Why the Far Right Is Fixated on Drag Queens

If one watches the news even casually, one will notice the growing obsession of far right talking heads and opportunistic Republican candidates and officeholders with gays in general and transgender individuals in particular.  We are seeing a revival of the vicious trope that LGBT individuals are "groomers" - even though pedophiles are almost exclusively STRAIGHT males - and an effort to again erase discussion of gays and science based sex education in schools. None of this is new among the far right "Christians" who I call Christofascists who have been obsessed with gays for decades and seek to stamp out any recognition or acknowledgement that their 12th century dogma on sex and sexuality is false and not anchored in medical or scientific reality.  With this demographic now among the most powerful segment in the Republican Party base it should be no surprise that this obsession has been mainstreamed into the GOP as shown by the policies and rethoric pushed by soulless opportunists like  Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas and Glen Youngkin in Virginia who seek to use fear of those deemed "other"- mainly gays and blacks - for political gain. But as a piece in The Atlantic notes, something more is going on, namely the rise of anti-democratic, fascist forces in America and abroad that once again seek to control personal freedoms (on coming to power, Hitler closed Berlin's gay bars and sent tens of thousands of gays to concentration camps).  Here are article highlights:

On Tuesday, a suspect accused of fatally shooting five people at a Colorado Springs queer nightclub in November was charged with hate crimes, assault, and murder. Elsewhere, armed protesters have been intimidating drag performers. And meanwhile, some states have banned gender-affirming health care and LGBTQ-inclusive instruction in public schools. Chase Strangio, an ACLU lawyer who has written for The Atlantic, argues that the LGBTQ community is under threat in part because of broader antidemocratic currents.

There has been deeply embedded structural discrimination and violence against LGBTQ people for centuries in the United States and around the world. So while it’s not new, I think that what we’re seeing right now is a sort of escalation in the types of rhetoric targeting LGBTQ people coming from both public and private actors, which of course results in the escalation of extralegal discrimination and violence.

What’s driving this escalation? Why now? . . . . I think it’s a combination of things. Part of it is a backlash to the increased visibility of LGBTQ people, as well as increased informal legal protection gained through Supreme Court wins in marriage and the Title VII cases. When you have a dynamic of people gaining more access to supportive public discourse, more legal protections, and increased visibility in popular culture and media, there’s a dynamic of more people feeling like they can live as themselves.

In addition to the backlash against those successes in visibility, we’re seeing a resurgence of far-right politics around the world and in the United States—a rise in far-right governments and far-right nongovernmental actors. And a feature of far-right government is a sort of fixation on the control of family and sexuality. If you look globally, you can see that anti-LGBTQ rhetoric rises with the rise in fascism. . . . That’s why we’re seeing this historical moment of anti-LGBTQ backlash in the same places where we’re seeing those types of governments rising around the world.

It’s all so inextricably connected, all part of a desire to control and restrict people’s sense of possibility and freedom. You can look at something like [the conservative activist] Christopher Rufo’s campaign against what he calls “critical race theory” and related efforts to restrict historically accurate teaching in public schools, and see how that quickly morphed into the same individuals targeting drag performance, trans health care, and the mention of LGBTQ people in schools.

All of this can be understood in two fundamental ways. One is the simple political opportunism of trying to [mobilize] voters in the lead-up to the next presidential election by stoking a sense of fear, of unfamiliar change. The second is exactly what I mentioned: The more you can control people’s sense of possibility, of expansiveness and freedom, the more that governments can expand their authority over people’s lives in general. I think we’re seeing those things in dynamic interaction at this moment.

The history of policing gender and criminalizing cross-dressing was always targeted at trans people, but it was also targeted at drag performance. We have a long history of criminal cross-dressing laws, and drag performers [have been arrested in the past]. If what you really want is to target queerness and transness, then drag is a huge part of that. It's a visible celebration of culture.

That has been combined with the fear and outrage being pushed from far-right media outlets, which have capitalized on the historical tradition of calling LGBTQ people “groomers” and saying that we pose a threat to children to create this moment where we’re seeing threats on children’s hospitals, attacks on drag performance, and so on. This is unfortunately part of a long tradition of positioning queerness and transness as “criminal.”

On the one hand, we’ve made incredible forward progress. . . . . At the same time, targeted rhetorical and governmental attacks are increasing dramatically. And so we have a sense of progress, but it’s difficult to sit in it, because there’s such precarity in all that’s happening right now. The way in which anti-trans antagonism has become so commonplace that people feel comfortable with it, I think that is a really scary proposition as we move into the presidential-election lead-up—especially when you consider the rise of far-right governments in the U.S. and around the world.

I feel that, with more visibility in the ability to find our people, there will continue to be beautiful and flourishing community spaces. Unfortunately, I think we are also going to keep seeing really troubling and expansive assaults on those spaces, and on our communities.

It is an unsettling time to be LGBT in America even with the passage of the Respect Marriage Act by Congress.  Too many Republicans are only too happy to use hate and fear to promote themselves.