Much Ado About Drag Queens: Another Phony Crisis from the Right

By Kevin Howley, July 25, 2022

For regular readers of right wing media—you know who you are!—panicked reports of drag queens hosting – or should that be hostessing? – story hour for impressionable young readers in public libraries and after-school programs are yesterday’s news.

For the rest of us, the latest tempest in a teapot brewing in right wing channels may come as a surprise. It sure did to me.

It’s no coincidence that conservative moral outrage reaches a fever pitch each June. “It’s Pride Month again,” laments PJ Media, “and that means corporations all over are busy virtue-signaling. In Milwaukee, the Brewers baseball team is getting into the spirit of the season by hosting Pride Night next Wednesday.”

But according to Big League Politics, “Drag queen story hours for children have evolved into a mainstream hot button issue over the course of this year’s Pride Month, but it has been a rising trend across the nation since 2017.” What stories like this conveniently ignore is the decisive role right wing media play in mainstreaming moral panic.

A New Beachhead in the Culture Wars

Consider this queerphobic mash-up of Pride Month hit piece and fast-food review from The Blue State Conservativeheadlined “Woke Burger King Introduces ‘Pride Month’ Whopper—Here’s What It Looks Like.”

Still, as political strategies go, it makes perfect sense. In the post-Roe era—which, in point of fact, began when the twice-impeached former president hit the Supreme Court trifecta—conservative activists began targeting LGBT and transgender rights in a bid to establish a new beachhead in America’s culture wars.  

Indeed, as NPR noted in a recent profile, longtime evangelical conservative operative Ralph Reed “sees issues involving sex and gender and parental rights as a new avenue for the Republican Party to make inroads with Black and Latino voters.”

I don’t say this lightly, but the cynical, manipulative and harmful use of young people’s gender identity as a wedge issue makes me long for the days of George W. Bush’s compassionate conservativism.

And don’t get me started with the head-spinning contradiction of conservatives who support “parental rights” in all things but reproductive justice.

Woke Indoctrination

The right’s gender trouble dovetails with its assault on critical race theory, it’s denial of climate change and it’s desperate embrace of Trump’s big lie about the “stolen” 2020 election. Some conservatives, it’s clear, just can’t handle the truth – about anything.

Appropriating the term “woke” from African-American culture, right wing pundits and politicians use the phrase to do a little “virtue” signaling of their own; a nod and a wink to a white nationalist ideology that has zero tolerance for diversity or dissent.  They can’t face the truth about structural racism, much less the truth about what multicultural democracy looks like.

As Florida Governor and lead contestant on the GOP-scripted reality series “America’s Next Top Tyrant,” Rick DeSantis, put it, “Following woke indoctrination in our schools. That is a road to ruin for this country.” Burnishing his white nationalist cred, DeSantis signed not one but two pieces of legislation—the Parental Rights in Education Act and the Stop Woke Act—that purposefully dumb down the American experience for Florida’s school children.

Hyperbolic Nonsense

Under the banner of parental rights, the GOP assault on so-called groomers—code for those who impose “other” values and lifestyles on unsuspecting children—aims to cultivate ignorance and intolerance.

In such a climate, is it any wonder that hyperbolic nonsense of this sort finds a receptive audience? “The pedophilia rights movement has become a core tenet of the Democrat Party. They have become a civilizational death cult and are more dangerous to the country than ISIS or any foreign threat could ever hope to be.”

For all their concerns about deviant groomers and America-haters, right wing media gave a collective shrug to the indoctrination that produced khaki-clad neo-Nazis descending on Charlottesville for the Unite the Right Rally.

Not to mention their indifference to clerical grooming that led to decades-long sexual abuse in the Catholic and Southern Baptist Church, among other godly groups.

Or, for that matter their disinterest in revelations about right-wing extremists who led the January 6 assault on the US Capitol.

That’s some serious indoctrination—if you’re a white supremacist.

Kevin Howley is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. His most recent book is Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination.

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