In recent months, more than a dozen American states have sought to restrict or ban drag performances, with many framing these legislative moves as aimed at protecting minors. In this explainer, JURIST unpacks the trend and highlights its worrying implications for free speech.

What is drag?

Drag is an art form, wherein individuals dressed in exaggerated costumes entertain audiences with song, dance, comedy, and by other means. Many associate the term with drag queens — performers dressing as women with exaggerated feminine features on stage, but the genre is more expansive and nuanced. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality:

“Today, many prominent drag artists are still people who identify as men and present themselves in exaggeratedly feminine ways as part of their performance, and are known as drag queens. While some drag queens live their lives as men outside of their drag personae, people of any gender can be drag queens. Drag kings, who wear men’s clothing and perform stylized forms of masculinity, are less common, but do exist. Many drag kings are women, but people of any gender can be drag kings as well. … Like transgender people, drag performers can experience discrimination and harassment because of their gender expression.”

Why do states want to ban drag performances?

State lawmakers moving to crack down on drag performances have typically couched these initiatives as efforts to protect children from “prurient” forms of entertainment. A survey of the many bills pending state legislative reviews reveals similar, if not identical, language along those lines.

These efforts come amid the backdrop of US culture wars that have reached a fever pitch in recent years, with gender issues featuring heavily in popular debate. As social progressives have increasingly embraced the idea of gender as a spectrum, social conservatives have drilled down on the idea of gender as a binary. Drag as an art form has gained mainstream popularity, and as a form of entertainment that necessarily entails creativity in gender expression, it appears to have become an easy target for politicians eager to rally socially conservative voters.

Why are they focusing on minors?

As Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown over the course of 20 years of authoritarian rule, an effective way to stifle free speech and expression is to claim that failure to do so will hurt children.

This is how the Russian leader justified a 2012 law banning so-called “gay propaganda” in the presence of minors in similar terms in a 2019 interview with US filmmaker Oliver Stone:

Oliver Stone: Years ago when we were talking about homosexuality, you said that in Russia we don’t propagate it.
Vladimir Putin: Not exactly. We have a law banning propaganda among minors.
Oliver Stone: Yes, that’s the one I’m talking about. It seems like maybe that’s a sensible law.
Vladimir Putin: It is aimed at allowing people to reach maturity and then decide who they are and how they want to live. There are no restrictions at all after this.

Arizona State Senate Republicans mirrored this logic in a recent statement. “One of the reasons why we were elected as lawmakers by our constituents was to protect family values. If men want to dress as women, and if adults want to participate in watching these hyper-sexualized performances, they have the freedom to do so. It crosses the line when kids are subjected to these drag shows,” they said.

In effect, by focusing on a vaguely termed and amorphously defined “threat” to the youth, leaders are able to appeal to the lowest common ethical denominator, even in the absence of evidence or concrete explanations of the perceived threat.