2022 was the year of the drag queen but backlash sparked a new … – iNews

“I’ve had death threats, I’ve moved house, then had more death threats,” said drag queen Aida H Dee — real name Sab Samuel — talking to i this summer about what life is like for him because he hosts events reading stories to children while dressed in drag. “I’ve got people threatening to come to my house. I’ve got people calling me up and calling me a ‘paedo’. I’ve got people calling me up pretending to be press. It is harassment and it’s constant.”

This is Britain in 2022, the year drag queens went mainstream. Once the besequinned entertainers lip-syncing in local gay bars, now they’ve been catapulted into prime-time success and right into something much more dangerous: a new frontline in the culture wars.

More than 50 years since drag queens fought back against police brutality at New York’s Stonewall Inn — often cited as the genesis of the gay liberation movement — today they are fighting a wider, more orchestrated battle. Social conservatives, the far right, the alt-right, anti-trans groups, anti-gay groups, and a ragtag mix of religious or conspiracist elements have seized upon these performers as the ultimate symbol of Everything That’s Wrong With Liberalism — galvanising their supporters to attack LGBT rights along with any value that looks a bit progressive. Wedge heels have become the wedge issue.

The backlash is multi-layered, from online hate campaigns to the introduction of new anti-LGBT laws, to violent, armed protests outside drag events. It’s more extreme in the US, but it’s ricocheting across the UK and spreading throughout the globe.

It could have been a year to celebrate. At the close of 2022, drag queens have never sashayed across so many TV screens, featured in so much news media, adored by so many, nor sprung from the lips of such high-profile politicians.

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RuPaul’s Drag Race began just 14 years ago without much hoopla, on Logo TV, a minor cable network in the US dedicated to serving the LGBTQ community. But in 2022, it has become a major franchise across 17 countries — with versions in France, Spain, Mexico, Australia, the UK, and many more — and watched globally.

In Britain, it’s shown on the BBC, whose flagship soap opera, EastEnders, this year introduced a new drag character. Spotting the trend, ITV launched its own prime-time Saturday night version of Drag Race this autumn called Queens For the Night, where hapless heterosexual celebrities attempted to become strutting, jibing divas — with mixed results. The straights, you might say, have never wanted a piece of the action more.

This included those in power. US President, Joe Biden, invited Marti Cummings, a non-binary queen, to attend the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act, enshrining both inter-racial and same-sex marriage into federal law. And Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister, appeared on his country’s version of Drag Race.

Britain has always been partial to a spot of dragging up (depending on how you define it). From the times of Shakespeare when men played all the women’s parts, to the music hall era of both male and female impersonators, right through to the pantomime dame, where for generations children have laughed as blokes in frocks thigh-slapped on stage.

On television, audiences loved them all, from Dame Edna to Les Dawson, Kenny Everett to Lily Savage. But mostly as an occasional, exotic treat. The popularity of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, the hit West End musical about a 16-year-old drag queen from Sheffield, which spawned a UK tour and last year a feature film, finally cemented mainstream Britain’s love of drag queens. Now, the omnipresence of drag can be described in the title of one of this year’s biggest movies: Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Beyond our screens, drag queens now roam across the land hosting drag brunches; high-kicking, hair-flicking and death-dropping to crowds of hen parties guzzling pricey mimosas just to soak up the big-haired campery (A word to the wise: do not expect good food there. You’re paying for the glitter). Drag bingo events multiplied too, turning strip-lit evenings of sticky-carpets-and-crocheted-cardigans into a must-see, Gen-Z proper night out.

But it was the third activity that sparked the war: drag story hour. These events in which queens read books to children, often in libraries, brought all the hatred to the yard.

In America, this year alone, there have been 141 protests or serious threats against drag events, across 47 states, according to a study by GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and Equality Texas, both LGBT charities. “The analysis shows increasingly violent rhetoric and incidents as the year progressed, including armed white supremacists demonstrating in Texas and the firebombing of a Tulsa donut shop that had hosted a drag event in October. Equality Texas documented additional targeted events throughout the year, including an armed demonstration and confrontation in San Antonio.”

The attacks also included a bomb threat made against a restaurant in South Carolina for hosting a drag brunch; rocks and smoke bombs thrown at a drag performance in Oregon; and most absurdly, death threats made against a dog shelter in Alabama after it invited a drag queen to read from the book Walter the Farting Dog to a room full of canines.

Some were organised by neo-Nazis, including the group NSC-131, the founder of which ended up in court charged with affray, after allegedly fighting with a counter-protester outside a story hour event in Massachusetts. Around 20 members of his white supremacist group had arrived at the event wearing black face masks, holding placards emblazoned with “pedo scum off our streets”.

The mass shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ night club in Colorado Springs, in late November, in which five people, including two trans people, were killed and a further 25 were injured, only heightened the sense of terror. A drag queen was celebrating her birthday in the club that night when it was turned into a bloody massacre. In response, many performers ramped up their personal security.

“We’re trying to smile and make people happy for the holidays and in the back of our heads we’re thinking, ‘I hope I don’t get shot’,” the former Drag Race contestant Jinkx Monsoon told NBC.

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Parallel to the protests came the political interventions: attempts to legislate against drag queens. The Idaho Family Policy Center, a Conservative Christian group, said it would introduce a bill into the state legislature in January 2023 banning drag performances in public venues. In Texas, a similar bill was already introduced in November. Under the House Bill 643, shows by either trans people or drag queens would be outlawed.

RuPaul, appearing on The Late Late Show, described such legislative attempts as “a diversion tactic to take the narrative away from the gun debate into something [else], to scare people into thinking about something else. And they’ve been successful”.

