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March 2, 2023

Talentless drag queen shows reveal that sex, not entertainment, is the point

By Andrea Widburg

A poster has been making the rounds among leftists. It shows familiar comedic drag figures from our past, and then castigates conservatives for hypocritically objecting to drag nowadays. That misses the mark. Back then, the joke was that these were straight men forced into drag for strictly non-sexual purposes. They weren’t targeting children for the LGBTQ+++ lifestyle. And of course, they were funny. It’s different now. The latest video from the “family-friendly” drag kingdom emphasizes that these are talentless men who get a fetishistic pleasure from an audience that includes children.

In the theatrical world, men dressing as women is a tradition going back hundreds of years. We all know that, in Shakespeare’s time and for almost a century thereafter, men and boys played all the roles because it was unseemly for women to appear. In America, during World Wars One and Two, when the military put on shows (as opposed to troops watching USO performers), men played the women’s roles because the military was a male institution. Irving Berlin even spoofed those “ladies” of the chorus:

The clear message was that men could play women, but they did so only because they had to. It wasn’t about sex; it was about necessity.

And that’s true, too, for that poster making the rounds. For older people, the poster is a trip down memory lane. They’re all there: Corporal Klinger, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon in Some Like It Hot, Tom Hanks in Bosom Buddies, Bugs Bunny has Brunhilda, the Monty Python guys in their working-class housewife drag, along with Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire and Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie. The caption, though, is the central point: “You’ve been entertained by drag your whole life. Don’t pretend it’s a problem now.”

But the images in the poster aren’t about “drag qua drag.” Yes, those were family-friendly, but the point was humor. Whatever the non-sexual situation at issue, it was funny that men were (quite badly) mimicking women.

Jamie Farr’s Corporal Klinger wanted only to go home, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon were escaping the mob, Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari were looking for affordable housing, the Monty Python guys were creating surreal humor, Robin Williams was trying to gain access to his children (not everybody else’s children), and Dustin Hoffman needed a job. And of course, Bugs Bunny, like all the Loony Toons characters, was a completely non-sexual, even asexual being, that took on sexual personas solely for laughs (and cartoon violence).

Despite appearing in shows that were meant for children (Bugs Bunny) or that were viewed as family entertainment (M*A*S*H or Bosom Buddies), these characters were not targeted at children. They were not intended to sexualize children, especially in an LGBTQ+++ direction. Or, as one “scholarly” paper states of today’s drag performances for children:

[Drag Queen Story Hour offers] early childhood educators a way into a sense of queer imagination: play as praxis, aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance, destigmatization of shame, and embodied kinship. Ultimately, the authors propose that “drag pedagogy” provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly.

Whatever Corporal Klinger or Bugs Bunny are doing, it’s not about “aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance…embodied kinship” or “living queerly.”

Today’s drag shows are about one thing only: sex. These performers, with their sexualized stage names, skimpy costumes, and dirty jokes, are horrible at actual entertainment. Nothing more perfectly illustrates just how bad they are, and how much they’re playing out their sexual fantasies, than this bit of vile performance from a “family friendly” show in England:

The fact that Twitter deems this video as one showing “potentially sensitive content” is all you need to know. One performer clad in bondage gear writhes awkwardly from rings, while another, wearing an exaggerated jock strap and hooker heels, does a handstand. You don’t need a degree in human sexuality to understand that what’s going on here isn’t entertainment for the audience; it’s fetish excitement for men who like an audience—and, perhaps, especially like an audience of children.

And if you need a reminder that what’s gone mainstream is not being played for the humor of seeing talented comedians (including animated ones) amusingly try to achieve life goals by pretending to be what they are not, nothing is better than this Sam Smith photoshoot, which followed on the heels of his literally demonic Grammy’s performance. (Warning: You will need eye bleach after seeing these media.)

This isn’t being sold for laughs. It’s being done to desensitize people, especially children, to the debauched sexuality that’s always existed but that used to be kept hidden from the mainstream for the good of society. Sadly, for our children, the left is trying to make it mainstream, telling them in as many ways as possible that the conventional life of heterosexual marriage is boring and unsatisfying, and that, instead, their bodies are meant to be sexually exploited for others’ pleasure.

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