Understanding Drag Queens - by Andrew Sullivan

Understanding Drag Queens

Among the stranger aspects of the current intra-conservative ideological war is a phenomenon around which an entire recent debate swirled: Drag Queen Story Hour. In the recent debate — for want of a better word — between Sohrab Ahmari, representing the Trumpy post-liberals, and David French, a Reagan-style fusionist, it was a rare moment of agreement. They both took it as a premise that Drag Queen Story Hour — a relatively new trend in which drag queens read kids stories in local libraries — was a problem they both wish didn’t exist. Ahmari was, let’s say, a little more exercised about this than French but neither ever explained exactly why Drag Queen Story Hours are, in fact, a key symptom of the collapse of Western civilization, or, in Ahmari’s astonishing description, “demonic.”

I assume Ahmari believes that drag queens are some kind of sexual thing, entirely inappropriate for children, and a vehicle for undermining sexual morality or childhood innocence or the sexual binary. Or they’re all predatory pedophiles. Or something like that. Now I’ve never attended a DQSH (and I’ll take a wild guess and suspect Ahmari hasn’t either), but I do know a bit about drag queens. Up here in Provincetown, I live among them. And let me proffer the possibility that both French and Ahmari have no idea what they are talking about.

In essence, drag queens are clowns. They are not transgender (or haven’t been until very, very recently). They are men, mainly gay, who make no attempt to pass as actual women, and don’t necessarily want to be women, but dress up as a caricature of a woman. Sure, some have bawdy names, and in the context of a late night gay bar, they can say some bawdy things. 

But they’re not really about sex at all. They’re about costume and play; their clothes and hair are exaggerated, over-the-top parodies of women’s appearance; their makeup is often cray-cray, their wigs absurd. They also reinforce, rather than undermine, gender norms in a weird, over-the-top way. And they’re supposed to be funny, surreal, larger-than-life. In Provincetown, where they walk the streets in full outfits in the light of day, they get a simple reaction from passing straights and families and children: first a look of surprise, then a little bewilderment, even embarrassment occasionally, but almost always followed by a giggle or a smile or a laugh. Then they want their picture taken with them. 

Quelle horreur!

Children love drag queens the way they love clowns or circuses or Halloween or live Disney characters in Disney World. It’s dress-up fun. When my young niece and nephew, both under ten years old, came over to Ptown one year, I took them to see Dina Martina, a legendary comic master of the art. They loved it, laughed constantly through it, and were genuinely entertained. They were particularly amused when Dina turned around and she had back hair visible above her dress.

The idea that they were being exposed to anything sexual or inappropriate is absurd. When I was a kid in Britain, there was a tradition every Christmas, and there still is, of going to a pantomime, a campy theater production loosely based on a fairy-tale, where a central figure will be a man dressed up fantastically as a woman — the Wicked Witch or the Evil Godmother or other misogynist grotesqueries. It’s not a strip show, for Pete’s sake. It’s a laugh, designed for the entire family. And yes, Dave Chappelle, the sanest man in America at the moment, is right. Men dressed obviously as women are first and foremost funny.

So how on Earth is this a sign of the cultural apocalypse? These clowns read children’s stories to kids and their parents, and encourage young children to read books. This is the work of the devil? Please.

What is there in the Gospels, in any case, that even suggests that this could be evil? How can reading to kids in a silly costume offend God? Yes, the church does say that men and women should become one flesh etc. and it affirms the complementarity rather than interchangeability between men and women. Fine. But what has that to do with dressing up as the opposite sex to perform comedy? Show me where in the Magisterium it says that drag queens reading to kids is “demonic”, Sohrab. Seriously, show me.

And get a grip.