Tennessee Wants to Criminalize Drag Shows. Welcome to the Right’s Latest Assault on LGBTQ People

For Kennedy Ann Scott, performing in drag offered a lifeline. She’d been bullied by kids in grade school and subjected to physical harm for being a boy who was, in their judgment, too effeminate. Discovering drag — she cites To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar as a touchstone — opened Scott’s eyes to the possibility of turning the very things her tormentors hated into a source of power.

“It taught me to find the confidence that I never thought I’d have,” Scott says. “It taught me how to be me. I’m a feminine gay man and I have always struggled to find my place in this world.”

Scott, a Tennessee performer who entertains at an East Nashville bar and a hotel near the downtown tourist district, currently sees that sense of self-expression and empowerment being threatened by a proposed law that the state legislature will take up in January. It’s one of a handful of anti-LGBTQ measures currently on the docket in Tennessee, along with one aimed at denying gender-affirming care to trans teens, and the latest wave in the right’s expanding war on the LGBTQ community.

Filed by state Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson, Tennessee’s anti-drag bill is similar to other proposed legislation in Idaho and Texas and aims to classify drag as “adult cabaret” — i.e., categorize it as something sexual rather than the multidisciplinary art form it is. This would ban it from public performance where there’s any chance children could see it, and result in jail time for violators. The targets are pretty clear: drag-queen brunches, drag-queen story hour, and especially the annual Pride events, where drag queens often give daytime performances before all-ages crowds.

“Our intention as drag queens or queer people is not to take away from any other group of people or from families or children,” says Eureka O’Hara, co-host of HBO’s We’re Here and a Tennessee-born drag performer who sings with Sarah Potenza and Katie Kadan on the new single “Big Mawma.” “It’s only to help ourselves and lift ourselves up. That’s our only agenda. Our goal is the same goal they have, which is to exist and thrive in a way that makes us comfortable and happy.”

Drag has been a popular target for the right over the last year, spurred along by social accounts like libsoftiktok spreading hate and misinformation under the guise of protecting children. Drag-queen story hours in California, Oregon, and Ohio have drawn angry protestors, some of them armed, and physical squabbles have broken out at hosting venues.

The attacks (and the threat of them) don’t seem to be letting up. Protests have escalated nationwide against LGBTQ spaces and even mainstream venues that feature drag. While the shooter’s motivations are still unclear, the massacre at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that left five dead last month took place during a birthday party for a drag performer — a trans woman who was present helped subdue the shooter. Over the weekend in Moore County, North Carolina, an as-yet-unidentified terrorist (or terrorists) took out the power grid for 40,000 people by shooting at electrical substations — one theory speculates it was an attempt to thwart a drag show scheduled for the Sunrise Theater in Southern Pines, North Carolina, that had shifted to an adults-only door policy after becoming the focus of protests. Authorities are aware of the theory but have not yet confirmed a motive.

Now in Tennessee, Pride and drag events are at risk of being outlawed. In September, armed protestors, some of which included members of the far-right white-nationalist group the Proud Boys, showed up to protest a drag event at the Museum of Science and History in Memphis and managed to get it canceled at the 11th hour due to lack of security. A Pride celebration in Jackson, 70 miles east of Memphis, was moved from a public park to an indoor facility in October, with the drag portion of the event at the end of the evening reserved for those 18 and older. Maury County mayor and U.S. Representative-elect Andy Ogles made an example of a local library after it featured a Pride display, eventually resulting in the library director’s resignation. More recently, the city of Murfreesboro (which is close enough to Nashville to be considered part of its statistical area) denied a permit to the Pride committee for use of public space after one activist posted video of a previous Pride that showed drag queens dancing in a way they deemed “provocative.” Elsewhere, the future remains uncertain for businesses like Nashville’s Big Drag Bus, a coach that ferries riders around downtown streets for a drag show on the move.

Chris Sanders of the advocacy group the Tennessee Equality Project calls the proposed law an “attempt to take a strength of the community and turn it into a weakness.” To do that, he says, “They have to cast what we’re doing as inherently adult entertainment and therefore a threat to children, which in their eyes legitimizes hateful rhetoric, bad public policy, and violent attacks.”

“We forget with the rights we do have how delicate they are and how quickly they can be stripped from us or our lives because of hate speech and propaganda by discriminatory people,” O’Hara adds.

The idea of treating drag as sexual is a favorite talking point among conservatives, who leap into action whenever a clip of a child witnessing a drag queen do the splits makes the rounds online. Adults-only nightclub drag performances have a reputation for being bawdy, but that’s miles away from a drag queen reading a children’s story. And videos of such family-friendly shows are often taken out of context to gin up outrage. This flies in the face of drag being a mainstream media presence now, thanks to the success of RuPaul’s Drag Race and its related offshoots.

Scott, who works in education when not in drag, says she instructs her fellow drag-brunch performers to never do anything while performing at brunch that they wouldn’t do in front of a favorite grandmother. It’s a skill that comes from having to learn how to navigate a world designed by and for straight people.

“No matter where we are, we are self-aware 24/7. You have to be,” she says. “Queer people know how to live in a heteronormative world.”

In Memphis, Micah Winter regularly performs as part of a theater drag troupe for mixed audiences. That means liberal and conservative folks alike, plus children both onstage and in the crowd. It’s a version of drag that goes back centuries to Shakespeare, and illustrates how it’s linked to highbrow art.

“I play the mother in Hairspray,” Winter says. “This December, I’ll play Mother Ginger in the Orpheum’s Nutcracker, which is filled with children. If [Tennessee lawmakers] pass that bill, I guess I wouldn’t be allowed to do that anymore. It seems so innocent on the stage at the Orpheum.”

Lawmakers in Tennessee have yet to try to outlaw bachelorettes from wearing penis necklaces, sucking on penis straws, and carrying inflatable phalli in front of children in downtown Nashville, just blocks from the Capitol. Rather, the concern seems to be reserved for people who want to exist in a way that isn’t tied to rigid ideas about gender expression, highlighting the transphobia that’s at the root of anti-drag efforts.

“That’s the real discrimination we’re dealing with,” O’Hara says. “You’re targeting trans people. Drag queens are going to do what they’re going to do anyway. They’re underground. They’ve always been around, even when it was illegal to do drag. What you’re doing is creating stipulations against people trying to live their everyday lives.”

“It rightly has trans and nonbinary people worried about whether they’ll be able to be in public without being harassed because of the bill. Even if there weren’t a conviction, you will empower people who hate them to report them,” says TEP’s Sanders. “If we concede that the government can tell us what clothing to wear or how to appear in public, we have lost our freedom.”

For Scott, these protests and proposed laws are not about protecting children as much as they are about policing bodies and behaviors. She knows from firsthand experience that if Tennessee was actually invested in doing so, the state could pass more legislation that helps kids in need.

“Why are we not putting more money into public schools? Why are we not putting more money into foster care and children’s services?” Scott says. “That’s protecting children.”