Why People Hate Drag Queens

It's Not About God Or Saving The Children

Meet Holly Would, my drag alter-ego. A one-time thing, comic Richard Ryder (aka Wilma Fingerdoo) interviews people while putting them in drag for the first time. This took two bloody hours. I don’t know how queens do it - and look far, far better than this in the doing.

THEORY :: The opening ceremonies of this summer’s Paris Olympics provided the latest justification for drag queen haters to go off. 

Fury was global, but the drag dissension spewed - in fact, all drag dissension - wasn’t and isn’t for typical reasons we’re fed. It never has been.

In case you missed it, after the Olympics’ drag number, offended Christians and far right-wingers, using the currently accepted societal norm of weaponizing “offense” to extreme virtue signal and - moreso - try and control others’ behaviour, expressed outrage when they mistook a tableau of drag queens as a portrayal of the gay painter Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” 

A mockery of Christianity!  Ridiculing religion!

No forgiveness, no following the word of their beloved Bible and loving these queens and their performance regardless, no love thy neighbour to be found. They dug their heels in and screamed blasphemy.

And ended up looking the way the evangelical or fervently religious quite often do: un-Christ-like, hypocritical - and ignorant. The queens were actually re-creating Giovanni Bellini and Titan’s “Feast of the Gods,” a nod to Greek gods, what with the Olympics originating in Greece and all. Jesus, even the Pope, who you’d think would recognize “The Last Supper” when he saw it - or didn’t - issued an icy response to what was overall a very brief dragtastic moment within the hours-long ceremony.

But say the queens were actually posing à la mode de “Last Supper”. What, exactly, is wrong with that? Would Jesus, dark-skinned, often homeless, a refugee on the run, unmarried and childless, who washed people’s feet, and hung out with hookers, the marginalized, the downtrodden, the loathed, and the forgotten, in his Christ-ness, not have loved the Olympic’s wee drag queen number, inspired by a painting of his final nom noms? I believe he would, if Christ is to be believed.

The Olympic queens could have posed as a Picasso, upset would have still ensued. Just having drag on a global stage was enough to pull the rage trigger for those who can’t stomach it. And so: “mockery!” “ridiculing!” “blasphemy!”

But anger from the Christian right et al. regarding Paris wasn’t really about faith, Jesus, or a famed painting, just as countless drag queen storytimes constantly being protested aren’t about “protecting” children from molestation or gender ideation, and just as all-ages drag brunches being shut down because of intimidation by darling Nazis aren’t about “saving” children from being groomed. (In the name of children, 203 drag events were targeted with death threats, fire bombs and armed assault in America last year, which also experienced record anti-drag legislation signed into law. Similar hate has bled up into Canada, with drag events in many places facing protests of various nasty forms.)

Sidebar on the pedo / groomer trope: Drag queens and gay men were the targets of this kind of attack as recently as the 1970s and 80s, and now the tactic has reared its abhorrent head again over the last few years. Crying “pedophile!” isn’t new.  It’s an ancient, powerful indictment used by everyone from the Soviet Union to Catholics in medieval times to otherize their enemies, to dehumanize until there was no sympathy for them. Leveraging on society’s deep feelings about children, and fears for their wellbeing and future, the strategy makes the adversary a morally reprehensible monster. This then allows justification for the mistreatment of the targeted person or group; when we fail to appreciate the humanity of others, horrible acts happen. 

The pedophile / groomer trope couldn’t be more inaccurate. It’s not drag queens or gay men targeting children. If you want to know who is, where and how, there’s lots of data out there about the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, daycares, sports organizations, and individual offenders who are, statistically speaking, almost always straight, and often far right leaning.

So then, what is all drag hate really about, if the tropes are provable bullshit?

A man in a dress and heels, self-determined, pushes extremely and uncomfortably hard against where much of society remains firmly rooted on the topic of women and autonomy.

