the anime Smile Precure! (2012) is an evil clown named Pierrot, and one of his minibosses is an evil jester named Joker.
And going for somewhat of a deep cut here, the final villain of the video game Puyo Puyo~n (1999) doesn’t reveal herself to the main character Arle as her Doppelgänger (calling herself “the true Arle”) until close to the end; for most of the story, she’s disguised as an innocent clown named Pierrot.
And as you may have guessed, the French name “Pierrot” (nickname for “Pierre”) got loaned into Japanese and Korean as the common word for “clown” (piero). “A clown named Clown? That’s uncreative.” Yeah, but then again, Pagliaccio from Pagliacci is also a clown named Clown, and to begin with, “Pierrot” became the word for “clown” because the stock character of “Pierrot the buffoon in white” was used so often in French pantomime (similar for Italian pagliaccio for that matter), so they’re continuing a tradition with a modern spin.
But for one reason or another, clowns are not evil by default here. There are no clown sightings in Japan (that I know of), possibly because we haven’t been primed by pop culture to fear clowns in the same way.
(There’s even a local hamburger chain called Lucky Pierrot close to where my mom grew up, and their hamburger-shop clown is still front-and-center in signs and promotional material. If you, by any chance, ever come up north to Hakodate, Hokkaido, try their Chinese Chicken Burger and their bolognaise-sauce-and-gravy poutine.)
The point is, clowns are evil in American culture in a way that they simply aren’t in Japanese culture, which hopefully answers the first part of the question, which was “Why are they scared of clowns?”.
3/6: I’m less used to drag
And with that, we’re done with clowns, like McDonalds in 2016. Now we move onto the second part of the question, which is “Why do drag queens make me, specifically uncomfortable?”. Fully divorced from cultural context, looking purely visually, clowns and drag performers have a lot in common. They both cake their face with hyper-stylized makeup, wear outfits that normal people don’t wear, and speak and gesticulate in exaggerated ways. If I were a purely reasonable being—well, first of all, I wouldn’t feel fear, of course, but if I did feel fear—I would feel about an equal amount of it towards both.
My introspection led me to this conclusion: Just as American culural events shaped the perception of clowns as frightening, my personal identity and experiences shaped my perception of drag queens as discomforting.
Exposure: fear of the unknown
Why do I have a stronger abreaction towards drag queens than towards clowns? Maybe I’m just more used to seeing clowns. Clowns were a thing since I was a kid, but I only became vaguely aware of drag performance when I was in (an English-speaking) high school, if I recall correctly. As such, I feel a familiarity towards clowns that I simply do not with drag performers, which feeds into a fear of the unknown.
But now, it’s probably more than just a fear of the unknown, since I’ve been aware of drag for about a decade now that I’m 26. There has to be some other kind of discomfort that has kept that rejection alive and strong.
Visual: uncanny makeup
When I ask myself what puts me off drag so much, the first thought that comes to mind is the makeup. Drag makeup involves vivid colors and exaggerated proportions; that much is common with clowns. But drag makeup uses techniques like exaggerated contouring, unrealisticly long eyelashes, and those black and white areas around their eyes to make it ambiguous where and how big their eyes are. That’s totally different from clown makeup, which more often involves flatter coloration and playful shapes, which leave the underlying facial structure largely unchanged.
While film critics (on the subject of It) say that clown makeup invokes the uncanny valley effect due to frozen and exaggerated facial expressions, I would argue that drag makeup, by invoking the illusion of exaggerated depth and facial features reminiscent of political cartoons, elicits a more visceral uncanny-valley abreaction from me. It looks like a human face but it’s been distorted and exaggerated just beyond normalcy.
Or maybe it’s not that deep and it’s just that drag makeup is outside my beauty standards.
Behavior: performing femininity
And then there’s the aspect of why they perform to begin with. Of course they’re both entertainers, but drag is way more specific than clowning. If my sources are to be trusted, drag is an act of exaggerated femininity by a masculine person. One of my American friends has also told me that drag is sometimes criticized as blackface against women: imitating and playing up the traits of a marginalized minority for entertainment. Whether or not that’s true—and as an Asian who sounds white, I will not get into that rabbit hole, or take a stance on it—drag has been a celebrated part of LGBT communities in the English-speaking world (to my discomfort).
