History Tells Us Drag Queen Shows Have a Revolutionary Agenda to Overturn Sexual Norms –

Columbia, Missouri, is a typical midwestern college town. Much like Ames, Iowa, or Lawrence, Kansas, or Champaign, Illinois, or Bloomington, Indiana, it has a population of roughly 100,000, sits in the middle of the state, and enfolds a large state university, in this case the University of Missouri. Full of college-related activities and removed from both urban angst and rural isolation, it presents an idyllic setting for raising children and edifying adults. Columbia is also typical in its standing as a center of liberal political sentiment amid great surrounding swaths of conservatism in rural and small-town areas (“oasis” and “desert” is the usual metaphor one hears from its academic denizens). Over the last couple of decades, Missouri has moved from being a long-time swing state to being a conservative bastion, as Republicans fill nearly all of the state’s congressional and Senate seats and state government offices. Columbia, however, like most college towns, has maintained a strongly progressive sensibility akin to the nearest urban centers, St. Louis to the east and Kansas City to the west. Progressive Democrats tend to dominate its city council, school board, and local state representatives.

A strong tradition illustrating the city’s liberal atmosphere is the annual Columbia Values Diversity breakfast, an event held for some 30 years on or around the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Hosted by the city government, it traditionally features speakers and presentations focused on the African-American civil rights movement, with representatives of the NAACP, local civic groups, and community leaders extolling King and his legacy. This year’s edition on Jan. 19, 2023, was typical, as a female African-American vice president of a WNBA team, and former star player, gave the keynote address, and a local African-American nonprofit leader was presented with an individual diversity award.

Drag performer at the Columbia Values Diversity Celebration (KMIZ ABC 17 News/YouTube)

The gathering, however, featured one notable departure. The last item on the program was a 20-minute performance by Nclusion Plus, a drag queen troupe, which presented four lip-synched musical numbers accompanied by sashaying and posing. At the end of the songs, several attendees rushed forward to give them dollar bills. It is hard to gauge the general reaction to the show, with film of the audience depicting some clapping and cheering while others appear to look on uneasily in disbelief or amusement. Then it was discovered that about 30 middle school children from the Columbia Public Schools were in attendance, as had been a custom for years, and witnessed the drag queen show. Upon this news, controversy erupted: the governor and attorney general of Missouri publicly condemned the drag queen portion of the event as inappropriate for kids, some Republican legislators threatened legislation restricting such shows, some parents of juvenile attendees expressed outrage that they had not been told about the drag show, Columbia leaders defended the performance and accused critics of anti-LBGTQ bigotry, and heated letters to local newspapers took sides. Public school officials scrambled to offer explanations.

As is true in many communities where drag queen performances or “Drag Queen Story Hours” for children have ignited controversy, the Columbia Values Diversity breakfast imbroglio raises several important issues with which concerned citizens are wrestling, either directly or by implication. What exactly is the agenda of drag queen performers and how does it impact the sexual values of our society? Are drag queen shows or story hours appropriate for children? Do drag queens and other sexually marginalized groups now have equal standing with racial and ethnic minorities to demand civic inclusion? A deeper dig into this heartland drama suggests some answers, while also shedding light on the larger culture wars roiling American society.

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While episodes of cross-dressing date back centuries, the history of drag queens in America is more recent and has gone through several stages. Emerging surreptitiously in the 19th century and continuing into the 20th century, drag queens outfitted in extravagant women’s clothing offered underground urban displays of sexual exhibition in clubs that piqued the attention of curious city-dwellers and attracted wide-eyed stares from provincial visitors. Beginning with the Stonewall Riots of 1969, however, drag became politicized as it was swept up in the burgeoning movement for gay liberation. It transformed from private titillation into a public display of rebellion against stuffy sexual restraints of bourgeois America. By the 1980s and 1990s, drag queens had emerged as important figures in the radical gender theorizing of figures such as Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, who drew upon the influential work of French theorist Michel Foucault to argue that a standard of heteronormativity provided a key support for Western patriarchal capitalism and needed to be overturned. In this sexual calculus of oppression, married heterosexuals stood at the top of the erotic pyramid, and stacked beneath them in descending order stood unmarried heterosexual couples, lesbian and gay male couples, promiscuous males and females, and finally, in Rubin’s nomenclature, “transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries [pedophiles].” Queer theory, as it came to be generically known, aimed to overthrow this hierarchy, replace the binary structure of male-female, and create a world of unbounded sexual expression. Drag queens — adult men wearing ball gowns and high-heels, glitter and sequins, outlandish face makeup, and bombastic hair — emerged as vivid symbols of sexual transgression that promised to undermine repressive Western norms.

Over the last two decades, queer theorists and drag queens themselves have issued numerous analyses and declarations of intent. Sarah Hankins, a queer theorist specializing in the study of drag queens (as well as an enthusiast for the genre), did extensive fieldwork in Boston-area drag venues and wrote an influential 2015 article describing drag performances as “potent stagings of gender, sex and social power as intersectional categories,” an endeavor that ranged from “on-stage teasing to lap dancing, grinding, kissing, mock oral sex, and sadomasochistic scenarios.” Hankins noted that drag queens employ “tropes of primitivism and degeneracy as tools of protest and liberation,” all in the interests of upending sexual hierarchies. Describing drag bar acts as “sex work” where drag queens labor for tips, she classified three types of performance — “Straight-Ahead Drag,” “Burlesque Drag,” and “Genderf**k Drag” — that employed varying techniques to present violations of the gender binary, titillating sexual display, and striptease. But regardless of the drag style, Hankins concluded, “overwhelmingly within this community, among performers and audiences alike, the affective pleasures of sex, arousal, and desire are valorized [i.e. the value is enhanced].”

In 1921, “Lil Miss Hot Mess” (the drag queen stage name of Harris Kornstein, a professor at the University of Arizona) co-wrote along with Harper Keenan, a transgender male queer theorist at the University of British Columbia, a piece that illuminated another important aspect of the drag enterprise: its educational mission, which focuses on reaching children. Titled “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood,” this handbook contended that the standard education system aimed to reproduce “the state’s normative vision of its ideal citizenry,” a crucial part of which was heteronormative gender roles. In the authors’ words, “the institutional management of gender has been used as a way of maintaining racist and capitalist modes of (re)production.” Drag queens promised to disrupt this indoctrination with “drag pedagogy,” which plants the seeds of “gender-transgressive themes” that subsequently grow to undermine the family, marriage, work, and other foundational elements of bourgeois capitalist society. But there is a broader drag educational goal: inspiring disruption and disobedience. Lil Miss Hot Mess and Keenan explain that drag pedagogy “is all about bending and breaking the rules.… There is a premium on standing out, on artfully desecrating the sacred. In other words, what we refer to as strategic defiance is encouraged …. [F]ostering collective unruliness also helps children to understand that they can have a hand in changing their environment.… [Drag] performers demonstrate a refusal to be told what to do.”

The revolutionary praxis of the drag queen movement appears in its clearly…