Stop draggin’ my heart around

I’m really not a drag show kind of guy. I don’t find any particular delight in seeing men dressed as women singing, dancing and telling jokes. Some people like it, but it’s not for me. Given the choice of going to a drag show or not, I probably would choose the latter.

Then again, I loved some sketches the Monty Python blokes did while dressed in drag. And I do think that “Some Like It Hot,” in which lead actors Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon spend most of the movie dressed as women, is a really funny film. OK, I’ll concede I liked “Bosom Buddies,” in which costars Peter Scolari and Tom Hanks – yes, our Tom Hanks – dressed in drag so their characters could live in a women’s hotel. And many of us, me included, loved it back in the day when comedian Flip Wilson would dress in drag to play his famously sassy character Geraldine.

So maybe I don’t like drag performances in the abstract, but, apparently, sometimes I do in the particular. I think that’s how many of us are.

Men have been performing as women for hundreds if not thousands of years. The female parts were played by men for decades after Shakespeare wrote his plays. If you go to Tombstone, Arizona and visit the wondrous museum there, you’ll see that many of the town’s male leaders dressed in drag to perform for the roughneck populace back in the Old West days.

Now, though, for purely political reasons, drag shows have become a huge issue. Laws are being proposed in many states aimed at keeping kids away from drag performances. Those who perform in drag in front of children could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.

With all that we have going wrong in this country – deadly viruses, increasing homelessness, unprecedented drug addiction, a national mental health crisis, the rise of hate groups, school mass shootings, workplace mass shootings, music festival mass shootings, grocery store mass shootings – why have drag shows become an issue?

The answer is an easy one. Politicians are appealing to the base reactions of those who find men in drag disgusting and perverse. It’s easier politically to scapegoat drag performers and other trans people than deal with what’s really going wrong in our land.

I would bet some legislators promoting anti-drag laws allow their own children to play video killing games at home, including games that give points for shooting innocent bystanders and running over pedestrians.

What would do more damage to the psyche of a 15-year-old, watching a drag show for 90 minutes one day or spending hundreds of hours playing a video killing game?

Do such killing games make all kids who play into would-be mass shooters? Of course not. But there’s evidence that playing such games does warp an infinitesimal few, mostly those with a host of other issues. Would seeing a drag show make a young person want to suddenly start dressing in drag? Maybe it would for an infinitesimal few, if they were predisposed to do so.

There is a wonderful HBO series called “Somebody Somewhere.” It’s about a group of misfits trying to get by in the small Midwestern college town of Manhattan, Kansas.

One character is a fellow named Fred, who obviously was born a woman but lives as a man. Fred works as a soil scientist for Kansas State University and assists area farmers.

When most people get to know Fred, including some area farmers, they accept him for who he is.

Maybe it’s because it’s easier, for some reason, for many to accept a woman dressing as a man than to accept the opposite. Maybe it’s simply because Fred can help farmers get a better crop in.

Then again, maybe it’s because most people think there are bigger issues than how others dress.