SHOW MUST GO ON
Fear amid right-wing attacks won’t keep Texas drag queens from stage
Braeden’s life fell apart in a CVS parking lot.
It was a Tuesday in October, and he was scrolling through his email, waiting for the text that would tell him his prescription was ready for pickup. One message in his inbox made him pause: a request for comment from the New York Post.
The email had come by way of the website for the North Texas drag show company that Braeden (a pseudonym requested due to safety concerns) helped form this past summer. The group had put on its regular brunch that Saturday at a restaurant in Plano. Braeden performs as Jan (also a pseudonym), an irreverent old lady from the Deep South who loves blue eyeliner and coral lipstick and won’t say no to a drink or two. It seemed like both Saturday brunches had gone well: So many people had asked to take pictures after the first show that they’d had to turn people away to prepare for the second.
Surely, Braeden thought, that email from the Post was spam. He opened it. It was a tweet with a video attached. The video was of Jan — and it had already gone viral.
The clip showed 27 seconds of Jan’s Saturday brunch routine. She swished her skirt and bounced up and down,
wearing a black dress with iron-on cat appliques and cat ears atop her light blond wig (a double entendre for the subject of the risque song she was lipsynching). Laughing patrons handed her bills. A toddler looked on in the background.
Sara Gonzales, a host for farright media company the Blaze, had been the one to take the video. She’d tweeted the footage of Jan dancing in front of the child and promised more to come. She vowed: “We WILL stop this.” (Gonzales did not respond to a request for comment.)
The vitriol came quickly. One person called Jan a pedophile. Another tweeted a photo of a tank spewing artillery. “How are these people somehow not considered child sexual predators?” someone asked on Instagram. Another person tweeted that he “recently purchased a solution for this”— and attached a photo of a woodchipper. The video of Jan played on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that evening with the chyron: THE LEFT IS OPENLY SEXUALIZING CHILDREN.
On Wednesday night, Braeden and his boyfriend fled the city.
‘Really dangerous lies’
For the past several years, the far right has held up drag artists as bogeymen to broadly scapegoat the LGBTQ+ community. They cloak their attacks in the rhetoric of protecting children, falsely casting drag queens as pedophiles and groomers. “You can’t get kids involved in your creepy sex stuff,” Carlson declared after the video of Jan’s routine played on his show. This past summer, a Texas state representative proposed a ban on minors attending drag shows, asking for prayers in the “fight to protect kids.”
“It’s just this latest flavor of homophobia or transphobia,” said Jonathan Hamilt, executive director of Drag Story Hour. “Before it was just gay people in general, but that doesn’t play well, so if you go after drag culture, which is a part of queer culture, and put this ‘protect the children’ spin on it, it’s a really good way to incite fear and violence and spread really dangerous lies about queer people.”
The inflammatory anti-drag campaign has manifested in demonstrations and threats against drag events across the country. Over just the last few months in Texas, drag shows have been canceled or protested in Galveston, Houston, Roanoke, Katy and Pflugerville. The consequences spill over into the lives of the queens, leaving some worried about their own safety even as they refuse to be deterred from being who they are.
Drag Story Hour, an organization through which drag queens read to children, has always had safety protocols, Hamilt said. But the recent threats have staff on a new, rapid-response model. (For obvious reasons, they aren’t sharing their internal plans.) The organization is working with the AntiViolence Project, a New-York based organization formed in the wake of attacks on gay men in the 1980s. AVP has trained storytellers on community safety planning: figuring out what groups are there for them and what help they can ask for. It’s a plan-ahead model. No one wants to be making decisions in a crisis.
Terry Fuller, a 15-year drag veteran, knew there would be trouble from the minute First Christian Church Katy announced that he’d be hosting a drag bingo as Kiki Dion Van Wales. The handful of protesters he saw when he got out of his car at the church that day in September would swell into a crowd of at least 100, including Proud Boys and neo-Nazis. Armed guards stood by. Everything felt like it was in slow motion.
While Terry waited inside the building, an armed counterprotester went by on his way to the bathroom. Terry thanked him for being there. The man stopped and outlined an escape plan. If I come in and grab you, the man said, don’t ask any questions. When I grab you, you run.
Paxton’s threat
Braeden and his boyfriend had left their home in Dallas, but the fallout from the video wasn’t letting up. He’d called out sick from work at his weekday job all week. His family members were texting, asking if he was OK (he wasn’t). He felt physically ill. His face was still all over social media, attached to allegations that made no sense. And on Oct. 19, Attorney General Ken Paxton told the Daily Caller, a right-wing publication, that Braeden should be prosecuted for his behavior around children.
