13.04.2023

Dragged over the coals

Why on earth is the right going nuts over drag queens? Paul Demarty investigates the latest moral panic

For years, we have watched with increasing exasperation the development of a moral panic centring on, of all things, drag acts. The American right has become increasingly deranged, especially about ‘drag queen story hour’ (DQSH) - a gentle and wholesome activity which is exactly what it sounds like: drag queens go into libraries or schools and read stories to young children. It is basically Jackanory in cherry lipstick and kitten heels.¹ This perfectly harmless phenomenon has become one of the more stupid sources of culture-war polarisation in American political culture, as red states line up to impose restrictions. Most recently, an attempt by Tennessee to impose age restrictions on drag events by reclassifying drag performance as “adult cabaret” has fallen foul of the courts, but some version of it will probably pass eventually.

Alas, this stupidity has inevitably made it across the Atlantic. With the Tories on the ropes, there is nothing else to be done but titillate Daily Mail-reading Herbert Gusset types with the spectacle of moral decay. American cultural hegemony over the Anglosphere has ensured a more or less exact copy of the controversy on these shores. The latest flashpoint is the passage of a motion at the conference of the National Education Union, reported to have called for more DQSH-type events to break down the “heteronormative culture” in schools.

I stress ‘reported’, since it has proven impossible to track down the original text. Various ‘worrying’ quotations were reproduced in an article by the Press Association’s Eleanor Busby, which was widely syndicated in local and national papers.² Nothing like the quotations mentioned by Busby appear in the NEU’s priority motions book.³ We reached out to Busby for clarification, but as yet have not heard back, nor have we been able to independently establish the existence of this motion.

Seaside panto

That said, though we could quibble with the ultra-liberal safe-spaces discourse in which the ‘scandalous’ quotes are couched, nothing more seems to have been proposed than that children should be introduced to the idea of non-standard gender presentations at a young age. It is, indeed, worrying that this is again being spoken of as a threat to children. Why should children be ‘protected’ from a practice many themselves engage in as part of utterly routine development (certainly many more than become drag queens in adulthood)? How have we gotten back to the point where it is acceptable to conflate such initiatives with child abuse?

As is depressingly often the case with these foolish panics, a perfectly venerable form of culture appears as a strange new depth of moral depravity. Men have dressed up as women for performance purposes since the days of Sophocles and Aeschylus; indeed, since women were not permitted to act, it was the only way they could appear in dramas at all. In Britain, this began to change in the Restoration period, which saw a great revival in the theatre all round - and with it the first women actors. Nonetheless, there have always been niches for cross-dressing male actors - the most obvious (and most relevant, given the ‘think of the children!’ nonsense all around us) being the humble pantomime dame. If the culture war hysterics really wanted to ‘return to tradition’, they would demand more drag acts, not fewer.

As for the latest excuse for the panic - that ‘drag queen story hour’ and the like are objectionable because they expose children to sexual content - we would once again point to panto. A certain sauciness is very much part of the family fun; Widow Twankey must have some facility with the double entendre for the thing to really come off. Videos of supposedly ‘inappropriate’ content in drag events for kids routinely go viral, but I have yet to see any behaviour naughtier than you would expect in a provincial theatre on a cold winter’s evening.

The real problem, as is incredibly obvious to anyone not reaching desperately for some excuse, is that drag acts today are very much part of gay culture. The pantomime dame - like the various grotesques of carnivale and similar ‘subversive’ forms of mass culture - is a strictly temporary inversion of the ordinary relationship between sex and gender presentation: a grotesque satire of femininity. The travesti of pre-modern and early-modern theatre are simply means of excluding women from public life. Both, then, are amenable to conservatism.

The modern drag show - whether in the “adult cabarets” so feared in Tennessee, or in the cheerfully sanitised form of the ultra-successful reality TV show RuPaul’s drag race (a sort of X-Factor for drag performers) - instead explicitly celebrates gender non-conformity as a normal feature of society. It does so in a theatrical form, of course, with the elaborate campy costumes of the drag queens; but by implication it rejects the automatic connection of sexual desire with sexual difference. An excuse will always be found to segregate drag queens from pantomime dames, in spite of their near total formal equivalence, because the drag queens stand in for homosexuality by way of a flamboyant performance of gender non-conformity, and the real problem for the anti-drag ranters is not ‘age-appropriateness’ or ‘sexualisation’, but homosexuality.

French-ism

It is difficult to pinpoint the origin of the DQSH panic, but it is indisputably tied up with the advance of a post-liberal or reactionary turn in conservative thought, especially in the United States.

One key moment was the publication in the Christian right journal First Things of Sohrab Ahmari’s essay, ‘Against David French-ism’.⁴ French, here, stands in for the hegemonic model of American conservatism - sometimes called ‘fusionism’, the fusion being between libertarian, free-market economic policy and illiberalism, with regard to social issues. French could not be more typically a ‘fusionist’-movement conservative, while Ahmari is an altogether different kettle of fish - once a Trotskyist, a convert to Catholicism and neo-conservatism, and today an advocate of isolationist, far-right social democracy.

