Joyless Republicans are such a drag

Drag queens have got their feather boas and sequined fishtail gowns caught in the revolving door of America’s culture wars.

To be clear: They’re not the ones at fault. Sudden demonizing and vilifying of drag performers by a potent, reactionary Republican political force is to blame. They hardly know who or what to target next, the hard edge of the GOP. So they’ve landed on Drag Showtime reading sessions for kids at local libraries and drag entertainment venues for adults.

At least 26 bills have been introduced in 14 U.S. states, and upwards of a hundred proposed, which seek to classify all drag performances as adult entertainment and regulate them accordingly. The backlash against queens — not all of whom are queer — has been extraordinary, wrapped up in moralizing dictates, justified as protection against the “grooming” and sexualizing of children, and a thinly disguised broadside against trans folk.

A solution in search of a non-existent problem and legislated hate.

Last week Tennessee lawmakers approved a controversial bill aimed at regulating “adult-oriented performances that are harmful to minors,” as defined by the state’s obscenity law, on public property or within sight of someone who is younger than 18, which would likely impact Pride parades. It identified “male and female impersonators” as adult cabaret performers, including drag entertainers. Obscene is defined as any work that “appeals to the prurient interest,” a sweeping catch-all. To that point, no drag performer had been charged under the existing law.

Also last week, Tennessee Gov. William Lee signed another bill criminalizing transgender treatment for minors — a total ban on all gender-affirming health care for kids, including puberty blockers and hormone treatments. The argument is that minors lack the maturity to make “life-altering” medical decisions such as taking gender-altering drugs and some of these treatments — certainly anatomical surgery — are irreversible.

Similar draft laws are being debated across American state legislatures covering everything from which pronouns can be used in classrooms to whether trans girls can play on sports teams that align with their gender. But the mishmash conflates everything so that distinct issues — I’d proffer trans athletes as an area of reasonable contention, as well as incarcerating trans females who have male genitals and have committed sexual assaults against women in prisons and halfway houses for women — are kneaded into a broadly intolerant rising dough.

In Kentucky, Bill 115 now leaves drag artists open to criminal charges for performing “sexually explicit” shows in publicly owned places or anywhere a child might be. Under the proposal, strip clubs and sex toy stores would not be allowed within 1,000 feet of a variety of locations, including schools, parks and anyone’s residence. Drag shows get lumped in.

Mississippi last month became the eighth state to officially ban sex change surgeries and puberty blockers for children under 18 who’ve been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. By stopping the body’s production of sex hormones, gendered characteristics such as a deeper voice and development of breasts can be halted. (To be perfectly honest, the long-term effect of blockers is not yet known so I do understand the caution. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the drugs to stop precocious puberty — where a child goes through the process earlier than when healthy — but they’re now routinely used “off-label” for trans care.)

Utah’s governor recently signed a ban on gender-affirming care into law, Arkansas has reinstated a ban on gender-affirming care for minors by making it easier to sue medical providers, Oklahoma passed a bill a few weeks ago banning use of public money for gender-affirm care for transgender people — on top of a separate bill prohibiting “lewd acts” in public, aimed at drag shows, Boise has a bill headed for the House floor that would restrict “sexual exhibitions including drag shows. Mississippi’s ban will allow doctors’ licenses to be taken away if they prescribe puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery for under-18s.

Good old Texas has a bill pending that would restrict drag shows as well — a humorous wrinkle to that undertaking the surfacing a week ago on social media of a video showing the proposed legislation’s author, State Rep. Nate Schatzline, cavorting in drag. Schatzline, a former pastor, tweeted that it was a joke from a theatre project way back in high school, move along, nothing to see here.

So he gets the funny in drag, when it suits his historical purpose — and comedy is central to drag culture, like Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in dresses in “Some Like It Hot,” but not for performers who make a living at it.

And then there’s Florida, which got this gender obsession wrecking ball swinging and has just recently proposed a half-dozen new laws that would, among its multiple directives, require teachers to use pronouns matching children’s sex as assigned at birth and eliminate college majors in gender studies.

I’ve drifted far away from my central topic of the legislatively besieged drag community but that’s because queens, queers and trans folk have been yoked together in overlapping encirclement by the legions of righteous indignation. While I recognize that there’s a growing weariness with trans activism — such a militant advocacy entrenching mutually intolerant dogma on all sides, all over a demographic of about 0.09 per cent of the population that identifies as trans — that’s still no justification for trampling on their rights. (Or the right to safe places for females, which are being erased, but that’s a column for another day.) A report by the University of California, Los Angeles found the number of Americans who identified as trans has nearly doubled — 300,000 — from 2017 o 2020, and around 1.5 per cent of American teens identify as trans, the highest of any age group.

While for most of us drag shows are simply lip-synching entertainment, accompanied by drinking and merrymaking in venues where minors aren’t permitted, bringing drag performers into the community, library reading sessions (which have been embraced in Toronto for several years) and popular “drag brunches” in restaurants, are beneficial avenues for embracing gender and sexual orientation querying among youths. Kids trending gay usually know it from a young age and I imagine the same is true for trans youngsters, though it may take years for them to accept and declare what they are.

Upwards of 120 drag events were targeted in the U.S. last year, according to GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group; at its very worst the mass shooting at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs on Nov. 20 that left five people dead. But it’s not happening only south of the border — there have been protests targeting “storytime“ events for children from Erie to Sarnia to Hamilton.

Flamboyantly dressed — but not sexually provocative — drag entertainers provide a comfort zone for young people trying to understand themselves, and their families. The very young kidlets are simply amused and absorbed by the dazzle. There’s no grooming afoot and the queens aren’t pedophiles or perverts. The majority of pedophiles and child sex offenders are heterosexual.

Apart from that, drag — whether highbrow performers or the more burlesque sort — have a long entertainment history, stretching back centuries. Recall, as well, that in Shakespeare’s day, all the actor roles were filled by males, as they were in ancient Greece and Rome. Also, drag is a classic comedy trope.

These stroppy Republicans have forgotten how to laugh, at themselves or anybody else. They see villainy everywhere. They’re whipping that anti-woke pony for all it’s worth and are hell-bent to tie blinders on children.

Saddle up for the drag-baiting derby. No winners.

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