When Nancy Pelosi appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars to opine that “Your freedom of expression, of yourselves in drag, is what America is all about. I say that all the time to my friends in drag,” she wasn’t entirely off-base. True, drag isn’t as American as, say, exercising one’s freedom to own guns, unless I missed a constitutional amendment on men wearing taffeta ball gowns, but America is certainly all about the freedom to be weird and was in fact founded by weirdos who were much farther out of the mainstream than drag queens are today.
What I would dispute, however, is why there seems to be this pressing urgency to bring drag into every corner of American life. I don’t particularly derive a lot of entertainment value from observing men shrieking and camping and pretending to be caricatures of women. Maybe Nancy Pelosi does, and that’s fine. There could be several cable channels devoted to drag, for all I know, and I don’t care. But, as my friend Charlie asks, why are children suddenly being forced to watch drag performances in schools, where they are a captive audience and where their formation is a matter of public interest? Why is drag everywhere, with public funds being spent on it? For citizens, especially children, to be forced to approve of entertainment that doesn’t necessarily appeal to them in order to advance some sort of ideological agenda doesn’t sound very American at all. It sounds rather Soviet, no? Being browbeaten is not very fabulous.