The war on drag queens continues apace. Last Saturday, members of the all-male neo-fascist gang Proud Boys tried to shut down a drag event at a DC area venue, physically attacking counterprotesters and leaving at least one bloodied, according to reports. Last year, there were 120 such protests of drag events in the US. The Proud Boys have been known to show up armed with handguns and assault rifles.
Meanwhile, state legislatures in red states around the country are taking up bills to criminalize drag performances anywhere children might see them, often redefining even family-friendly drag acts as “sexually explicit.” and, in some cases forbidding shows by people “reading to kids in flamboyant makeup.”
In Tennesee, the state senate just passed a bill forbidding shows open to children featuring “male or female impersonators.” The bill defines drag shows as “adult cabaret performances” equivalent to strip shows. Now that it’s passed the senate, the bill will be taken up by the state house tomorrow, and if passed, will likely be signed into law by anti-trans governor Bill Lee. Dozens of bills targeting drag shows have been introduced in at least 15 states so far, including Arizona, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Texas. Florida governor and anti- “woke” crusader Ron DeSantis wants parents who take their kids to drag shows investigated for child abuse.
This war on drag has taken over political culture on the right. Reactionary media personalities like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson regularly rail against the supposed evil of drag, with Carlson accusing Drag Queen Story Hours of “indoctrinat[ing] and sexualiz[ing] children.”
The attacks on drag queens are, of course, part of a larger anti-trans crusade. Though drag queens aren’t trans women, but rather men who perform in women’s clothing, the two groups have been conflated in right-wing propaganda, with both groups being targeted for supposedly “grooming” children. Dozens of bills restricting everything from trans girls and women from participating in women’s sports to receiving gender-affirming care have been introduced across the country.
“This is them trying to silence trans people,” a drag queen known as Tara Lipsyncki recently told LGBTQ Nation,
taking away children and teenagers’ rights to their own body autonomy, banning books in libraries and everything else — they’re trying to literally kill the next generation. They are trying to eradicate trans and queer youth so we don’t have anything behind us.
This isn’t just about drag shows. They want trans people eliminated from public life.
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@NotEdward There’s been a few goes at bringing it here but it’s still really rare.
Thanks for everyone letting me know on the pantomime thing: it would if course now be illegal under this new law.
Panto has been a thing of discussion here in the past. It is a thing in Canada (mostly thanks to Ross Petty and friends who have been running big televised shows for years, which inspired a bunch of other smaller local troupes to pick it up as well), but it doesn’t seem to have ever been brought into the U.S. by anyone with the same sort of clout as Petty did in Canada.
(Ross Petty is not only an actor and theatre producer himself, he’s also the husband of Karen Kain, who was a ballerina and later artistic director for the National Ballet of Canada. So there are a lot of connections and potential clout involved. And stunt casting, such as when Bruno Gerussi from the TV show The Beachcombers was cast as the evil stepmother in a Cinderella pantomime show.)
No panto in the US, but there is a tradition in the Nutcracker ballet (as performed by Ballet Austin, at least) to have Mother Ginger cast with a local celebrity since all they have to do is stand there in the costume and wave at the children in the audience. The casting has always been gender-blind – one year it was Lance Armstrong, often it’s a local newscaster, whoever’s up for it.
I guess this is related. Just having a bit of a twitter debate with a vicar about whether Rye is really boring. His best, and so far only, rebuttal is that they have drag bingo.
Which I must confess I didn’t know was a thing; but now I quite fancy it.
@Victorious Parasol
Yeah, I hate to do that thing where I point out how something may directly affect some people if they stand by and do nothing (because trans rights are human rights periodt!) but I feel like it needs to be said that that kind of sht affects cisgender women too. Especially those of us who are simply gender-nonconforming like me. I don’t own dresses, skirts, heels or even makeup. Im not butch, but I don’t dress fem either.
We are in one of those full-on moral panics that happens right before every major election in the US (remember the Migrant Caravans). It will ramp up to the highest point of hysteria, and then after the election, it will be forgotten as if everyone had suffered a night of drunkenness, while the Right moves on to some new panic, which is pretty much what the past ten years have entirely consisted of thanks to social media and 24 hour news. Just one reactionary moral panic leading to the next one.
Im just…Arent these people exhausted from all the manipulated reactionary outrage yet?
