The Struggle to Publish
I have dithered about putting this post on my blog for nearly two months, hoping against hope that someone else with my knowledge would write an essay that I could just point at. I say this, first, because I try to limit my posts about current debates around gender in our society to guest writing on other forums so that my blog can focus on longer-term writing projects like epistemology, environmentalism and socialism
I say this, second, because I have to disclose some things about myself that I find embarrassing, whether I should find them to be so or not.
But I have decided to break down and make this post here because the issue it is confronting remains highly relevant and because of the way cancelation campaigns against me have escalated in bizarre and new ways, increasing my sense urgency around child safeguarding.
The Redefinition of “Drag”
When you are staring down people who have achieved the power they have by mastering the art of Newspeak, it is important to examine the ways in which they tilt the table, discursively, in any debate they have with you. Those critical of the Gender Orthodoxy and other aspects of Newspeak-leavened Wokeness are better than many at spotting the embedded intellectual bad faith; nevertheless, I think some crucial points about the Drag Queen Story Hours are being missed by my comrades.
Drag is a problematic, arguably misogynistic art form that has existed for well over a century in the Global North. It was part of a larger suite of “impersonation art” that flourished during the Cold War and late twentieth century. While its origins were different than Elvis impersonation, that was the category into which mainstream culture placed it once it began to gain legitimacy as an art form in the late 1960s. Some drag performers were full time “female impersonators,” the polite term for transsexuals during the Cold War but most were gay men who did drag on the side.
Like stand-up comedy, drag acts came up through a raunchy club scene, full of profanity, sexual references and drug and alcohol use. But it must be understood that the way the acts functioned at the clubs was by way of contrast. While most clubgoers might be gay or bisexual men dressed provocatively, or at least economically, for the drag act, the drag performer, himself, would comment on this by way of contrast.
Drag performers did not merely hide any sign of their actual primary and secondary sexual characteristics; they presented in the sharpest possible contrast to their audience. This included hyper-feminized “womanface” mannerisms and make-up, in contrast to the hyper-masculine crowd before them. It also included floor-length dresses, enormous and elaborate wigs and high heels, the sort of ensemble normally associated with respectable female entertainers who performed on the Las Vegas stage in the era of the Rat Pack.
These drag performers perfected mimicry, as distinct from mockery, of the female performers they, as attention-seeking, straight-attracted gay men, aspired to but knew they could never actually be. Precision when it came to dance moves in heels, lip syncing and costume mattered. This tradition held into the early twenty-first century because that raunchy club scene of gay bars that hosted entry-level drag shows could graduate its most proficient impersonators onto the Las Vegas stage, or at least onto the stages of Reno and Carson because of the nature of Vegas. Not just drag queens but Elvis impersonators thronged into Nevada; Rich Little and the great mimics and impressionists also congregated there, in Las Vegas, an extension of the replica city aesthetic epitomized in its great pyramid of Cheops and its own Eiffel Tower.
The audiences for drag queens in Nevada were little different than those for other sorts of impersonators. As an extension of the “stays in Vegas” ethos and replica city aesthetics of the place, straight men and women comprised the vast majority of the audience in top-flight female impersonators, who compared the dance techniques, costuming and vocal ranges of performers.
While some drag show viewers were no doubt also sex tourists to Las Vegas, they would not have understood their enjoyment of drag shows as part of their sex tourism, which was taking place down the road at brothels and strip clubs.
But as the twentieth century finished, a drag-adjacent form of entertainment was on the rise; transsexual/“shemale” strip clubs began to pop up in North America’s major cities for men who missed their stay in Thailand or Brazil and those who could not afford to go. I remember when the first ones opened in the mid-00s in Vancouver and Toronto because I, a sexually ambivalent man, was a patron of these establishments for a number of years.
These were utterly unlike either the drag shows at gay bars or the top-flight drag shows of Nevada; and they did not claim to be like them. Capitalizing on increasingly available and successful cosmetic surgical procedures, these clubs were staffed by full-time sex workers whose main clientele were men like me: straight and bisexual men who were attracted to the both highly feminine and clearly uncanny physiological characteristics of the strippers who, as in most strip bars, made their real money in the lap dance rooms. These cosmetic surgeries were expensive and much of the money made went directly into servicing medical debt. Nina Arsenault, one of the most popular performers boasted a $45,000 body.
As a consequence, instead of minimizing masculine features of their appearances, the most successful of the sex workers there concurrently amplified both their masculine and feminine primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Because, unlike female sexuality, male sexuality has plenty of time for the uncanny or, less politely put, the grotesque.
Because it was so clearly work done by surgeons and carefully burnished by its sex worker recipients that had lured us to the basement of a straight strip club in Mississauga, the “dancing” on stage did not hold most patrons’ attention and was performed in a perfunctory manner. None of the vampish showmanship of drag was in evidence. We were there for the uncanny costumes and bodies and the opportunity to unwrap them to reveal forms every bit as uncanny as those in Nero’s Domus Aurea.
After all, let us remember that Dylan Mulvaney did not rise to prominence on TikTok by making videos of himself in evening gowns singing in a falsetto but by giving tips on how to show off the contours of one’s erect penis in a leather mini-skirt.
Children and Drag
So, I want to contest the idea that the thing we are calling Drag Queen Story Hour is a drag show at all. First of all, the performers are not the straight-attracted gay men of either of those bar scenes. They are, overwhelmingly, autogynephilic men, partaking of a kind of Gold Rush hypermasculine sexuality.
But beyond that, their acts resemble, in every way, the transsexual strip clubs of the 00s, not the Vegas drag shows of the 80s. The problem with these “story hours” is that they are mainly hosted by men in grotesque, hypersexualized sex worker work attire. They are no more appropriate for kids than if a professional female stripper and prostitute came in in her work clothes and did her act for a group of children.
How would we feel if that happened, if a female stripper performed her act with children, shaking her genitals at them, exhorting them to put dollar bills in her g-string and instructing them on fellatio techniques. The woman would be jailed and the town would drive her out with pitchforks and torches, and deservedly so.
So, why, exactly, is it okay for men, who commit over 95% of all sex crimes, to engage in this behaviour with our kids?
More disturbing still, and the events that provoked me to come forward about my own sketchy past to offer some firsthand evidence others might not possess, is the idea that if children watching drag is okay, then it is okay for children to do drag. I lost four multi-decade friendships in the past month because I objected to a CBC TV documentary celebrating the “career” of a nine-year-old boy working as an exotic dancer for adults and a vendor of fetish gear to adults at a sex shop.
Leading the charge in the furious denunciations, threats and harassment not just of me but of my close friends was an individual working for Carousel Theatre, a youth theatre company in Vancouver that puts on summer day-camps with government funding to teach performing arts to kids.
I actually attended such a camp in 1981, put on by a precursor organization to Carousel, when I was nine and struggling with having been interfered-with sexually as a child. And I was naturally appalled, as an alumnus of such a camp, that Carousel was running a state-subsidized “drag camp” to teach seven to eleven-year-old boys the fine arts of sexualized cross-dressing and exotic dancing for adult men.
And if someone thinks that this is something it is appropriate for children who still believe in Santa Claus to be doing, I will say of them, what I said of the ghouls at CBC promoting that Montréal child’s sideline in sex work, and what got me into such trouble a month ago, “anyone celebrating this should be dragged through the streets of Seville in chains.”