Identity: gender anxiety and prevalence in LGBT spaces
And here’s where my transness comes in. I’m a stealth transsexual woman (or at least I want to be stealth), and I’ve come to a compelling hypothesis: my discomfort is because drag is the antithesis of how I want my gender to look and feel like.
On one hand, drag queens’ femininity is an artifice. It’s hyperbolic and theatrical, and the more so, the better. Transgressing gender norms is a virtue, not a vice. The ridiculous send-up is the point, and every queen and viewer is in on the joke. In drag, visibility is success.
On the other hand, stealth trans people like me want to make as little of a fuss about our gender as possible, passing matter-of-factly as our gender and living peacefully. The idea that our true gender is an artifice is a tacit and invalidating accusation that popular media has continued to throw. (That accusation, in Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, is termed “effemimania”.) To stealth trans people, visibility is failure.
The irony of touting drag as a treasured art form, in a community that prides itself on inclusion of sexual minorities, is that drag amplifies and validates the worst insecurities that stealth trans people have. The pressure to be “out, proud, and transgressive” permeates them as the correct way to be LGBT, especially trans; being stealth is often criticized as being “complicit to oppressive social structures” and “not being Proud enough”. But we’re just being ourselves—something they would’ve celebrated if “ourselves” were different.
Why not just fight back? The problem is that it’s very hard to argue for being understated and stealth while embodying it. By stating that you’re trans, you’re undermining your point that you want to not be perceived as trans. But without stating that you’re trans, you aren’t recognized as someone with a horse in the race. As a result, outness and proudness wins out, forming the “we’re here, we’re q***r” monopoly we see today.
(Also, I personally dislike RuPaul because of his history with transphobia, but that’s beside the point, and that’s a topic for someone who’s actually invested in drag culture.)
4/6: Lack of context: I see drag queens when I don’t expect them
Speaking of LGBT spaces, I’ve never really seen drag performers anywhere in real life to be honest, except in Pride Parades. But by far, if you were to ask me if I associate clowns or drag queens with unpredictable, boundary-pushing behavior, I’d say drag queens.
When I see clowns, they’re usually in theme parks, festivals, and street performances, all environments where you would go “Yeah, okay, sure, a clown.”. They’re controlled, child-friendly environments where you can count on your expectations being accurate: maybe some juggling, maybe some balloon animals, that sort of stuff.
But in my experience, when I see drag, it’s not because I sought out a drag show, because I don’t watch them. Most of the time I’ve seen drag, it has been by surprise. For example, while watching videos, especially late-night news-humor talk shows like Last Week Tonight, I’ve been greeted with a surprise segment featuring drag performers. And sometimes, those segments feature kids, who are too young to see an actual drag show! The last time I saw a drag queen (that wasn’t a re-watch) was in Jimmy Kimmel Live!, out of the blue as a comedic segment to read Eric Trump’s book Under Siege to kids.
Trixie Mattel: I’m Trixie Mattel. Do I scare any of you?
several kids: No.
Trixie Mattel: Really?
girl: You just look amazing. Why would that be scary?
Trixie Mattel: That is so affirming. Thank you so much.
Come to think of it, their total lack of fear is the actual reason why I started this essay. Seeing that my abreaction to drag queens is not remotely universal motivated me to compare my personal discomfort to the one that Americans generally do have to clowns.
Drag in public?
But now that I’ve mentioned “Drag Queen Story Time”, I can’t help but veer headlong into this topic, much like a suburban soccer mom losing control of her SUV on a stroad: What’s the deal with drag queens and children?
It seems to me that I only see drag in 3 contexts ever: 1) in drag shows (i.e. in private), 2) in LGBT-related events (i.e. in public, but not necessarily for children), and 3) in events specifically targeting kids as the demographic, like Drag Queen Story Time.
If I understand it correctly, drag performance is supposed to be raunchy, sexualized, and boundary-pushing. And that raunchiness is only accepted because of the opt-in, closed nature of drag shows, isn’t it? If you see a drag show, it’s because you showed up to see a drag show, or decided to stream one at home. So why is drag so normalized in public spaces, whether or not with children?
