As odd as it sounds, Poly Tics hadn’t gotten her moment inside the Kentucky State Capitol building until she testified before a state Senate committee in early March.
The 25-year-old drag performer had come to Frankfort, Ky., that March 2 decked out in sparkles, jewels, long eyelashes and teased hair to speak out against a Republican bill that would classify her part-time job as simply being an “adult” performer, meaning her work would be defined as a live, sexually explicit act “involving male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest, regardless of whether or not performed for consideration,” according to the legislation’s text.
One of the bill’s sponsors, Republican State Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, had said during the Senate Veterans, Military Affairs and Public Protection Committee hearing that the intent was to “keep sexual performances away from children.”
But if passed, the bill would make Tic’s work a Class B misdemeanor offense if they performed on publicly owned property or anywhere her work could be viewed by a minor — with the penalty escalating to a Class A misdemeanor on the second offense and Class D felony on a third offense. Businesses that hired Tics to perform under such circumstances could also lose their liquor and business licenses as punishment.
“As a drag performer who depends on drag shows and drag performances for income, this bill not only tells me that I’m not really a human worthy of rights, but I’m also not worthy to work, and I’m not deserving of an ability to make money,” said Tics, who uses the pronouns she and they and took on the stage name “Poly Tics” after someone advised her to keep politics out of drag performances.
Already, Tics said, they’ve had to reach back out to potential bookings to say that while they tentatively intend to perform, they need to know they won’t be put at legal risk if bills restricting drag shows continue to progress. Drag performers in other states — many of them LGBTQ people, who are more likely than their straight and cisgender counterparts to be poor — may soon have to make similar business considerations.
Tennessee adopted a law this month to restrict “adult cabaret” performances in public spaces and in the presence of kids. Though the bill didn’t mention drag explicitly, it did include “male or female impersonators” under its definition of adult performers, and came amid right-wing backlash toward events where drag queens read books to children.
In Texas, a Republican legislator has introduced a bill that would fine businesses that host “sexually oriented” performances when children are present. The bill would put “a performer who is nude” in the same category as drag performers who use “clothing, makeup, or other similar physical markers” while singing, lip syncing and dancing, so long as the act appeals “to the prurient interest in sex.”
Meanwhile, drag performers, business owners and supporters gathered this month in Kissimmee, Fla., to discuss another proposal that — although also lacking the word “drag” — would threaten the licenses of any business that allowed a child to see an “adult live performance,” broadly defined as everything from a depiction of nudity or sexual conduct to lewdness and “exposure of prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts,” according to the bill’s text. (That proposal also zeroes in on performances that appeal “to a prurient, shameful, or morbid interest.”)
One Orlando business owner, who asked not to be identified, told the local CBS affiliate WKMG-TV that since drag had “come to the forefront of the last five to seven years,” they’d have to “figure these things out.”
“Certainly, business owners are very worried about the impact that this could have,” Chris Hartman, the executive director of the Fairness Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy organization in Kentucky, told MarketWatch. “I would say the drag-brunch economy alone these days … is massive. What drag is providing for the bottom line of our commonwealth is substantial at this time.”
‘Any art form can be modified for its audience’
Drag performers and their supporters say their work — as with most performers and entertainers — can be adapted to accommodate children, while their performances otherwise can provide a welcoming and inclusive environment, bringing people together for drag-themed brunches, drag-themed story hours, events at gay clubs for adults and more. People even gather in person to watch episodes of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” a popular Emmy-winning reality drag-competition show in its 15th season. (The creator of that show, RuPaul, said in an Instagram video this month that Republican politicians were fixating on drag queens to distract from “the real issues that they were voted into office to focus on: jobs, healthcare, keeping our children safe from harm at their own school.”)
Poly Tics, a drag performer, could be economically harmed by bills that restrict drag performances.
Courtesy of Poly Tics
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“It undermines the performers to assume we’re not able to accommodate for those different audiences,” Tics said. “I equate it to a Broadway show or any sort of musical: There’s certain musicals that are going to be family-friendly and the performers are going to act, dress, talk, perform in a certain way that would be different if you have a show as adults-only. I referenced some of these iconic movies that people grow up with in their childhood: ‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’ or even the movie ‘Hairspray.’”
“There’s nothing inherently sexual about drag,” added Tics, who has a day job working for the state.
Brigitte Bandit, a full-time professional drag entertainer based in Austin, Texas, told MarketWatch she does shows at bars, clubs and private events, including bachelorette parties, birthdays and weddings. But she also recently performed at a child’s birthday party hosted at a pizza restaurant and participated in a story reading this month.
“Drag is an art form, and any art form can be modified for its audience,” Bandit said.
The history of drag can be traced back to “two main branches,” according to Meredith Heller, the author of “Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender-Bending” and an associate teaching professor in the women’s and gender studies program at Northern Arizona University.
One is in “subcultural queer spaces,” she said, since “when queer people wanted to get together and keep it low-key, they might do these types of performances or expressions in private parties.”
But more commonly — and perhaps because plenty of archival records back this up, while records of “things that are subversive” are scarcer — the history of drag is associated with theatrical cross-casting, she said.
“Even way back in the day, like Greek antiquity, they were doing cross-casting,” Heller said. Men played women’s roles in Elizabethan theater, as well as in performances in Japan and China, she added.
Often, it was more publicly acceptable for men to perform as women than for women to perform in public, period, she said. And the practice continues today without the sort of uproar that queer drag performers in the U.S. have encountered: British pantomime has long featured men dressing as women and women dressing as men, and remains a family-friendly Christmastime tradition.
“The tradition of Peter Pan played by a woman — that comes from pantomime,” Heller said.