His polemic with French was a transitional moment, but is relevant here, because its motivating incident was a DQSH event:

I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no “polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war”. (What prompted my ire was a Facebook ad for a children’s drag queen reading hour at a public library in Sacramento.) I added: “The only way is through” - that is to say, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.

David French’s error is to suppose that disputes between Christians and the ‘pagan’ libertines can be left to a purely liberal regime, whereby we all agree to ‘live and let live’. In fact, Ahmari notes, the libertine enemy has more of a grasp on this than the Frenchistas:

Individual experiments in living - say, taking your kids to a drag reading hour at the public library - cannot be sustained without some level of moral approval by the community. Autonomy-maximising liberalism is normative, in its own twisted way. Thus, it represents the interiorisation, and fulfilment, of French’s worldview. And this is how David French-ism gets trapped.

The essential problem is that fighting for conservative values as a matter of religious liberty concedes too much. For a conservative Catholic like Ahmari, it is a matter of faith as of the first Vatican council that the moral teachings of the church are, in principle, rationally demonstrable (evangelicals like French have tended to be resistant to such rationalism, admittedly). Defending such doctrines qua cultural quirks, which should be indulged with the same beneficence as, say, sexual fetishes, merely opens up the way for their rejection as barbaric and harmful prejudices, in the same way that paedophilia is not treated with the same magnanimous indulgence as are other paraphilia. Thus, according to Ahmari, there is a need to fight the culture war as a war, not as a polite discussion.

Reversals

Ahmari’s article was a straw in the wind. The drift among the global right has been away from David French-ism, towards (to take a prominent icon of the contemporary right) Viktor Orbán-ism - the promotion of a ‘thick’ conservative creed that proposes some fully worked-out view of the good life, and seeks to exclude supposed ‘perversions’ of that vision from the public sphere.

The salience of drag from this point of view is considerable. With men presenting themselves theatrically as women, it permits a rhetorical slippage from transgender identity back to gay identity, allowing conservatives to turn one backlash into another: it catches gay men in the act, so to speak, of directly undermining conventional gender roles and revelling in doing so; and it ties liberal cultural values to a particular kind of commodified sexual presentation. This enables rightwing conservatives to pose as pseudo-left anti-capitalists, painting their ‘woke’ enemies as instruments of vast moneyed interests. The specific story-hour panic, meanwhile, allows an undertone of paedophile threat to creep into the rhetoric.

Thus something no more threatening than the most vanilla seaside panto is written about in tones once reserved for alleged satanic ritual abuse. Thus public libraries are besieged by enraged suburban prudes; thus the anti-woke mind virus spreads from country to country.

The main lesson, perhaps, is that Martin Luther King’s arc of history is quite capable of bending back on itself. Western societies, including Britain and America, have achieved some measure of enlightenment in their prevailing attitudes to sexual minorities. (Indeed, for all the red-state red meat being thrown around, a majority of Republican voters approve of the legality of gay marriage.) But they have done so amidst obscene inequality and pervasive corruption, and so the way is open for an Orbán type to present broader social malfunction as an effect of liberal moral decadence.

Liberal, single-issue, NGO-type politics cannot, in the end, compete. It offers the worst of both worlds: a malcoordinated melange of moral demands than can nonetheless be presented by the reactionary right as a single conspiracy, with Orbán’s arch-enemy, George Soros, no doubt to blame. Alas, the left has steadily collapsed into the same disaggregated strategic muddle, in the name of being good builders of the existing social movements. Unable thereby to detach itself on questions of sexual unfreedom and other forms of oppression from the hegemonic liberal constructions of these issues, it is thereby quite as trapped as David French.

Ahmari is right, at least, that some vision of the good is at issue in both the liberal and conservative contenders in today’s culture war. Yet it is telling that, however polarised they may be, both sides fall so easily into their opposites (conservatives argue, in liberal fashion, for ‘religious liberty’ to be properly respected; liberals demand punitive state action against protestors at DQSH events, abortion clinics and so on).

In principle, the socialist movement offers a true resolution of this quandary: a social ethic of radical solidarity and profound democratic spirit - “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”, and all that. But social ethics need a social base. All encroachments on the hard-won freedoms of gay people must be strenuously resisted. But we must in the end be equal to leading these struggles, instead of ever tailing one wing of an increasingly dysfunctional bourgeois political class.

. This article discusses drag more or less exclusively as the performance of femaleness by males. Drag queens have vastly more cultural penetration than drag kings, for whatever reason, and certainly loom larger in the imagination of panicked conservatives.↩︎
. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/teachers-lgbt-brianna-ghey-tate-britain-mary-bousted-b2314800.html.↩︎
. neu.org.uk/media/24336/view.↩︎
. www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/against-david-french-ism.↩︎