Okay, who have been to a drag show? Raise your hand!
I have and it is not something to get into a tizzy over.
It is lip-syncing to popular songs, telling jokes or singing and showing cleavage. That’s it. There is no nudity, no simulated sex, nothing.
Drag shows have a long history in the South. Why are they drawing threats now?
USA Today via Yahoo News
By Danielle Dreilinger
December 13, 2022
[…]
Especially scary because it was one of an increasing number of drag shows, across the South and the nation, facing threats and protests — at least 126 in 2022 through mid-November, including 48 in the South, GLAAD reported. The highest number of threats were in North Carolina, followed by Texas. Legislative efforts to limit drag are underway in six states and the U.S. House.
[…]
Drag performers typically wear elaborate costumes that exaggerate traditional gender norms, and perform stylized routines — often lip-syncing to popular songs, telling jokes or singing. They may show cleavage, not unlike Dolly Parton. It’s most common to wear women’s clothing, but performers may be of any gender and wear pretty much anything — there are drag kings as well as queens, and performers who blur gender entirely. If you’ve seen the musical “Hairspray” or any of 40-plus Bugs Bunny cartoons, you’ve seen drag.
As the article goes on to say drag is nothing new, it has been around since the Roman days. Recently look at Flip Wilson, Milton Berle, Tom Hanks, and who could not forget the #1 crossdressers Corporal Klinger Jamie Farr!
But now it seems like the Republicans would like to lock them all up.
Staff at the ACLU and the Family Research Council both said they haven’t found an organized campaign to limit drag shows.
Rather, social media and conservative news outlets have buzzed over a handful of videos of drag performances with children in the audience.
Outcry over these events spurred Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson to file a bill that’s been characterized as banning drag. Johnson said that’s inaccurate.
The bill would limit all sexually explicit performances in areas where kids could be present, he said: “It doesn’t matter if it’s by someone who’s dressed in drag or not.” It would not affect drag shows in age-restricted venues, or people in drag marching in a parade or reading at a G-rated story hour, he said.
[…]
People like Johnson say they just want to make sure children aren’t exposed to sexual material, like parents of all stripes don’t want kids seeing online porn.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson has never seen a drag show so they have this image of an orgy on stage.
Of course the Bible Thumpers are in on the act
“With the children, we’ve got a crisis. The building is on fire,” said Sharayah Colter, a member of the Conservative Baptist Network’s steering council. But underneath that, “It’s not right to be questioning the identity that God has given people when he has created them — he creates them male and female.”
From that perspective, it doesn’t matter if a drag queen is wearing an evening gown reading “Goodnight Moon”: It’s gender-bending, and it’s unacceptable.
Colter and some evangelicals believe the prevalence of LGBTQ people in the cultural discourse, including through drag, makes people, especially children, more likely to be gay or trans.
[…]
Accusations that gay people are trying to groom or convert children are familiar. They are also untrue. There is zero evidence that LGBTQ people are more likely to molest children. Science has found sexual orientation and gender identity are innate, "influenced by genetic factors," GLAAD spokeswoman Barbara Simon said.
Ding, ding, ding!
And that folks is the bottom line, “makes people, especially children, more likely to be gay or trans” and “groom or convert children” they still believe that we are not born this way but lost our path and somehow decided to be “GAY.” (That’s why they are still gun-ho on conversion therapy.)
That is the big divide between conservatives and liberals. The conservatives are still living in the 1950s when homosexuality was believed to be a choice and gender is only determined by chromosomes.
Police routinely raided those New Orleans balls. A 1972 issue of “Drag” magazine reported that four men were arrested at Memphis’ The Door lounge. The performers were booked on charges they impersonated females, and the owner for permitting men to sing, dance and kiss in dresses and wigs. “Crime is certainly rampant in Memphis!” the magazine noted, with a practically audible eye-roll.
“We were felons,” Pratt said. In the 1970s, she lost custody of her two sons because she was a lesbian. The Supreme Court didn’t overturn sodomy laws until 2003.
And that’s what they want to do is bring us back to the 1950s when father knew best, gays were in the closet, trans were locked up in jail, and Blacks knew their place. The Republican dream is to criminalize us again.
I have been to a number of drag shows and there was nothing to be embarrassed about, many of my friends are drag performers, and there is even a drag queen who on his Facebook page has “Performance artist, political Queen, psychologist in semi-retirement.”
For me drag shows are not my cup of tea and that is one of the things, if you don't want your child at a drag show don't bring them, but don't other what to do or watch.
That is one of the reasons for the book banning they want to go back to when everything was Lilly white and straight on the bookshelves.
Susan Campbell (opinion): CT Republicans fail another book report for 2nd-graders
CT Insider
December 13, 2022
To people who’ve lost sleep over it, the 5-year-old child of state Rep. Roland Lemar, D-New Haven, and Yale clinical professor of law Anika Singh Lemar has seen the children’s picture book “Julián is a Mermaid.”
More importantly, she is unscarred by it.
I have read it, too, and while the book didn’t make me reconsider my gender identity — as some critics fear the book will do — the theme of an abuela’s undying love made me smile.
Of course, there’s a backstory.
A couple of weeks ago, the Connecticut GOP shared on their official Twitter account a video that was originally posted by @LibsofTikTok, which has a nasty reputation for posting anti-LGBTQ content. The tweet included a video of a Darien mother who recently took issue with “Julián,” winner of a 2018 American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award. By the mother’s account, the book, which she said was read to her daughter’s second-grade class, is an “inappropriate” “story of a little boy who is transitioning to a little girl.”
In fact, author Jessica Love wrote a story about a boy who wants to be a mermaid, and I’m guessing Republicans posting on Twitter didn’t read the book before sharing that tweet. After all, the outrage machine isn’t fueled by information. It runs on energy and snark. The mermaid transition could be a metaphor, I suppose, but not for most second-graders. Does anyone believe that a picture book would prompt any one to say, “Oh, wow, I’m a girl” when they’ve lived their lives as a boy? I read a lot of books about trains to my son, yet here he is, crashing toward his 40s, and he’s still not a train. As the Darien mother late said on “Fox & Friends,” while she supports the LGBTQ community and her town’s teachers, “We're talking about seven-year-old children who believe in the tooth fairy. They believe in unicorns. This is completely off their radar.”
AWK, Polly wants a cracker, AWK!
I wonder how many of these conservatives have actually read the books that want banned?
Did you read the book?
Oh we can read that, it filth!
Then how do you know it should be banned?
Fox News told me!
And that is one of the things, if you don't want your child read the book don't let them, but don't other what to do or read.