Typically, those sorts of performances weren’t seen as explicitly sexual, and instead served to uphold gender roles. (More often, at least in the West, they were also associated with mocking women.) The difference between drag and theatrical cross-casting, however, is that the latter often features an overarching story and script, and a man playing a woman regardless of whether the performance is comedic.
Drag falls out of that “safety zone” and into a place where gender-bending is the central force and the performers and audiences are often queer, Heller said; it’s more associated with queer cultural expression.
Similar to cross-casting, though, drag is not defined by explicit sexuality. Yet it’s seen that way by people who consistently associate queerness with sexuality.
“When we think about people being heterosexual, we think a lot of things about them: Maybe they have kids, maybe they have a wife, maybe they need to provide for their family,” Heller said. “In a heterosexuality society, where queerness is seen as not the norm, when people think about homosexual people, they just think about sexuality.”
“Just people knowing a queer person does this, if they have a limited characterization or picture in their mind of what a queer person is, they instantly go to sex,” she added. “People denigrate and limit queer people by only thinking about them as sex. Sex is one part of most people’s lives, but not the whole of their lives.”
An annual holiday pantomime performance in Malvern, Pa., even drew controversy this past winter because the Dame character — traditionally played by a man wearing women’s clothing — was instead played by a “true drag performer” and called “the Guide,” according to the Philadelphia public-radio station WHYY. The theater putting on the show received threats, and some schools that had planned to send children on field trips pulled out.
“It’s because of this political climate,” said Domenick Scudera, a professor of theater at Ursinus College and drag performer. “It has nothing to do with the fact that somebody is wearing clothes that are different. It really comes down to this politicizing of hatred toward the LGBTQ+ community. It’s really targeted hate — the easiest way for them to target is to find the most vulnerable, and drag queens and trans people seem to be the easiest targets right now.”
‘Unforeseeable repercussions’
Apart from the community drag may provide for performers and audiences, it’s also a revenue generator for some businesses and performers. A manager of a Mexican restaurant in Bryan, Texas, told the Waco-based ABC affiliate KXXV in 2021 that drag brunches helped keep its doors open during COVID-19, for example. Even Taco Bell hosted a series of drag brunches last year.
Tics, who lives in Winchester, Ky., and often performs in Lexington, told MarketWatch they’ve found success performing at charity drag shows and paid opportunities including weddings, bar shows, drag brunches and anywhere else “you’d want a little burst of fun energy,” she said. These days, paid gigs make up about 40% of their income, with each booking coming with a fee of at least $100 and roughly $200 in tips.
“Unfortunately, in the current economic climate, having a single job typically doesn’t make ends meet for me,” Tics said. “It’s the same with my partner. My partner and I both have day jobs that we work full-time, but we also perform on a regular basis as well. That provides that secondary income that’s really crucial for us.”
Drag itself can be costly. Though Bandit does well for herself and makes more money as a drag performer than she did as a receptionist, investing in her appearance can help her get more opportunities. If money were to dry up and she were only making enough to cover her living expenses, it would be difficult to “reinvest in my drag,” she said.
There’s also some confusion about how the anti-drag bills would even be enforced, or how deeply they’d impact performers’ pocketbooks. If a child were to be present for a wedding at a public venue where a drag queen was hired to perform, for example, could the drag queen be held accountable? What if an adults-only drag brunch were held at a restaurant that had windows accessible to passersby, and a child accidentally saw it? Will drag queens have to turn down charity events — or will charity events have to stop hiring drag queens — if the gatherings include children?
“They’re going to have to decide, ‘Do we close the restaurant for the day to have this event, or do we not have the event and rely on normal sales?’” Tics said. “A lot of restaurants don’t have the space to definitively provide these [physical] barriers where you’re not going to accidentally see a drag queen or that sort of thing.”
“There’s still a lot of unforeseeable repercussions,” they added.
‘The things I’ve seen online are scary’
Drag queens are no strangers to backlash. GLAAD, a media advocacy organization, reported in December that there had been 141 protests or threats targeting drag events in 2022. Texas had the highest number of incidents.
Bandit said that while such protests haven’t yet impacted her ability to make a living, she did have a show canceled in San Antonio due to pushback. And she fears for her safety when she’s performing.
That may be another expense for businesses that hire drag queens: Some venues are getting extra security. “It’s scary to think that anybody can come and they’ll just start yelling,” she said. “The things I’ve seen online are scary.”
Just this month, people including armed white supremacists turned up to protest a drag-queen story event in Wadsworth, Ohio, according to the Akron Beacon Journal, and a different group showed up in Royal Oak, Mich., upset about a separate drag-queen storytime, the Detroit News reported. Both drag story events, however, also drew supporters. “We’re no different from a clown or party princess,” Quentin Yanez, who read at the Royal Oak event as the drag performer Mimi Southwest, told the Detroit News.
Still, the Oakland County GOP, which encouraged attendance at the protest, said in a statement to the Detroit News: “Drag queen storytime is an exercise in normalizing what is not normal, and can be upsetting, scary and confusing to a young child. Adult sexuality introduced to a child — especially outside of the family unit — is not ‘playful’ or safely entertaining. It is at best inappropriate, and at worst, criminal.”
Tichenor, the author of the Kentucky bill, did not respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment. During the hearing where Tics spoke, though, the state senator similarly described drag performances as being “heavily marketed to children,” when she believed they should be for adults only.
“This bill is not anti-LGBTQ,” she said during the hearing. “This bill is pro-children.”
Tics, for her part, said conservative politicians “know very little” about the performances they’re attempting to restrict.
“The few times that they do try to educate themselves, they pick what they want to find,” she said. “If you want to look for an adult-themed drag show, you can find it — just like if you search ‘drag-queen story hours,’ you’re going to find someone in age-appropriate clothing, reading an age-appropriate book.”
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