At the beginning of 2023, drag came under attack.
Tennessee, Texas and Montana all passed laws which would specifically ban drag artists from performing in certain public spaces – the latest part of a conservative culture war that has seen books banned from schools and libraries around the US and rights stripped from the LGBTQ+ community.
But the Republican-led anti-drag crusade – seen by activists as a front for further attacks on trans people – has run into problems.
In each of those states, judges, including one appointed by Donald Trump, have blocked the laws after lawsuits from drag queens and civil rights groups. On Thursday, a judge in Texas extended a block on the state’s drag ban from taking effect, setting up a hearing for a permanent injunction later in September.
Florida has also seen a law restricting drag shows blocked, while in Alabama a proposed bill was quietly dropped after hundreds of people protested at the state’s capitol.
While Republicans say they will continue trying to pass the drag-ban bills, the failure so far has given tentative hope that the right wing’s war on LGBTQ+ people is running into trouble.
Tennessee was the first state in the country to pass a law placing strict limits on drag shows, when the state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, signed the legislation into law on 2 March.
The law banned “male or female impersonators” from performing in public spaces, which would include Pride parades on public property, or in a location where it can be viewed by minors. The wording was criticized by the ACLU, which told the WPLN radio station the law is a “subtle and sinister way to further criminalize just being trans”.
Lee signed the law despite a photo emerging in February showing him dressed in drag as a younger man.
In June, however, a Trump-appointed judge ruled against it, following a lawsuit by Friends of George’s, a Memphis-based LGBTQ+ theater company.
Thomas Parker, a US district judge nominated by Trump in 2017, was critical of the legislation in his ruling, describing it as “unconstitutionally vague and substantially overbroad”. He noted that under the bill’s language a woman performing in an Elvis Presley costume could be punished because she would be considered a “male impersonator”.
Despite Parker’s ruling, some Tennessee officials were determined to enforce the new law. In August, a prosecutor in Blount county, in east Tennessee, announced, at extremely short notice, that he planned to enforce the anti-drag law against a Pride festival.
That prompted a legal scramble from the ACLU and Flamy Grant, a drag performer scheduled to appear at Blount Pride. They sued to allow the festival to go ahead, and a second judge ruled against the law.
“It just felt like a very touch-and-go week, whether we were even gonna be able to have the event,” Grant said.
“We got the restraining order just the day before maybe. So we were able to move forward and it made the celebration all that much sweeter. Yes, we had been through that kind of rollercoaster of a week. But at the end of the day, Pride is Pride, and the community turned out and it was just a very joyful, celebratory event. I’m so glad that we got to do it.”
Grant, 41, is based in North Carolina, where the Republican-led house has proposed its own anti-drag law. North Carolina, like other GOP-dominated states around the country, has passed laws which target the LGBTQ+ community, including laws which target trans youth. Such legislation is often disingenuously billed by conservatives as necessary to protect children, but LGBTQ+ advocates say that is a smokescreen.
“This new wave of reinvigorated bigotry – but bigotry that’s masked in this fake concern for children, and fake concern for morals of society or however they frame it – is not going to be successful, of course,” Grant said.
“But it does make life really hard on a daily basis for people just trying to live their lives.”
Republicans and rightwing media personalities have accused drag performers of intending to indoctrinate and “groom” children through their performances. Events like the drag queen story hour have come in for particular criticism, as drag has become a fascination and obsession for conservatives.
“It’s puzzling because drag has been an art form celebrated for centuries and across cultures, from Shakespeare to military bases, bridal showers to bingo,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO and president of Glaad, the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization.
“If you’ve seen Mrs Doubtfire, you’ve seen drag, to no negative impact on anyone.”
Ellis said the emerging war on drag performers could be seen as part of the ongoing rightwing hostility to transgender people, as some conservatives ignorantly or disingenuously link drag performers with trans individuals.
“Since the nationwide win for same-sex couples’ freedom to marry in 2015, anti-LGBTQ extremists have for the most part abandoned their fight against marriage and now turned their attention to targeting transgender Americans, their healthcare, access to public spaces, even just talking about who they are and the pronouns they use,” Ellis said.
“This makes drag an obvious target for those who inaccurately conflate being transgender to being a drag performer. These baseless drag bans attempt to erase, shame or otherwise make it harder for LGBTQ people, and especially transgender people, to be themselves and to celebrate their communities and art forms.”
