This is serious. Upon learing of this movie, Ron DeSantis had to be
cuffed and confined for attempting to steal a bodyguard's handgun in a
sadly unsuccessful attempt to kill himself.

https://paleofuture.com/blog/2023/6/1/that-time-ronald-reagan-starred-in-
a-world-war-ii-movie-featuring-drag-performers

Jun 1
That Time Ronald Reagan Starred in a World War II Movie Featuring Several
Drag Performances
Matt Novak

Ronald Reagan in the 1943 Warner Bros. movie This Is The Army, telling the
drag performers it�s time to go on (left) the drag performers in the film
(right)

The U.S. military will no longer host drag shows at bases around the
world, according to a new report from Associated Press. The news comes
following a pressure campaign by Republicans to abolish anything
associated with LGBT life during Pride Month. But banning drag isn�t just
bigoted. It ignores the long history of drag in the U.S. military that
stretches back over 100 years.

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a man who�s never served in the military,
celebrated the move and even took credit on Twitter for putting pressure
on the Pentagon. But drag has a history in performances both for and by
the U.S. military, and one has to wonder what former Republican president
Ronald Reagan would say about the current controversy around drag. Why
bring up Reagan, the patron saint of all things Republican? The Gipper
starred in a very popular movie during World War II that featured four
drag performances.

This Is the Army started as a stage production in the summer of 1942 and
was such a hit it was developed as a movie and released by Warner Bros. in
1943. The film offered a peek at what soldiers and sailors being were
going through during a very uncertain time in the war. The movie has its
serious moments, but it�s mostly about creating a positive distraction for
a war-weary public.

The book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World
War II by Estelle B. Freedman helps contextualize what the movie and the
inclusion of drag meant to a wartime audience in the 1940s.

�This Is the Army became the prototypical World War II soldier show and
established the three basic wartime styles of GI drag. These were the
comic routines, chorus lines or �pony ballets� of husky men in dresses
playing for laughs; the skilled �female� dancers or singers; and the
illusionists or caricaturists, who did artistic and convincing
impersonations of female stars,� Freedman writes.

But Freedman is quick to note that drag was actually out of style in
mainstream theater by the 1940s because it was associated with the first
two decades of the 20th century�the �golden age of female impersonation�
as the author describes it, and a staple of vaudeville that seemed old
fashioned with the advent of sync-sound movies by the late 1920s and early
1930s. But the military very consciously got around that association by
firmly planting This Is the Army in a tradition that starts with the first
World War.

In fact, the movie starts by being set in New York in 1917 at the start of
America�s inclusion in World War I, when drag shows were commonplace as
entertainment for American soldiers.

The title slate that appeared during the opening of This Is the Army
(1943)

�The most popular soldier show during World War I was Sergeant Irving
Berlin's Yip, Yip, Yaphank presented by 350 men from Camp Upton, Long
Island, who borrowed ideas from vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies to
provide many situations for dressing in women's clothes,� Freedman writes.

In 1918, the New York Times celebrated the Yip Yip Yaphank stage show as a
�rousing hit� and called the casting of its drag performers �nothing less
than inspired.�

When This Is the Army hit theaters, the promotional material from the
military even cited Yip Yip Yaphank as inspiration. �The actors in This Is
the Army are carrying on the tradition of the World-War actors [�] the
same blood flows in their veins,� the promo guide said, according to
Freedman.

And Ronald Reagan, the future president who provides a cohesive narrative
arc to the film, was clearly not bothered by having so much drag in a
show, as you can see from the clip below.

Newspapers of the time praised This Is the Army, with the New York Times
calling it �buoyant, captivating, as American as hot dogs or the Bill of
Rights.� And while Freedman insists this might have been artificial
boosterism in an era when war propaganda was serious business, I have to
disagree. I�ve read plenty of movie reviews from this era and critics
weren�t afraid to pan a movie for anything they didn�t like, even if the
movie featured the stories of fighting men overseas.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt attended a stage performance of This Is
the Army in Washington, praising it as one of the greatest shows he�d ever
seen and expressing approval that it was being made into a movie.
President Reagan even watched the film at Camp David on July 1, 1988,
decades after it hit theaters. Reagan clearly had no issue with the
depiction of drag in the 1980s if he was screening it in the lead up to
Independence Day.

The movie is filled with numerous song and dance numbers, including many
that don�t involve drag, but the film isn�t very well remembered today,
perhaps because it features a very unfortunate blackface sequence. But the
inclusion of not one or two but four drag performances should put this
current ban on drag in the military in perspective. Especially since the
clip below would almost certainly run afoul of laws in Florida and Texas,
despite being something that was widely enjoyed by mainstream America in
the 1940s.

This Is the Army was a huge hit, raking in over $10 million at the box
office on a budget of $1.8 million, without even adjusting for inflation.
That made it the most popular movie produced during all of World War II.

This is the Army is available to watch in its entirety on Tubi, though
it�s a scratched and faded print as best I can tell. And, again, some
aspects haven�t aged well. But there�s simply no denying that drag has a
long history in the U.S. military. And the people fighting against drag in
the year 2023 are just hateful bigots.