Drag performances and drag queens have been criticized recently by Conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ politicians and their supporters for “indoctrinating” children. This summer, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis filed a formal complaint against a local restaurant after the restaurant hosted a drag queen brunch that children attended. This complaint in particular cites a Supreme Court case from 1947 classifying “men impersonating women” as a public nuisance. As this case is three-quarters of a century old, it is clearly outdated and its use in the present day represents a return to the terrorization of LGBTQ+ people of the 40s, 50s, and 60s faced. While socially this is a problem, the issue goes deeper to the use of policy as a coercive form of segregating the public and private spheres. When one cannot express themselves in public by law, they are forced to contain themselves only in the private sphere, limiting representation and the vibrancy of entertainment institutions. Moreover, a “public nuisance” is different than the indoctrination of children. This highlights a shift in the vernacular towards more extremes so as to enrage the public about an issue. In exploring this, I challenge readers to consider the true weight of these statements so as to allow space for the benefits of LGBTQ+ representation and expression to arise. By this, children are more educated, drag performers are liberated, and indoctrination becomes inDRAGtrination.
While the LGBTQ+ community faces harassment in many forms daily, the specific harassment types used against drag performers serve to segregate the community and target non-conforming gender expression as an immoral act. This unique experience and bold expression against societal norms attract harassment from anti-LGBTQ+ people. Thus, drag performers must combat this harassment intentionally and strategically in a way that other members of the community do not. This is the case even when a drag performer identifies as cis-hetero. By running an internal cost-benefit analysis between harassment and harm against living their truth, drag queens and kings come to an individual conclusion on whether or not their art form is worth the risk. In doing this, drag performers are putting themselves out there in a way no other community is asked to. While this is unfair and inequitable treatment, research suggests that the drag performers who choose to continue performing become equipped with further sets of skills and defenses, and go beyond simply being LGBTQ+ to living queerly.
In relation to this, gender in drag performance is not the only societal norm point of contention amongst Conservatives. By marrying the underlying ideals of gender identities and sexual orientations, drag presents a platform for performers to express themselves in new and intersecting ways. For instance, male drag performers are able to more openly express their gay sexualities despite the rejection they would typically face out of drag. Therefore, performing in women’s attire is essentially becoming “other.” This serves as a reclamation of being “othered” through the long-established means of performance and entertainment (i.e., costumes, makeup, Shakespearian play portrayals accepting male actors playing female roles). Similarly, the inclusion of multiple genders in drag performances speaks to the inclusivity of the art form as a whole, and the positivity created in a space of creation. Female drag performers, or “drag kings,” use drag as a means to feel their identity as opposed to the typical invisibility of this identity through societal stifling.
Here lies the reciprocal relationship of drag’s art form and drag performers: whether the performance is despite societal exclusion or in spite of it. Even though drag performances are regarded as highly controversial through the eyes of the Right, most drag performers do not get into drag to fuel this debate. In fact, many drag performers find themselves unintentionally, or in some cases, reluctantly in the position of “activist.” Within the LGBTQ+ community, drag spaces are largely leisurely and welcoming. It is outside of these spaces where the real harm is done. Thus, this activism, intentional or not, would not be necessary if not for the societal standards that hold people in inauthentic categories according to their genitalia, and not their own lived desires. In this way, society’s problems are LGBTQ+ problems, and as the cycle remakes itself, real people are made othered, invisible, and hated.
In connecting this controversy, drag events centered on child engagement seem to be at the heart of the debate. Drag events such as Drag Queen Storytime or Story Hour, in which drag queens read to children, have been going on for years and only recently have garnered negative attention. This is not to say that there has not been anti-LGBTQ+ hate during these times. In fact, from 2018 on, there was a rise in hate crimes which can be associated with these drag events. The difference now is media publicity and the air time given to Christian radicals. In many instances, these hate crimes are not prosecuted and are thus societally justified through the same outdated logic criminalizing sexual orientation and the “deceptive” nature of non-conforming gender expressions. These societal norms are then codified in law through the noticeable gap left between cyber hate and real-life conduct. This is not to mention the exacerbation of hate through online platforms that allow hate-groups to flourish and people to assert themselves into roles they were not meant to play, including that of a parent to a child they don't even know.
To reframe and combat this hate, drag needs to be celebrated as the entertainment and art form that it is. Consider, perhaps, that Drag Queen Storytime allows children a new kind of freedom within an early childhood educational framework, advancing critical factors such as play as a praxis, aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance, destigmatization of shame, and embodied kinship. How much more would children be able to learn if they were offered the opportunity to expand and explore? This is the foundation of a queer, inDRAGtrinated world, and I’d bet it’s not as scary as some may think.
By Emily Carriere