Dec 19, 2022
The Truth About the Conservative Drag Queen Panic
It demonstrates why organized conservatism has a credibility problem
Recently, there has been a moral panic about drag queens among a certain type of culture war ‘conservative’. According to the people promoting this panic, drag queens are always sexual, and they are putting on what should be adult-only performances for increasingly young audiences. I actually agree that ‘drag queen story hour’ is a problematic idea. Coming from a trans woman’s perspective, I worry that kids don’t know enough to differentiate between drag queens and trans women. This might mean that they end up associating trans women with drag subconsciously, even when they grow up. However, I do think the moral panic around drag queens has gotten to an irrational, and perhaps dangerous level. The only way to prevent irrational moral panics is to stick to the objective truth, and not allow emotionally charged rhetoric to color the picture. Therefore, today, I want to analyze the issue, in an objective way.
Firstly, it is not true that all drag queens are sexual. Some might be, but you certainly can’t say that all are. To actively promote such an unfair smear on all drag queens is, let’s be honest, anti-gay. Drag queens have been a part of gay culture for as long as most people can remember, and almost all drag queens are gay men. You really can’t deny the fact that drag queens are a part of the gay community, and attacking drag queens is attacking the gay community. This has real life effects too: gay venues that put on drag shows have been targeted by right-wing culture warriors in recent months, in a way that hasn’t happened for several decades at least.
On the other hand, there is really a good case to be made that too many things that should be adult-only are, well, no longer adult-only in modern Western society. The popular culture of the Western world is sexualized to a level that is not seen anywhere else, and I have long argued that this is a problem. I agree that kids need a healthy environment to grow up in, and they don’t have that right now. It is good that people want this to change.
The problem is, the frustration has been misdirected by people with an anti-LGBT agenda. Sexualized drag queens are certainly nowhere near the top of the list of things that kids are exposed to, but shouldn’t be. As many have argued, we should probably look at banning child pageants first. The point is, given that the problem of kids being exposed to inappropriate things is mostly created by heterosexual society, to blame drag queens is basically to scapegoat gay people for straight people’s sins. In fact, organized conservatism has a long history of blaming gay people for straight people’s sins, and this is a major reason why conservatism is so unpopular among Millennials and Gen Z. I’m old enough to remember how organized conservatism created a moral panic over gay marriage, to distract from the fact that the 2003 Iraq War was unjustified, costly, and simply immoral.
There is nothing wrong with wanting sexualized drag performances to be adult-only. The way to do this is to apply the rules across the board, to straight and gay people alike. Not only to drag queens. Fair rules that are well justified will be respected. On the other hand, people will rightly push back against discriminatory rules that target particular minorities, and history shows that this is the right thing to do too. If we allow organized conservatism to continue to link otherwise good values with discriminatory policies, traditional values like modesty, decency, family values and so on will suffer, because they will be associated by young people with homophobia and bigotry. In other words, organized conservatism is giving traditional values a bad name, by associating them with discriminatory policy. Anyone who wants to preserve traditional values should push back against this.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who recently published her autobiography The TaraElla Story, in which she described the events that inspired her writing.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory.
