Mrs. Doubtfire, Shakespeare could be next
As best we can tell from relatively infrequent visits to Blue Mound, Haslet and Saginaw, all communities in state Rep. Nate Schatzline’s Tarrant County district, residents in drag are not standing on street corners waving rainbow flags and importuning youngsters to switch gender or sexual identities.
Drag queens are not (as far as we can tell), serving chips and salsa at Evita’s Mexican Restaurant in Blue Mound or a Phat Breakfast Burrito at Big Azz Burritos in Saginaw. You can pick up cold and allergy medicine at Haslet Pharmacy, stay at Residence Inn by Marriott in Haslet or enjoy the Laredo Burger at Haslet’s Texan Diner without encountering a drag performer (again, as best we can tell). Schatzline also represents a portion of Fort Worth, where at least a couple of adult venues (and a bingo hall) feature drag performers, but as best we can tell they’re not pursuing their harmless cross-dressing predilection and often astounding performance art in public libraries, city halls, grocery stores, churches, laundromats, schools and day care centers, real estate offices, banks, sporting events — the list could go on.
There’s no evidence that drag performers living in the 93rd district of the Texas House of Representatives are bothering anybody. Except, that is, Schatzline and other “Christian” social conservatives around the country who have launched an aggressive coordinated movement targeting the LGBTQ community, including drag performers.
On his first foray into Austin, the 31-year-old freshman representative is the proud sponsor of House Bill 1266, legislation that would classify establishments that feature drag shows as “sexually oriented businesses.” (If you’re a sexually oriented business, you pay additional taxes and are subject to stricter licensing requirements.) Schatzline’s bill is one of four filed by Texas Republicans aimed at establishments that allow performers to wear clothes or makeup that exhibit, in the words of HB 1266, a “gender identity that is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth.”
Granted, Schatzline defeated his Democratic opponent in his fervid red district with nearly 60 percent of the vote last fall, but we find it hard to believe that outlawing men dressing up as women (or vice versa) was a high priority when his constituents sent him to Austin.
It is a high priority for conservative politicians who have signed up for the culture war while ignoring actual policy issues. Their quiver of poisontipped darts include laws targeting alleged child indoctrination (“grooming”), LGBTQ rights, gender identity rights and other animating issues related to sexuality and gender. Claiming that drag performances are sexualizing children, Schatzline said in a Twitter video that the purpose of his legislation is to “ban sexually explicit drag shows and preserve the innocence of the next generation of Texas.” Actually, he’s exposing this generation and the next to distrust, discrimination and hate.
The son of evangelical ministers, Schatzline himself is a former pastor and football coach (according to his website). A graduate of Southwest Assemblies of God University in Waxahachie and Liberty University in Virginia, he is the founder of For Liberty and Justice, an organization “dedicated to mobilizing the local church to see reformation in government.”
Schatzline also has some experience
as a dragster of sorts. Two days before his bill was assigned to the House State Affairs Committee, a video surfaced of the lawmaker as a teenager blithely skipping through a park with friends while wearing a black sequined dress. Asked about what would seem to be a bit of hypocrisy on his part, he proclaimed on Twitter that it was “some class project I did as a teenager where my buddies dared me to wear a dress.”
It was not, he said, “a sexually explicit drag show.” Just what his legislation defines as “a sexually explicit drag show” isn’t all that clear. And that’s the point: Keeping it opaque allows for prosecutorial discretion and selective enforcement. (“It’s the police! Open up! You allowed your children to watch ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’!”)
Would Jaston Williams and Joe Sears, the beloved cross-dressing duo of “Greater Tuna” have to worry about a latter-day Barney Fife carting them off to the calaboose? In a place “where the Lions Club is too liberal and Patsy Cline never dies” — to quote the Tuna guys — you can never be sure.
Shakespeare himself might have run afoul of Schatzline’s scrutiny. Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra and every other female character who trod the boards in the 16th and 17th centuries was actually a young man or a boy, their dresses “dragging.” The Bard and his immediate successors had to deal with “pestering Puritans” seeking to shut down “stage plays of mirth and levity,” while we have zealots intent on curbing the rights of men and women who dare to depart from traditional gender norms.
Schatzline’s personal crossdress caper has its counterpart in Tennessee, which has emerged as the nation’s epicenter for drag and transgender animus. Shortly before Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill last week banning “adult cabaret performances” on public property, a photo emerged of Lee wearing a dress in 1977. Like Schatzline, Lee scoffed at claims of hypocrisy. (Not to play armchair psychologist, but toss former Brazilian drag queen and current New York Congressman George Santos into the mix, and you have to wonder if there’s a pattern here.)
Schatzline may worry that if he calls off his anti-drag campaign, he won’t have enough to do in Austin. We can think of a few ways to keep busy, from fighting for better teacher pay to protecting kids in foster care to even just sitting back and watching intently to learn how the place works before he starts firing off irresponsible legislation.
If he’s worried no one will notice him anymore, Schatzline can dig that little black-sequined dress out of the back of his closet and sport it on the House floor. Pumps are fine, too, even stilettos. They’re clothes, that’s it. Not a sex cult initiation. And it might do him some good to walk in the shoes of people he’s trying to demonize.
Lack of clarity in the state’s anti-drag law would allow for selective enforcement.