Of course it’s not just men who do drag. Straight people, trans people, lesbians, non-binary people, all manner of folk do it. But for the enemies of drag, that’s more head-spinning gravy atop their main detestation. The meat of their abhorrence, the first thing they think of when they think ‘drag queen’ is a man, twisting and bending gender roles.

That twisting and bending is the rub. Because a woman, in any form, is less-than, isn’t she?

Madonna spoke to this truth in in her 2000 song, “What It Feels Like For A Girl”:

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short

Wear shirts and boots 'cause it's okay to be a boy

But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading

'Cause you think that being a girl is degrading

Strong inside but you don't know it

Good little girls, they never show it

When you open up your mouth to speak… could you be a little weak?

What kind of man would sacrifice his masculinity and trade down? Only to then - WTF? - find personal liberty as a “woman” in the doing?

Our dying patriarchal society despises the idea of a powerful woman, one who knows her value. Such women are highly inconvenient to have around. Women delighting in who they are - as drag queens are wont to do - women who don’t need to fix themselves? It’s an awful lot of effort keeping up with a woman like that, which is why women are suppressed, held back from even thinking about reaching for the fullness of who they really are as early as childhood, using the low bar that often suggests women are barely human. Our society is hellbent on keeping women in their place: insecure. We teach them through the media - or any shop they go into selling myriad beauty products with which to correct and improve upon herself - that she, as is, will never be enough. Constantly women are told there is something wrong with them. We do not want to see autonomous women, look south of the border at the passionate, ongoing, male-led fight to wrest away from women control over their own bodies, the “proud,” “honoured” adjudicated rapist Donald Trump at the helm, calling it a “miracle.” It’s dystopic, and, if not stopped, sure to bleed up into Canada the same way drag-hate has; both forms of detestation and intolerance are deeply rooted in the same filth.

It sickens those who oppress women when a dude actually chooses to look and act like one (as they ignore the fact it takes balls bigger than theirs for a man to put on makeup, a wig, a dress and heels and then go out in public.)

The only thing worse than a woman is a woman in self-rule - the authentic self-expression as a woman in full glory drag provides. It is a very common metamorphosis: meek, shrinking violet men donning drag and transforming into confident spitfires, owning the room they’re in and keeping everyone in it enthralled and in check. This transformation - man gains personal power by becoming a woman - is just too much for countless people who think women are to be held back, pushed down, and shut up. So they want the same for drag queens and use religion and “protecting children” so to do just that.

We live in a world where we’re taught to strive to fit in, we are encouraged - especially women - to become less of ourselves, to negate our personal power and be more of what most others are like, instead. Society does not foster what drag does - belonging - being yourself and being welcomed and accepted and celebrated for who you are, finding and owning your personal power.

Men and women who hate women and personal power and, by association, drag queens, fear belonging. Haters despise seeing other people free, unique, expressing themselves. They hate men experiencing their fullness as “women” because they hate women in their fullness, full stop. That’s why the fury over the Olympics’ opening ceremony, why all the drag hate.

Anne Hidalgo, a powerful woman as mayor of Paris, responded beautifully when she spoke out against those who criticized the drag component of the opening Olympic Games ceremony. And she didn’t tread lightly. In an interview with Le Monde, in her full power, she raged: “Fuck the reactionaries, fuck the far right, fuck all of those who would like to lock us into a war of all against all.”

Fucking agree. Fuck those critics. Fuck those who want to divide us and pit us against each other, keep us all down, who want us playing small. Fuck all the drag haters, everywhere, inspired by their worst impulses, whose underlying loathing of drag speaks volumes about their warped, patriarchal, deeply rooted hatred of women, especially women in total autonomy, all their fully realized beauty and power on display.

Keep going, women and drag queens, please. You alone will save the world.

Hear The Shaun Proulx Show every weekend on SiriusXM Canada Talks 167. Hire me to speak or host your next event. More info: shaunproulx.com