In the summer of 1995, while some gay men were padding their hips and dressing in glamorous gowns to get ready for a drag queen pageant, one young queer femme was busy getting her mind blown open by drag kings Julie Wheeler and Buster Hymen in the gay Mecca Provincetown, MA.They were so sexy and hot, Mo Fischer recalls. After having her life turned upside down by this encounter, Fischer decided to host her first drag king contest, and her drag king persona, Mo B. Dick was born.Soon after Mo B. Dick the B stands for Bodacious because he doesn't want Herman Melville's lawyers coming after him" was busy styling his signature pompadour, learning how to create a realistic bulge, and hanging out in punk clubs in the East Village with his fellow drag kings.Times may have changed, but the popularity of drag queens has not see the 101 iterations of Drag Race were obsessed with. But their counterpart, drag kings, have yet to reach this level of mainstream popularity which is why Mo is hoping is hoping that Revry's new reality competition show, King of Drag, which he helped to cast, acted as the consulting producer, and appeared as a guest star on episode four, will be a turning point for the drag king community.Not only was Mo instrumental in bringing King of Drag to your television screens, but he also helped found the modern drag king movement. Mo has many claims to fame, but perhaps his most lasting contribution to the world of drag kinging is DragKingHistory.com, a website dedicated to preserving this centuries-old art form.Much like when JoJo Siwa tried to claim she wanted to start a new genre of music that she called gay pop, Mo says he started Drag King History after hearing from young drag kings who thought they were the first to ever do it.The reason why I started Drag King History, the website, was because I kept seeing all these young kids saying, Oh, Im the only drag king here, theres never been any other drag king and Im like, What?! Because we had a thriving scene in the late 80s and 90s," Mo tells PRIDE. "That was largely unknown because we didnt have social media and so were not on YouTube, were not on Facebook, were not on Instagram, so theres not that representation.Not only does Mo have the credentials he created the first weekly drag king party, the first drag king cabaret tour through the U.S. and Canada, was featured in the first book about drag kings The Drag King Book, and appeared in Venus Boyz, the first documentary about drag kings but he has also spent years studying drag king history and giving lectures all over the world in an attempt to pass the history of drag kinging down to younger generations.Drag King History has been so wildly successful that in 2020, Mo was contacted by the Library of Congress asking to archive the entire website to preserve for posterity. But how did drag kings get their start, and how is the movement different from drag queens?Earliest drag kingsIts hard to pinpoint the exact origin of drag kinging, but while Mo says the modern drag king movement started in earnest in the 1980s, there had been male impersonators and women who dressed up like men in the theaters for hundreds of years before then.Male impersonators got their start back in 618 A.D, when women would dress as men to perform in Chinese operas. In the 1660s, women were finally permitted to perform on stage in England and took on so-called breeches roles where they impersonated men. Many books and articles cite Annie Hindle as the first drag king, but in reality, she was the first male impersonator to appear on variety stages in the U.S. In the 1920s and 1930s, there were cabaret clubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Paris, and London where male impersonators performed in tuxedos, but without faux facial hair or elaborate costumes, and would sing and perform alongside drag queens. In the 50s and 60s there were also male impersonators like Storm DeLarveri, who performed at the Jewel Box Revue, which was the precursor to La Cage Aux Folles.Politics and drag kinging go hand in handWhile male impersonators and drag kings share DNA, and male impersonation led to the modern drag king movement, the two are very different. Male impersonators seek to accurately imitate men in settings like the theatre and vaudeville, whereas modern drag kings create campy, exaggerated masculine personas in performances where they challenge gender stereotypes and make political and social commentary. So today, you see drag kings are much more political in their statements, in their performances. Okay, it's not just frivolity, you know what I mean? So you're going to see drag kings who are talking about genocide in Gaza and, you know, free Palestine and f*ck Trump, f*ck ICE. You see that more in the drag king community and drag queens, it's more about the shablams and splits, and everybody freaks out, right?Some drag queens add political commentary into their acts, but Mo says its a baked-in part of drag kinging because it was a way for women to gain some semblance of autonomy and agency from the very beginning. Although gay men doing drag had to contend with codes and laws criminalizing homosexuality, queer women had to deal with the addition of misogyny which kept them from voting and out of the workforce. All of these dynamic women made extraordinary strides in their life by