Threats force venue to stop drag shows
The owners of The Starlighter, a live-music venue in San Antonio’s Deco District, say they’ve been hit with a barrage of online threats and bullying after hosting a toy drive and drag show combo on Friday night.
As a result, they’ve canceled all drag performances through the end of this month.
“The Starlighter’s goal has always been to provide a safe all ages space for entertainment & unfortunately we’re now being made to feel unsafe in our own space,” the owners said in an Instagram post on Sunday.
Taylor Hansen, who describes himself as an “independent journalist” and works with ANTI-LBGTQ organizations, recorded several performances at The Starlighter on Friday. He posted a tweet about the event the next day, with a video clip that included a drag queen in a Christmas tree costume performing a risque dance routine.
“The Island of Misfit Toys Drive & Drag Show” was billed as an all-ages event to raise money and gifts for needy children during the holidays.
Friday’s event featured a screening of the classic TV Christmas special “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” and collected about 60 toys, organizers said. By the time the drag performance started later that evening, they added, only about a dozen people were still in the audience.
Hansen did not respond to a request for comment.
Organizers said several people protested the event
customers for Russian crude, including refiners in China and India, will see a benefit in the combination of low prices and a relatively stable global oil market.
And even if those big buyers opt out of price cap regimen, “the cap will enable them to bargain for steeper discounts on Russian oil and benefit from greater stability in world oil markets,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Friday.
In a safeguard against an immediate shortage of oil and a spike in prices, ships that were loaded before Monday have until Jan. 19 to legally unload their cargoes, a price-cap loophole intended to prevent loaded ships from being stranded.
These moves are not expected to have a sudden impact on oil supplies for Europe, because the regulation has been in the works for months and traders and shippers have had time to adjust. In particular, energy companies have begun buying more oil from the United States, Brazil, Guyana and the Middle East. The EU is also giving exemptions to countries such as Hungary, whose energy needs depend on flows of Russian crude by pipeline, to quell their objections to the sanctions.
And refined products such as diesel from Russia will not be banned in Europe until February.
Governments are also trying to keep compliance requirements relatively simple to encourage shippers and others to participate rather than stay away from Russian oil as they did when Moscow started its war in February.
Whether these bets will pay off remains to be seen. Russia has said it will not accept a price cap and has threatened to cut off supplies to countries that comply with the arrangement. If Russia followed through on such steps and restricted oil as it has natural gas flows to Europe, it could wreak havoc in the oil market markets.
“These measures will undoubtedly have an impact on the stability of the global energy market,” Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesperson, said Monday, according to Tass, the Russian state-run news agency, referring to the embargo and price cap.
Analysts say that Russia has been pulling together a socalled shadow fleet of some 100 old tankers to export its crude and evade EU sanctions. There are doubts, however, about whether it has access to enough large tankers capable of carrying oil long distances.
Prices gyrated in the oil markets Monday, but then fell the most in more than two weeks as risk-averse investors pared crude positions ahead of the end of the year. West Texas Intermediate futures shed 3.8 percent to settle below $77 a barrel after earlier topping $82 on Monday.
One sanctions expert said the lengthy negotiations had produced a deal with the potential to work.
“I suspect the compromise that was reached gives the policy the best chance it could have to succeed,” said Edward Fishman, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Policy.
Fishman, who previously led planning and implementation of sanctions on Russia at the Department of State, said there were several reasons to be optimistic. One is the recent softness of oil markets, which he interpreted as meaning that Russian oil was no longer as critical to the markets as it was a few months ago. He also said the agreed $60 price was a “Goldilocks” level, not so high as to give Russia even more revenue than it is currently receiving or so low as to discourage Moscow from producing oil.
He also said that the cap’s provision to review the price level every two months, or more frequently if needed, provided the “flexibility” that historically has helped make sanctions, like those targeting Iran’s oil sales, effective.