The Texas War On Drag Continues

If at first you don’t succeed in passing unconstitutional legislation in Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s Senate, all you have to do is try again two years later. 

That’s what happened last week, when the Senate State Affairs Committee heard Senate Bill 18, a tweaked version of a bill from last session restricting children from drag shows. That law was ruled unconstitutional in federal court on First Amendment grounds and on pause pending an appeal by the state.

The new bill bars state funds from public libraries that hold events with drag queens, a new cause célèbre among conservatives nationwide.

“We get questions asking, ‘Why do you want to talk about this stuff?’ We don’t want to talk about this but we need to respond to it,” said Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola. “This is about children.”

He cited an instance in Houston where a library inadvertently let a drag queen who was a registered sex offender volunteer. But the bill does not directly address childhood safety.

Only 20 people testified at the committee hearing, which is slightly surprising given this is one of Patrick’s priority bills and was backed by all Republican state senators. 

“We used to recognize children need to know what is normal and healthy before they learn what’s normal. Children are inexperienced in this world and easily influenced. Children in Sudan learn to become stone-cold killers. Children in Taiwan learn to become prostitutes,” said Ken Moore, a Senate Republican Executive Committee member from Houston. “Seeing men dressed up and acting like prostitutes is a wonderful example of what they do not need to see before their life equips them with the context to process it.”

Testifying against the bill, Dustin Rynders, legal director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, drove home a point that critics have argued before: drag performances have a history going back centuries, when men played women’s roles on stage. Not everyone would consider the roles as drag performances either. 

The first time he saw someone in drag was Tom Hanks on the TV show Bosom Buddies. That was an eighties sitcom where two men must dress as women to live in an affordable apartment in New York City.

A decade later Rynders saw his first drag story time hour when in the movie Mrs. Doubtfire, where Robin Williams, who has lost custody of his children after divorcing his wife, dresses as a female housekeeper at his ex-wife’s home to see his children. In one scene, Doubtfire is reading to children.

Brigitte Bandit, a well-known Austin drag queen, spoke in opposition to the bill as well. While Bandit is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns they said the bill wouldn’t impact their shows. “When you consider what I’m wearing now – make-up, a wig and heels, I’m presenting as a woman,” Bandit said, noting they were born female and would among supporters be considered a woman. “My drag story times would be unaffected. Why should I be able to continue to the same kind of events with similar content and costumes but not my male counterparts?”

While the bill awaits debate for the full senate, elsewhere in the state, a war on drag performances is underway. The Texas A&M University System announced last week that drag shows were banned on all campuses, including Draggieland, which had been slated for later this month at Rudder Auditorium. The hosts of Draggieland, the Queer Empowerment Council, will be holding a protest on Thursday. This week they also filed a lawsuit arguing the drag ban is unconstitutional.

Drag bans have taken many forms across the country. Tennessee’s Adult Entertainment Act was the first large-scale drag ban in the country. The same day as the hearing on SB 18 in Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to Tennessee’s anti-drag bill.

For Equality Texas Interim Director Brad Pitchett, many of the anti-drag laws that have been introduced in the legislature mimic the state’s abortion ban. The 2021 law Senate Bill 8  banned abortion after eight weeks and allowed anyone to sue someone in violation of the law. 

“These private cause-of-action bills are equivalent to the state’s anti-abortion bounty ban,” he said. Under House Bill 938 by Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, any minor could sue anyone involved in a drag show. It has yet to be referred to a committee.

But maybe the third time is the charm for one of Patrick’s latest priorities.