So What's Wrong with Drag Queens?

Drag has changed from the time when I was young.

Are young children able to process the implications of this image?

We all know what harm trans people are doing to society, but it may not be so obvious what drag queens are doing that isn’t good. (Please see my article “Trans People Are Seeking Acceptance in the Wrong Way”.)

I came of age as a gay man in the 1970s. I went to Greenwich Village to socialize every week. One would assume that I saw a lot of drag queens, but I didn’t. I saw only a few in the decade or more that I was going there. Most gay bars were NOT hang-outs for drag queens, as most gay men have no interest in them. The few that I did see looked like ordinary women, but today’s drag queens are a different animal. The majority of them dress up to look like over-sexed prostitutes. They wear heavy makeup more suitable to Kiss band-members than to natural women. They wear over-sized wigs and excessive jewelry, and they show cleavage if they are able to.

The point is that they don’t represent real women in a realistic or sympathetic way. As such, I don’t think they are suitable entertainment for children.

In the same way that white people in black-face mock black people, men who put on “bitch-face” mock women. There is an exact correlation between minstrel shows and drag shows—why one of them is socially acceptable and the other isn’t, I will never know. All societies on the Earth are misogynistic, and I suppose that’s the reason drag is accepted. Women are the main scapegoats for hate in our world, for no other reason (it seems) than that they are the weaker sex. Human beings apparently value strength above all other things.

(Since writing the above paragraph, I have seen this comparison between drag shows and minstrel shows described as “hate speech”. It isn’t. It is an accurate comparison between two very similar activities—indeed, the comparison is “spot on”, which is why it rankles trans supporters so much. White people dress up as black people to mock black people, and men dress up as women to mock women. The correlation between the two activities is exact. I’ve noticed that the more accurate a criticism is, the more likely it is to be labelled “hate speech”.)

I am a liberal, but I am not a stupid liberal, and you’ll sometimes hear me criticizing liberals in my articles here. Today’s liberals believe that drag queens are part of “diversity”, but they are not. “Diversity” means a variety of races, religions, cultures, languages, sexes and ages. Gay people, being perhaps 8% of the population (much more if we include bisexuals), are also part of “diversity”. Trans people—at least, those trans people who have gender dysphoria and are not part of the current fad—may also contribute to diversity (although the jury is still out on that). Drag queens, however, represent a sexual fetish. The proof of that is in the ridiculous way they portray women, and the fact that the women they portray are always hypersexualized, like prostitutes who enjoy their work. If they tried to portray women as normal women, as trans women do (or try to), then we could just say that they are part-time trans women. But they dress up like female clowns. Drag queens, it seems, are men who are besotted by aggressive women, and so, like men with autogynephilia, they dress up to imitate those women, and in the process get a sexual thrill. Black-faced white racists, and bitch-faced male misogynists—there is nothing normal about either group, and neither group is suitable for children to see.

It should also be pointed out that in the LGBT alphabet soup that I am a part of, drag queens belong with the T’s much more than they belong with the G’s. This is because some drag queens are heterosexual. It should be obvious that dressing up as a woman for pleasure has more in common with pretending to be a woman, as trans women do, than it has with being same-sex attracted.

For some reason, liberal white mothers are gung-ho when it comes to drag queens. Whenever I see photos of drag shows with children in the audience, the audience is always white, and the children are always there with their white mothers. Black mothers are not so stupid. Drag is very popular in Hispanic cultures, which isn’t surprising, given that dramatic human images (think Mardi Gras or Day of the Dead) are part of those cultures.

The organization Drag Queen Story Hour bears some scrutiny. I believe that they came into existence because there weren’t enough venues or shows for drag queens to dress up for, and dressing up is their addiction. At the time that the idea was hatched, they may have thought that society would be more accepting of them because of the inroads that trans people had made. In addition, reading stories to children would give drag queens a softer image. I’m sure that drag queens also liked the idea of having a captive, uncritical audience to perform to (children). The drag queens showing up at libraries are probably less sexualized than the ones in drag shows; but even if a drag queen dresses up as a fairy god mother, he is still conveying a distorted image of women. The conservatives in our society are right that drag queens do not make suitable entertainment for children. Children don’t need to learn about the sexual fetishes of adults before they have even reached puberty.

Like trans women, drag queens feel contempt for real women, and our society should not put that contempt on a pedestal as if it were a good thing.

Is this the image of a man who likes women? I don’t think so.