Improbably, drag queens have become the latest glittery flashpoint in our ongoing culture wars with a new wave of legislative proposals designed to limit the freedom of these performers to do what they long have done.
If certain popular social media channels and news sites are to be believed, America is divided between those who celebrate flamboyant performers putting on sexualized shows for elementary school students and those who see in those wigs and sequins the harbinger of the last days of the republic.
There are those on both the right and left who have a vested interest in keeping this conflict boiling in these absurdist terms. It is time for some sanity, as it is for some adult thinking on what kids should and should not be required to read in school.
The art form of a man dressing up in women’s clothes, or engaging in female impersonation, dates back at least to ancient Greece. It is impossible to produce a good chunk of the plays of William Shakespeare without an awareness of that ancient practice. And as anyone who has seen “South Pacific” well knows, drag shows were common ways to entertain U.S. troops abroad.
There were drag shows during World War I and World War II. Balletic GIs appeared in tutus in 1942 without controversy and the National World War II Museum has noted that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was especially entertained by a drag impersonation of Gypsy Rose Lee.
Ronald Reagan enjoyed drag. So did Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. There long have been Republican drag queens and drag queens at Republican events. The history goes far deeper than the fabulist freshman Republican George Santos, who reportedly has a drag queen past. Nothing to be ashamed of although that hardly is true of many other aspects of Santos’ personal history.
And, for ordinary Americans, drag shows in cities like Las Vegas, or at the Baton nightclub in Chicago, long have been part of a fun weekend on the town. For decades, they have been a much-loved staple of bachelorette parties and stag nights. In small towns in Texas, drag queens step up on a country-and-western bar every weekend to impersonate Tammy Wynette.
It has been like this for generations, and it is fundamentally benign and without threat. Even the most rigid and authoritarian societies have built in safety values, understanding as even dictators do that people deserve nights when a society’s usual conventions and power structures are suspended. They keep us all functioning together.
And anyone who argues, as we have been reading of late, that drag shows are inherently obscene or sexualized simply is ignorant of their long and, frankly, distinguished history.
The nub of the current issue, of course, involves drag shows for children. And this is where things get more complicated.
Certainly, there can be drag shows for children. Seeing a man perform while dressed as a woman is no threat whatsoever to your average kid, and actually is a tool to increase tolerance, empowerment and critical thinking. They often are as fun for kids as for adults.
But here is where we depart from some progressive views on this issue: Those queens who are performing for kids should maintain age-appropriate performances and, yes, that might mean moderating what typically goes on at the Baton at midnight.
Most queens of experience, and of compassion for the very young, are fully aware of this. They know that tiny kids should not be pawns or proxies for adult arguments over gender and sexuality.
But some shows in libraries and elsewhere have offered fuel to Twitter accounts by focusing on sexually oriented material. We’ve all seen the videos, and it makes no sense to deny their existence. If there are young kids in the audiences, anything and everything should not go.
We’d also like to send a memo to drag queens (and the librarians who book them) pointing out that parents, and not just politically sympathetic ones, can and should be your partners when it comes to programming.
Parents deserve a say in what their kids watch and what their kids read in school, too.
School boards should not be removing books from curricula that offer diverse points of view. But they also should not ignore parents who say that they don’t want their kids reading sexually explicit material in their classrooms when their own families have not deemed it age-appropriate. And, here again, it’s disingenuous to say this is not happening.
These are difficult, nuanced issues, of course. And since they involve flashpoints like gender and kids, it is easy to ignite extreme passions on both sides. The result is adult fights that end up harming kids, even if the sincere motivation on both sides is to achieve the opposite.
You might say that drag queens are a minor issue. That’s not true. These issues are at the core of public discourse and, given the determination of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to press this politically effective matter, along with the dispensation of controversial material in elementary schools, they likely will be at the center of the next presidential election.
Drag queens are, of course, at the middle of a proxy fight for different visions of where America should be going. Visions of that future will vary in a healthy democracy, as long has been the case. Some will think sexuality has to be discussed from kindergarten; others will prize a period of innocence and want to extend it as long as possible. Reasonable adults can disagree.
But responsible parents have the right to raise their kids as they see fit. And where children are concerned, screaming at opponents to try to wrestle power can have unintended consequences. That’s already happening, too.
