Drag queen Cheri Lake (she/her), who performs under the name 'Brigitte Bandit,' prepares to give testimony in the Senate Chamber at the Texas State Capitol in Austin on March 23.Brandon Bell/Getty Images North America
To Brian Hernandez, the drag show they organized a few weeks before last Christmas seemed innocuous. An all-ages event, it featured a toy drive for low-income families. The evening’s performances were preceded by a screening of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
But when they arrived at the venue, a bar in San Antonio’s art deco Fredericksburg Road neighbourhood, Mx. Hernandez was greeted by protesters.
“There were people on the corner of the block with signs saying ‘not our children,’ calling us pedophiles and groomers,” recounted Mx. Hernandez, 27, who was performing that night in their drag persona, Miss Taint. “It was the first time in my nine years doing drag that I had ever seen that.”
After decades of steadily moving into the mainstream, drag has abruptly become an object of moral panic for much of the U.S. right. At least 14 states have passed or are considering laws that would crack down on it. The bills are raising fears that new legislation will criminalize not only drag but the right of transgendered people to live their gender identity. And a concurrent increase in violence and harassment is causing alarm.
In San Antonio, two protesters took video of Mx. Hernandez’s show and posted it online alongside accusations the dancers were corrupting minors. As the views climbed into the millions, the threats poured in. Some vowed to murder the performers, others to burn down the venue. At another local drag show two weeks later, protesters showed up carrying guns.
Now, the Texas legislature is mulling a series of bills that would either severely restrict drag or ban it entirely. “It feels like The Twilight Zone,” Mx. Hernandez said.
Drag queens Miss Taint and Naima Jackson at the Blue Star Arts Complex in San Antonio on March 3.Adrian Morrow/The Globe and Mail
“This is not what America’s about,” said King Robinson, 30, who performs as the Queen Fantasia, over tacos in San Antonio’s Pearl district, a collection of repurposed 19th-century factories. “They are trying to make you wear a uniform. ‘You’re a man, you have to dress like this; you’re a woman, you have to dress like that.’ That’s fascism.”
Mr. Robinson had just come from performing at a baby shower. “There were 25 kids there, smiling, dancing with me. They like that someone is dancing and looking beautiful and having a good time,” he said.
Last month, Tennessee became the first state to pass an anti-drag law. The legislation prohibits drag on public property or in any venue within 1,000 feet (305 metres) of places where children may be present. Chris Dodd, the Republican legislator who sponsored the law, accused drag shows of trying to “recruit children to this lifestyle.” Similar legislation is under consideration in several other states, including Florida and Arizona.
One bill in Texas would ban minors from watching any performance in which someone “exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth.” Another would cut funding to public libraries that host drag queen story hours.
A judge has temporarily blocked the Tennessee law from taking effect amid a court challenge from a Memphis drag troupe named Friends of George’s. The case is scheduled for trial next month.
Brice Timmons, a lawyer for Friends of George’s, said the challenge will turn on constitutionally protected freedom of expression. The law has already had a chilling effect, he said, causing all but one Pride festival in the state to pre-emptively cancel their drag events this year. He will also seek to prove that the impetus for the legislation is bigotry. “It is an improper motive to pass a law to discriminate against a group of people,” he said.
Ironically, several anti-drag politicians have themselves been revealed to have previously dressed in drag. A high-school photo of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee shows him wearing a cheerleader’s outfit, a wig and pearls. In an online video, Nate Schatzline, a Texas legislator backing the anti-drag bills, skips around a park while wearing a black dress.
Cheri Lake performs at the Cheer Up Charlies bar and nightclub on April 2.Brandon Bell/Getty Images North America
Jules Gill-Peterson, an expert in transgender history at Johns Hopkins University, said this double standard is telling about the laws’ intent. “They are saying that when men in positions of power cross-dress, it’s okay. To them … it should only be illegal when LGBTQ people do it,” she said.
Even the messaging about protecting children is a rehash of old, homophobic tropes, Prof. Gill-Peterson said. These have gained new life from QAnon, the conspiracy theory that claims former president Donald Trump is secretly fighting a Satanic child-trafficking ring. “The language of ‘grooming’ – that’s very much the language of Q,” she said.
To many in San Antonio’s LGBTQ community, the anti-drag legislation is tied to Republican efforts in recent years to curb the rights of transgender people. Texas legislators have attempted to restrict which bathrooms trans people can use, and to make it harder to obtain gender-affirming care.
Some of the anti-drag bills are worded so vaguely that police could theoretically arrest a trans person simply for presenting as a gender not assigned to them at birth, Mx. Hernandez said. “The agenda is to erase queer lives.”
In December, not long after the protest at the toy drive, gun-toting militia members showed up outside a drag show at the Aztec Theatre in downtown San Antonio. They were outnumbered by counter-protesters, including several who carried assault rifles of their own and dressed in black tactical gear. The event happened less than a month after the deadly Club Q shooting during a drag show in Colorado.
King Robinson, 30, who performs as the Queen Fantasia, is pictured in the Pearl district of San Antonio.Adrian Morrow/The Globe and Mail
Wearing drag one spring evening while enjoying the Blue Star Arts Complex, a warren of art galleries and music venues along the San Antonio River, Naima Jackson was fully aware that even dressing like this in public could become illegal.
She believes the very growth in drag’s popularity helps explain the backlash. RuPaul’s Drag Race, the popular reality competition show, for instance, both broadened drag’s audience and drew the attention of bigots.
“It’s never been this open, this free, this accepted. You can live your full, complete, actual life,” Ms. Jackson, 40, said. “And some people don’t like that.”