I know sexualization at Pride is a contentious topic, and one that is subjected to lots of fearmongering and fake news from the cishet establishment, but I have seen videos of people showing up to a Pride Parade in BDSM gear like leather harnesses, collars on leashes, and pup masks (If you don’t know what that is, good. Stay not knowing.), and that makes me extremely uncomfortable and makes me feel unsafe going to future Pride Parades.
And I know that some people are super sex-positive and kink-positive that they genuinely see it as a good thing that these fetishists are showing up in BDSM gear. And that’s okay, it’s okay to have a wrong different opinion. But in my perspective, kink does not belong at Pride, because Pride is still a public event where the general public will show up without knowing it. (And yes, people are genuinely unaware of Pride Parades. I’m trans, and I’ve shown up to a Pride Parade not knowing about it. In a full black goth get-up. I’d have worn something more colorful if I had known.)
How is drag different? It’s a sexually-charged form of expression that prides itself on making people uncomfortable by exaggerating and/or flouting gender norms. Whether the onlookers are adults or minors, I would have expected a similar pushback against drag in public, including drag at Pride and Drag Queen Story Time at schools and libraries. And not just from the type of Republican who advocates for LGBT book bans at school libraries and gets blindsided by having the Bible banned for sexual and violent content, but from anyone to the Left of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
5/6: Maybe there’s social stigma against badmouthing drag
I’m gonna adopt a different framing for a moment: “Why do more people talk about being scared of clowns than about being scared of drag queens?”. Maybe I’m not alone in being scared of drag queens, but people just don’t say that they are, because of the consequences of voicing it out loud.
As I said before, drag is heavily treasured in English-speaking LGBT communities for Stonewall reasons I don’t feel like getting into now, and drag performers are often the eye-candy for LGBT-related event posters regardless of actual content, even here in Japan. And I don’t blame them for that inclination; look how eye-catching they are!
When these communities are so invested in drag as the visual language of their PR, any perceived slight on drag gets exaggerated as homophobia and/or transphobia . . . despite the fact that many drag performers are cishets. (Of course, disproportionately more of them are gay and/or trans, but I’m saying that not all of them are.)
Clowns don’t have the same degree of backing from minority activist groups. The closest thing they have is from The World Clown Association, which I didn’t know existed until I started researching the 2016 Clown Scare.
You can “just not like” clowns without political implications. People can freely say that they feel uncomfortable with clowns, without being accused of hating children or parties. But you can’t “just not like” drag, without someone reading uncharitably into its association with minority activism, and concluding that you don’t like gay and/or trans people.
6/6: Conclusion
Turns out my discomfort with drag wasn’t just superficial, and a symptom of a broad ideological dissonance between LGBT communities and myself as a stealth trans woman. Why is it that “coulrophobia” gets an academic word, but fear of drag queens gets me ostracized?
Drag is the symbol of the LGBT community because the community values being out, loud, proud, flashy, and transgressive, which are all things my gender is uncomfortable with. For those of us whose gender is neither political performance nor a spectacle, drag is a symbol of the part of the community that invalidates that we were Born This Way and we want to stay unremarkable. Perhaps my discomfort with drag stems from that clash: the ultimatum to celebrate an art form that not only embodies but validates my internal fear that my gender is seen as a farce even by ostensibly trans-positive people, or to get labeled and shunned as a bigot.
It’s tragic how much it took for me to finally feel safe discussing this topic. I have needs as a binary transsexual: to medically transition, to pass, and to be accepted within cis society as just a woman who never chose to be trans, not a “transwoman”, not a third gender, not someone who is glad or proud to be trans. However, expressing those needs among transgender people also got me shamed as a bigot. I felt no validation from validity culture that insisted I’m fine as I am, and that my wanting to pass instead of being genderfucky is “internal transphobia”.
The reason I wrote this essay was because I feel alone in my discomfort with drag. I don’t actually know what my call to action is. Do I want to find others who feel the same? Do I want to feel less uncomfortable with drag? Do I want drag to be less normalized in public? I think any of them would remove suffering from my life.
And to think this all started with a question about clowns—silly entertainers who want to spread smiles with one of the most universal languages: physical comedy. Through the topic of cultural fear, I’ve ended up at the conclusion that my discomfort runs deeper than just the makeup or the outfits, but a different cultural difference, not just Japanese vs. American, but normalization vs. anti-assimilation.
Do drag queens make you scared or uncomfortable too? Please leave a comment so that I can feel less alone.