Prominent Republican Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, meanwhile, said it “should be illegal to take children into drag queen shows”, that schools should lose federal funding if they “intentionally confuse children about gender/sexuality”, that any teacher “caught doing so should be fired”, and that this was necessary to “protect children from child grooming”. Yet in the final week of December, Ms Greene voted against the Respect for Child Survivors Act, a bi-partisan bill in the House of Representatives that would improve how the FBI investigated child abuse cases.

Alongside the anti-drag protests, LGBTQ-related books are now being banned from school libraries in the US, according to PEN America. The two most frequently banned titles in the last year were LGBTQ subjects: Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson.

Leading media figures ramped up anti-drag and anti-trans commentary in 2022, often conflating the two as twin evils. In a segment about the White House inviting to its doors both a drag queen and a trans woman, Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, one of the most watched men in America, called the move “an effort to degrade the country, to make it into a joke” and said it was not unfair to accuse such people of “being creepy with kids”. Greg Kelly, a US conservative TV anchor with his own show on Newsmax, said in December that drag queens reading to children is a “violation of my constitutional rights, even if it’s not my kid”.

In the UK, the former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies MBE said she would not allow her children to attend a drag story hour event, calling it a “pornstar appropriation of women” (There is no porn or sex, just entertainers in wigs reading books. Feminist positions on drag vary as much as they do on trans rights). Laurence Fox, the actor-turned-right-wing-activist, and former candidate for mayor of London, lost the latest round of his high court libel battle against a gay ex-trustee of Stonewell and a drag queen called Crystal, after calling them “paedophiles” on Twitter.

And in an echo of UK’s Section 28, (the 1988 law that effectively banned teachers from discussing homosexuality) the Free Speech Union called on the Prime Minister, “to ensure children aren’t being politically indoctrinated in schools…” and in particular, “The radical, politically charged academic theory underpinning the pedagogic technique known as ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’.” Activists operating under the name Safe Schools Alliance UK intervened too. The group wrote to the Children’s Commissioner in England asking her to stop Drag Queen Story Hour events, claiming it is “damaging”, “promotes the transgression of boundaries”, brings “adult ideology into children’s spaces” and is therefore “an abuse of power”.

The cry of drag opponents rests on an old lie: that gay men (in this case, those in dresses) pose a threat to children, to family life, and therefore to the decent foundations of Western society. They project what anti-LGBTQ folk have always projected onto this community: sex and deviancy. The wearing of make-up, skirts, or bras becomes in this mindset inherently sexual. Love and acceptance is never mentioned. Female drag queens, now rising in numbers and appearing on RuPaul’s Drag Race, are ignored. And the real culprits who harm children, women, and families — the male heterosexual abuser, a culture of patriarchal sexual violence — are overlooked.

The protests against drag queens reading stories to children exploded throughout Britain in 2022, from Bristol to Bodmin to Welling. By August, a seemingly nervous Rochdale Borough Council “postponed” a Drag Queen Story Hour event it was due to hold with Aida H Dee, who said it was done without discussion and without a future date offered. Sab Samuels, 27, the man behind the persona — who introduced such reading classes to this country — had grown all-too used to the attacks against him. A few weeks earlier, a mob of protesters invaded his story hour event at Reading Central Library, brandishing megaphones, with banners reading “Welcome, groomers”, “nonce upon a time”, and falsely accusing the drag queen of “child grooming”.

Shortly after, Samuel spoke with i to describe what the threats against him have meant, in particular how the police have had to intervene.

“I’ve got a mark on my mobile number, my address, and my boyfriend’s number, so if either of us call 999, the police come straight to the location without really having to explain why,” he said. The day we spoke, he had already received two threatening calls. He detailed a typical example.

“Someone called me up and said, ‘I’m coming to get you’, stated my home address, hung up, called again a few minutes later, gave my address again, and said, ‘See you soon’. I had to evacuate my house and call the police.”

The purpose, for Samuel, is clear. “It’s a type of censorship,” he said, “like a second Section 28. And it’s getting worse. I’ve got protection for my personal safety hidden in different parts of my house, just in case I ever get barged in on in the middle of the night. I fear for my life. It’s a horrible thing to have to say out loud.”

But, like the drag queens at Stonewall, Samuel isn’t going anywhere. “All of this hate is just fuel for me to be able to keep going. These people are the reason I do what I do. These people are the reason why I started Drag Queen Story Hour in the UK.”

He grew up in the silence of Section 28, knowing he was different. “I dealt with gay slurs my entire childhood. I started asking myself, ‘what’s wrong with me?’ All of this self-loathing is the reason why [I do this]. I didn’t have a role model.”

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Reading books to children, while dressing and expressing part of who he is, could help young people be themselves or be more accepting of others, he said. “I want to be the person I wish I’d had at their age.” His concern for kids who feel alone extends to the adults who attack him. “I think these people must be very scared of the world,” he said.

That world — our world — is dividing ever further apart. In the last few weeks, Barbados has decriminalised homosexuality and Ukraine has introduced new legislation against homophobic hate speech. But its aggressor, Vladimir Putin, has just signed a new law expanding its ban on the so-called “propaganda” of LGBT-related material for minors to adults too. For it to be illegal to publicly express non-heterosexual relations is an effective criminalisation of the LGBT community.

The creeping clampdown on sexual minorities by Putin’s ally, Viktor Orban, took a distinctly 2022 turn this year too after the Hungarian prime minister called for “less drag queens and more Chuck Norris”, referring to the tough-guy martial artist film actor. And in Uganda, the government shut down Sexual Minorities Uganda, its only LGBT rights organisation.

2022 might be the year of the drag queen but it’s too early to tell if this era of history ultimately belongs to the queens, their fans, and their community — or to those trying to destroy them.