Lawmakers go after drag shows as Arkansas’s culture war rages on – Arkansas Times

First, consider the optics. A tribunal of men — all white, Republican and married to women — convened Thursday to vote on a bill that would classify drag shows as adult entertainment, thereby limiting where they can happen and splattering a sludge of judgement over the entire genre.

Members of the Arkansas Senate’s City, County & Local Affairs Committee faced off Thursday with an eclectic crowd of people who listed reasons cultural, spiritual, religious and constitutional for why Senate Bill 43 has it wrong. The committee passed the bill anyway, clearing it to go to the full Senate for a vote. The bill also has to move through the House before becoming state law.

Brian Chilson

Sen. Gary Stubblefield (R-Branch), SB43’s sponsor and a member of the eight-person committee, gave an inadvertently amusing intro for his bill, one that made clear he’s never been to a drag show and has likely only heard about them in church.

Drag shows scare children and steal their innocence, he said. People move to Arkansas to get away from drag shows, he said, referring to a couple he met who moved here from California because of Arkansas’s values and morality.

He quoted at length an unnamed drag queen who he said asked him to protect Arkansas’s youth from the titillation of glittery gender-bending artistic displays. This person described drag queens to Stubblefield as people who “put on makeup, jump up on the floor, writhe around and do sexual things.”

“‘Would you want a stripper, or porn, to influence your child? It makes no sense at all!’ These are not my words. This is the testimony from a person who is a drag queen. There’s a lot of filth that goes on, a lot of sexual stuff that goes on backstage. There’s a lot of nudity, a lot of sex, a lot of things.”

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Only one person, Arkansas Family Council Director Jerry Cox, testified in favor of the bill. Well done, he told lawmakers.

A statuesque drag queen, a transgender attorney in a wheelchair, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, a science teacher and a businessman who stages drag shows and pageants in Arkansas and elsewhere testified, sometimes testily, about their objections.

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Showstopper Athena Sinclair, a statuesque queen in a floor-length gown cinched at the waist and eyelashes she could swat flies with, assured Stubblefield that the gymnastic orgies he described as happening backstage at drag shows are physical impossibilities.

Sinclair, who sometimes presents as a man named M.D. Hunter, showed not a bit of skin except her hands and face. “I have more clothes on than most people do in this room. I have on about eight pairs of tights at all times,” she said. That’s the norm for drag performers, so nudity is simply not an option.

“Drag is something that I do as self expression. Drag is simply art,” Sinclair explained. “Drag is not this sexually oriented thing you’ve been told that this is. Whoever submitted this bill doesn’t know what drag is.”

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Holly Dickson, executive director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Arkansas, established her woke bona fides by kicking off her testimony against the bill by giving the senators her pronouns. The drag show bill teems with constitutional violations on speech, artistic expression and equal protections, she told them. Equating drag queen brunches and story hours with peep shows and strip clubs, and regulating them as such, would be a clearly unconstitutional limitation on people’s right to freely express their gender.

“It is parents who have the constitutional right to control the religious and moral upbringing of their children. Not the government,” she said.

The bill’s wording is problematically broad, and could potentially even prevent transgender people from being able to sing in their church choirs or do karaoke, Dickson noted. Private homes aren’t even excluded.

Brian Chilson

Because the bill prevents drag performances on public property, it seems to preclude drag performances at municipal theaters, in parks, in parades, etc. The “Tootsie” run that just wrapped at the Robinson would be perfectly safe, according to some of the senators on the City, County & Local Affairs Committee. But the broad wording in the bill leaves it open to interpretation.

Some of the senators said the bill would not prevent drag queen story hours at libraries because while they happen on public property, those events aren’t meant to be “prurient.” But Stubblefield’s introduction to his bill, in which he railed against drag queen story hours, indicated at least some of the stakeholders have different understandings of what the bill would regulate and what it would not. And “prurient” isn’t defined in Arkansas law, meaning the issue of what is prurient and what isn’t would be open to interpretation unless or until a court interprets it for us.

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Little Rock teacher Jason Bailey drew applause when he noted that drag shows are often less prurient than the saucy uniforms of waitstaff in restaurants unregulated by this moral policing. “This bill is not about lewd performances, dress or behavior. If so, Hooters would be shut down.”

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Committee Vice Chairman Terry Rice (R-Waldron) admonished the audience of lawyers, drag queens, transgender people, disabled people and Democrats in suits to keep quiet and abstain from such displays.

Bailey noted that LGBTQ+ youth in Arkansas already face a tough environment, and laws like this one could cause them more suffering. “Arkansas is ranked 47th in education, 48th in child mortality but second in the nation for child hunger. Yet senators and House members of Arkansas spend their time attacking marginalized communities.”

Brian Chilson

After Bailey’s testimony, Hooters became a recurring theme of the hearing, as senators noted the ways Hooters is and is not similar to drag shows. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Jonesboro) defending Hooters as a family establishment that he said does not sexualize children and therefore does not need to be legislated like drag shows do, in his opinion. Sen. Joshua Bryant (R-Rogers) noted that since Hooters serves beer, it’s already is subject to some zoning restrictions.

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Michael Dutzer of Florida, a business owner and dad of two, is in Little Rock to work on the Miss Gay America Pageant and popped over to the Capitol to testify about the economic benefits of drag. The pageant he runs is an economic driver, filling hotel rooms and restaurants. Drag performances promote self-acceptance, diversity and inclusion, and as with other forms of art and entertainment, parents are the ones who should make decisions on what’s appropriate for their own kids.

Sen. Kim Hammer (R-Benton) rejected citizen Ally Thomlinson’s argument that if we’re going to do what the new governor says and give freedom and personal responsibility back to Arkansans, that should go for all Arkansans, “not just the ones with whom our values align.” Governor Sarah Sanders was only talking about school choice when she said that, Hammer said.

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With testimony wrapped up, Stubblefield closed for his bill with some Old Testament fire and brimstone from the book of Deuteronomy. “The Bible says if a man dresses like a woman and a woman dresses like a man, it is an abomination to God.”

This matters, he said, because the Bill of Rights did not come from the hands of men like you probably thought. “It came from almighty God,” he said.

Plus, Stubblefield said, did you hear about what happened in Florida? Disney required its Orlando employees to wear masks during pandemic flareups, and an executive said publicly that he would support repealing Ron DeSantis’ “don’t say gay” law. State lawmakers retaliated by fiddling with Disney’s tax benefits.

“Going woke is going broke,” Stubblefield said.

SB43 passed on a voice vote. Committee Chairman Sen. Scott Flippo (R-Bull Shoals) was not present.

Sinclair told the senators that her God loved everybody as she sashayed away from the hearing room. Bailey told them people will be peeking into lawmakers’ closets after the vote. Hammer and Rice said they would make an official note of Bailey’s comment, which they classified as a threat.

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