Each of the anti-drag laws introduced in 2023 seem to share vague language about what exactly defines drag.
In Montana, an anti-drag law restricted performers who adopt “flamboyant”, “parodic” or “glamorous” personas from public places where children are present. A judge temporarily blocked the law in July, ruling that the law “will disproportionately harm not only drag performers, but any person who falls outside traditional gender and identity norms”.
An anti-drag law was introduced in the Alabama house of representatives by Republican representatives Arnold Mooney, Jamie Kiel, Scott Stadthagen, Mack Butler, Jim Carns and Chris Sells earlier this year. The bill made it illegal to perform drag, and perform other acts, in a public space where minors are present.
The sponsors, who are all men, seemingly let their imaginations run wild when they drafted the bill. As well as drag queens, the legislation ruled specifically against “sado-masochism” in a breathy passage that detailed “the binding or physical restraining of a person who is nude or clad in undergarments”.
The drafters apparently gave less thought to the potential response to their proposed law. Hundreds of people, some in drag, marched to the Alabama capitol in protest. The bill did not make it into law, although it could be picked up again in the future.
“It is very dangerous, what they’re doing as a whole. Because they really are attacking who we are as people,” said Champagne Munroe, a Mobile, Alabama-based drag performer.
“It’s disheartening and it’s dangerous to our wellbeing. We all have very limited time here on this blue ball, and we’re all just trying to get through it the best way we can.”
Texas passed a law in July banning “sexually oriented performances” – which the state’s lieutenant governor defined as drag shows – in the presence of anyone under 18. Businesses which violated the law are punishable by fines of up to $10,000, while drag performers could be sentenced to up to a year in jail.
As restaurants and bars in Texas prepared to hold their last drag shows, the law was blocked by a judge, and could be overturned permanently later this month.
Brigitte Bandit, 31, gained attention online after she twice spoke out, in drag, at the Texas capitol against the law. She said the wave of legislation against drag, and against the trans community, was dangerous.
“It’s really caused a lot of hatred here in the state that we’re seeing more and more of,” Bandit said. “I think by our lawmakers listening to these kinds [of voices] they’re just legitimizing them and making them more prominent and they’re spreading this hate.”
Although the law is on hold, Bandit said she had experienced different, more negative attitudes since the ruling. When she performs, she will now change at the venue rather than travel in drag, while after her testimony she received death threats online.
“We’ve seen this kind of rhetoric being spread before in the past. In the 70s they were trying to claim that gay people were pedophiles. But we’ve gotten through it before, so that kind of gives me some hope that we can do better and hopefully have a better future,” Bandit said.
Kara Foxx-Paris, who has been performing drag for more than 25 years, was among those whose livelihood was threatened. She criticized “hypocrisy” from the Republican-dominated legislature that passed the drag law.
There was no Republican clamor, Foxx-Paris said, for legislation to restrict football teams from employing cheerleaders to perform in front of crowds containing children, or efforts to stop the restaurant chain Hooters from encouraging its waitresses to wear revealing attire.
“There’s all these things out there where the girls are scantily clad, and just as sexy, if not more, than a lot of drag performances. There’s all these things existing, and yet none of that has ever been attacked.”
Drag was targeted, Foxx-Paris said, because it’s part of the LGBTQ+ community.
“And a huge part of the conservative side is trying to limit, take away rights from us, and do whatever they can to basically abolish us for existing,” she said.
A lawsuit has stayed the Texas law for now, but performers there and elsewhere worry that the right wing will not give up its crusade against drag and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.
In the first three months of the year at least 417 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in state legislatures, according to the ACLU, while in June the Human Rights Campaign issued a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans.
There were 161 protests and threats targeting drag events between early 2022 and March 2023, including at the Blount Pride celebrations in Tennessee, according to Glaad.
With threats continuing, Flamy Grant, whose lawsuit allowed the Blount county event to go ahead, said the way to protect LGBTQ+ people was “allyship” from others who may not be part of the community.
“And allyship is not just a tweet or a Facebook post, or just saying: ‘Yeah, I’m an affirming person,’” she said.
“Allyship is standing with us at these moments when we’ve got protesters showing up to our events, when we’ve got elected officials, and district attorneys, and police, and the courts coming for us. That is the thing that is going to really help us turn the tide – for people to see that it’s not just queer folks standing here demanding our dignity, there are people who love us everywhere.”