Speaking of vicars and gender (which now seems to be what we are talking about, having exhausted everything there is to say about Rye)
@Lakitha K Tolbert
We just had a major election, and the next is not until almost 2 years from now. Either we are just in a state of perpetual campaigning, where the right needs to whip up their voters 365 days of the year, every year, or these politicians actually want to codify their ridiculous prejudices into law without regard for winning elections. Either way, the panic isn’t going away this time.
I think we should just start putting on productions of Twelfth Night and force Red States to try to cancel them.
@Dave
Unfortunately, both of these are most likely true!
Both the endless moral panics and right wing scheming are equally terrifying and exhausting!
@ Lakitha K Tolbert and Dave
That continuous campaigning is a purposeful attempt to control the truth, typical of the abuser whether on a domestic or national or anything in between scale. A concise, if depressing, summary: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/25/feminism-men-putin-trump-abusive-men-dictators
This article is incredibly informative when it comes to issues of authoritarian violence and terror. Due to the prevailing right wing idea of the replacement theory, these last few years have been a punitive attempt to burn it all to the ground upon realization that things are never going back to the way they used to be. PoC/and all other marginalized groups relationships to white supremacy has always been described as an abusive one, where white supremacy attempts to keep the marginalized cowed and in their place, with us constantly resisting our oppression.
In other words, the right knows they’re going to lose, that the past will not return, and their behavior in the past few years has been not just a reaction to the progress of the last twenty years, but a punishment for us daring to resist them, just like in any abusive relationship.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/25/feminism-men-putin-trump-abusive-men-dictators
He makes a good point about Hooters restaurant. I then typed “children at hooters” “hooters grooming kids” and “are parents who take their kids to hooters groomers?” and variations of similar in youtube search bar and… oh boy.
Funny that Trump’s favorite author Nick Adams (Alpha Male) says on Twitter that parents aren’t real parents unless they take their kids to Hooters, and Gender Studies in the “good ‘ol days” was a Playboy magazine (posted meme of a small child with Playboy in hand) and that America can be made great once again and solve a lot of it’s problems with these two simple methods. Yet you won’t hear a rant from Daily Wire about any of that.
Absolutely. I made the Hooters point before myself. They are absolutely fine with showing boys female sexuality, and to sexualize five year old girls. Just as long as it is all heterosexual. Only homosexual expression is grooming.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Hm. The rest of the headline doesn’t appear to be in Polari, so I’m guessing “Christina” is a typo and not a reference to worshippingJessica Christ?
@ moon custafer
How bona to varda your dolly old eek. You might find this fantabulosa video bona dolly.
https://www.middletemple.org.uk/members/inn-initiatives-and-events/lectures-seminars-panel-discussions/fabulosa-story-polari
It’s Jennifer Christ, you blaspheming heathen, and we won’t put up with any more talk of this scripturally-unsupported and thoroughly unChristinian “Jessica” heterodoxy!
In the spirit of optimism: https://www.outsports.com/2023/2/23/23612187/johnny-haught-mma-drag-brunch-west-virginia?fbclid=IwAR3cM61NRShU9rxOwC1AipxdSKwsMpmyiC6kzH0FOZOQ5455pbhz3a2AIP8
This is where the “Disney is sexualizing kids” thing came from. When you ask people what they mean by “sexualizing” they are at a loss to explain. If they say having a gay character in a Disney film is sexualizing, then logically that would mean having any hetero characters would be sexualizing as well.
A part of tge problem is that some oeople are so sexually repressed that it’s extremely easy for something to seem sexual thereto.
I don’t see how drag shows teach kids to keep silent, to be compliant when an adult or another adolescent violates their boundaries I don’t see how they teach kids that their bodies are so shameful they invite abuse and are not even worth defending. I don’t see how they break down a child’s sense of autonomy and normalize sexual acts between adults and minors.
So what exactly do they think drag shows are “grooming” kids for?
As someone who has been through a sh*t-ton of psychotherapy to undo a sh*t-ton of childhood grooming, it absolutely infuriates me to see the label slapped on to anything the Christian ethnonationalist right doesn’t like.
True grooming devastates a human being, and some of the ways in which it shapes our development can’t be undone.
I see FAR more practices and doctrines which fit the true definition of “grooming” in the way children are brought up in many Christian sects/denominations/congregations, though, so I can understand why they are devoting so many resources to popularizing an incorrect definition.