Democratic Male Leader Invites ‘Drag Queen’ to Entertain Women Legislators

Screenshot/@LADDYBUNNY77/Twitter
Screenshot/@LADDYBUNNY77/Twitter
Neil Munro

The House Democrats’ 2022 campaign committee has hired a man who presents himself as a parody of a woman — in “drag” — to entertain Democratic legislators during their pre-election strategy session.

Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY), the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), invited a man with the stage name “Lady Bunny” to provide “musical entertainment” on March 9 at the caucus’ 2022 Issues Conference.

“This is part of our government … It is a problem for the party that claims to represent women’s interests,” said Natasha Chart, a feminist who advocates for women’s rights. “If it is not a deliberate insult, they haven’t been thinking about it very much, have they?”

The comedian describes himself as:

A living drag legend, international sensation, razor-witted comic, fab DJ, and one kooky queen, the Lady Bunny experience can be summed up in her own words from V Magazine’s “Thought Leaders” issue: “My humor is outrageous, my look is over the top, and my politics are in your face. That’s just the way I am!”

Drag shows are “sexualized entertainment for nightclubs that exclude minors … I don’t want any part of that and I can stay home,” Chart said. But the DCCC event is a civic display of the party’s priorities, not a commercial event at a closed-door nightclub, she said:

This is where policies are being decided and wrangled on behalf of the party that controls the presidency and Congress. So this is kind of a big deal in terms of a professional arena [for women, especially for women in politics]. If it matters that somebody did this at a big multinational corporation, and I think that it would, it matters more here. Because this is governance and affects all of us.

Chart continued:

Women complained for years, I think rightly, when you know their male bosses and work colleagues would go and do business after hours at sexualized nightclub events, where women were not going to want to attend or if you did go, you felt super-awkward the entire time. You would definitely complain if something like this was part of a company event and if it was highly sexualized. If that’s the kind of show they’re going to have to DCCC meeting, it’s just going back to an old sexism that we’ve objected to for a long, long time … This affects how men see women in the workplace, this affects how women see themselves and their potential in the workplace, and really speaks to I think the seriousness of leadership concerns.

…

It sounds insulting to me. But no one on [Maloney’s] staff is going to get any negative feedback on it from their immediate circle, or from staffers and other congressional offices. They’re not going to get any negative feedback from journalists or activists that they follow on social media. And so none of the people whose opinions they care about are going to be reflected back to them as negative. They’re just going to assume that all the criticism is from people who “Hate the gays” basically … It probably doesn’t occur to them at all that it would be offensive or bothersome to anyone because everything about the social circles that they move in has been designed to exclude such opinion, I’m sure they did mean it like, “Oh, this will be great and everybody will love it.”

The comedian’s tweets are far less sexualized — and far more focused on economic class and the danger of war —  than tweets promoted by other cross-dressing men, such as “drag queens” who sit with children during so-called “Drag Queen Story Hours“:

Blackface shows were once routine and socially accepted, but now socially marginalized, Chart said:

Everybody understands “Okay, well, maybe there was something wrong there and we shouldn’t have ignored it.” … Now there’s the impulse to double down extra hard on “Okay, well this is a problem is that we absolutely have to do everything, to not make the same mistake again.” But the problem is they’re making the same mistakes again because they’re listening to the noisiest people and not being thoughtful about what they’re doing.

The drag shows are better described as “woman Face” than blackface, said Chart. Drag shows “make fun of women as being stupid and vain and shallow and good for — as they say — only one thing because that is a common male sexual fantasy. Within the gay male community, it translates into a male idea of female sexuality.”

Conservatives have long opposed the public display of “Drag Queens” as a reckless threat to children’s sexual development. This concern, for example, has helped GOP politics in Virginia and other states.

The feminist and liberal critique of “drag queens” is being supercharged by the rising clout of non-homosexual transgender activists who claim each person’s fluid feeling of “gender identity” is more important in culture and law than the reality of their male or female body, or each person’s heterosexual, gay, or lesbian character:

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