“What’s more,” Paxton said, “the Texas Legislature should amend the Texas Penal Code to expressly prohibit this kind of grossly sexual conduct and empower my office to prosecute when district and county attorneys refuse.” (Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
What do you do, Braeden wondered, when the top-ranking lawyer in the state profiles you as a pedophile and a criminal and you haven’t done anything wrong?
He still had to go through the motions of normal life. He deposited the dollar bills fans had given him at his Saturday performances. He went to H-E-B with his boyfriend. He walked through the aisles in a haze, picking up a hodgepodge of food that didn’t quite make sense: ice cream, a bag of chicharrones too big to finish, tortilla chips but no salsa, three overripe avocados, bagels but no cream cheese, salami but no crackers. He did two laps around the store before telling his boyfriend he had to go.
On the way home from HE-B, another member of the performance group texted him an article. The Plano Police Department had seen the video and found no evidence of lawbreaking. He wouldn’t be prosecuted.
Braeden started crying in the car.
‘Not a new phenomenon’
The New Year’s Eve gathering followed what’s become a too-familiar formula. The public caught wind of a drag event. Armed men showed up. News crews arrived on the scene. The nastiness dragged on for weeks.
But the armed men were police, the news crews all worked for print papers, and it was New Year’s Eve, 1895.
“Drag is being drawn into this political maelstrom, but the origins of drag in the U.S. were political,” said Channing Joseph, a scholar specializing in the history of drag. “It’s not a new phenomenon that conservatives are upset about drag and its influence in society.”
In researching Black queer histories, Joseph discovered William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved man who dubbed himself the “Queen of Drag”— the first documented instance of anyone doing so. Swann’s D.C. drag balls were repeatedly targeted by police, even though there was technically no law on the books that made drag illegal. When Swann was brought to court in January 1896 (not for the first time), the presiding judge lamented that he couldn’t sentence Swann to 10 years.
Swann later applied for a presidential pardon. (This, Joseph said, made Swann the first documented person to take legal steps to defend the queer community.) In denying the pardon, the U.S. Attorney wrote: “His evil example in the community must have been most corrupting.”
Today’s vilification of drag is more akin to what went on in the late 1970s when singer Anita Bryant formed the first national anti-gay group, Save Our Children. A year later, a California state senator suggested allowing school boards to ban gay teachers. “I assume most of them are seducing young boys in toilets,” he said.
“From the beginning, this movement, which is really about trying to keep sexual minorities from having civil rights, they framed their work as protecting children,” said Sophie Bjork-James, a professor at Vanderbilt University. “We can see a throughline of that through today.”
The current framing is particularly insidious, she said: If supporting drag shows is the equivalent of grooming a child, how could anyone not be against it?
“I think that’s part of why it works so well, to focus on things like grooming,” BjorkJames said. “Everyone should be against sexual abuse of children. Like, that is a standard. So it’s a successful strategy.”
It’s also a dangerous one. There’s always a relationship, she said, between dehumanizing language and hate crimes — a linkage even more urgent as the suspected shooter who killed five people at the LGBTQ+ bar Club Q in Colorado Springs faces hate-crime charges. When hateful rhetoric goes up, violence can, too.
Set a ‘great example’
When he’d made it past the protesters outside First Christian Church Katy and been briefed on his safety plan, Fuller stepped back, took a breath and reminded himself that he had a job to do. Kiki was there to put on a show, to help people relax and have fun. And there were children looking up to her.
“The first show was all kids, so I knew that I had to set a great example,” Terry said. “Not only for myself and the church but also for any other queens that do drag queen bingo.”
The show went on. The kids loved it.
“The good stuff outweighs the hate,” said Jonathan Hamilt of Drag Story Hour. “We have way more supporters and way more love and way more support than hate.”
Three weeks later, Braeden is back at work and back in his apartment. His real name still hasn’t gotten out. He’s terrified that it will. Part of him wonders if they’re just saving his name for a rainy day. The other part of him wonders if they just don’t care: The story fits a preconceived narrative. He is, to them, not so much a person but a representation of what’s wrong in society.
In the immediate aftermath of the October brunch, Braeden considered retiring Jan. But when Texas International Productions hosts its Plano brunch this month, Jan will be there, armed in coral lipstick and blue eyeshadow, cat ears on her head. She’ll open with the number that went viral.
There’s a specific moment where Braeden becomes Jan. He’s already buzzed his arms and cut his hair and moisturized his skin and shaved his chest down to his nipples. It happens when he’s sitting in front of the mirror, contouring his neck to create an older woman’s wrinkles and hollows. He looks at his reflection and thinks: There she is.