doing this because women didnt have agency over their own lives before, shit, not until like the 70s here in America. And look at the backlash were having now, he explains.Modern drag king movementAccording to Mo, there werent many drag kings performing in the 1970s in large part because of anti-male sentiment within the queer feminist community. In the 70s theres kind of a dearth of drag king representation because that was the time of more anti-male, if you will, in the feminist and queer, lesbian worlds and stuff. It was really reclaiming your womanhood, and I think it was a tough time for butches and people who wanted to perform, Mo says.The term drag king only appeared in print for the first time in 1972, but didnt enter the popular lexicon until the 1980s when drag kings like Johnny Science, Diane Torr, and Shelly Mars started using it.The modern drag king movement, where kings broke off from male impersonators, started in the late 1980s. Many people call Mo the founding father of the modern-day drag king movement, but Mo says hes just one of the founding fathers, while Torr is the founding father, the Godfather, if you will.In fact, Mo considers himself to be one of Torrs acolytes because the person who taught him how to bind his chest, put on facial hair, and how to pack, attended a workshop put on by Torr that taught everything you needed to know to be a drag king. Back in the 80s, Torr would put these workshops on all over the world, and Science, a transsexual make-up artist, would teach women how to do their makeup and facial hair, and Torr would teach the theatricality and how to walk and hold themselves. And then they would go to strip clubs after they did this workshop, and they would walk the streets of New York City or London or Rome or, you know, wherever she did these workshops, you know. So she really took it to the next level in that respect, Mo says.At this time, drag kings and queens frequently performed alongside each other, and drag king contests were popular and are still a huge part of the drag king community to this day. Mo himself hosted Club Casanova, the first weekly drag king party, and only stopped after two years when the then-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani forced its closure. Drag Kings and gender InclusivityThere were clubs and drag venues that werent as welcoming to all kinds of drag kings, but by and large, the drag king community has always been inclusive of nonbinary, transmas, and gender-nonconforming performers and gender fuckery, Mo says.Where the drag king community has always strived for inclusivity, historically, the drag queen community hasnt been very welcoming to different gender expressions until more recently you can see this evolution in the Drag Race franchise, where nonbinary, trans, and even cis women have been welcome in recent years. Mo attributes this contrast between the king and queen communities to the fundamental differences between men and women.Testosterone, either you want to fuck it or kill it, you know what I mean? And women are more community-oriented and more convivial in that respect, he explains. Look at, my God, look at King of Drag. You know that just the show people are the constant remarks that we're seeing on social media are the inclusive, the warmth, the camaraderie, and how easy people are helping each other.Despite kings and queens sharing the stage together in the 80s and 90s, drag queens, by and large, have been unwilling to pull kings up with them as they gain mainstream acceptance and popularity. Its little kids in the sandbox, theyre not sharing their toys, Mo quips.Mo is careful to point out that while the drag queen community as a whole hasnt been willing to uplift drag kings, there are some queens who have excelled in this. He calls Sasha Velour the queen of kings for being inclusive of kings and points out that drag king Tenderoni won Alaska Thunderfucks Drag Queen of the Year Pageant in 2021. But this is the exception, not the rule.When people ask me, How come drag kings arent included? my answer is always PMS. Patriarchy, misogyny, sexism, or what I like to call the Republican agenda, he says.Rise in popularityDrag queens may be in the middle of a renaissance, but drag kings are still having to claw their way to mainstream relevance. Mo may be one of the founding fathers of drag kinging, but he is still relatively unknown, while countless drag queens have captured the popular imagination.Mo says that every few years, drag kings will rise in popularity, only to be forgotten again. For Christ's sake, weve been around for a long time, and every four years its like this big Wow look at this, drag kings are here, and so its funny, he admits. From a media perspective, theres not that consistency, and so then it becomes like oh wow, this fresh new thing and so weve been trudging along and weve had to work hard to be recognized, and visible and represented. Thats been challenging.But King of Drag, and the publicity it has brought to the drag king community, has the opportunity to change all of that. There is this prevalent thought that drag kings arent as interesting, arent as funny, arent as entertaining, and Im mean the great news is, we keep proving them wrong because we keep coming up and bubbling up in media, we keep winning awards, and we keep wining these contests.