As American acceptance of sexual difference pushes forward in fits and starts, a self-appointed savior of the nation’s youth emerges from the swamps of Florida to stand athwart the progress of tolerance and human decency, yelling Stop!
No, not Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Sunshine State Savonarola running for the Republican president nomination, but his equally obnoxious fellow Floridian Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma and kitsch song stylist who became an international synonym for homophobia in 1977 and was subsequently relieved of her ambassadorial duties by the Florida Citrus Commission for her “Save Our Children” campaign to repeal anti-discrimination ordinances nationwide. As if on cue, 1978 saw the birth of DeSantis, Bryant’s true heir in the state’s tradition of exporting gay-bashing crusaders to the rest of the country.
If DeSantis didn’t study his predecessor’s anti-gay playbook, he might as well have. Bryant accused gay people of “recruiting” the young, a calumny that managed something of a time-traveling hat trick: It simultaneously anticipated the DeSantis administration’s legislative campaign against gay and trans “grooming” of children, traded on the myth of gays as child molesters and echoed the ancient libel that the blood of gentile children was used in Jewish ritual. (Whether it’s a coincidence or a correlation that the minority groups accused of coming after the children also found themselves in Hitler’s showers is a question unlikely to be contemplated by Florida public school students under DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” education reforms.)
From hairspray to homophobia, DeSantis amounts to little more than Anita Bryant in drag — just add a designer education and presidential ambitions and subtract the ability to hold an audience.
Here’s another thing these two sun-kissed bigots have in common: Children and “the family” have proved useful props in their anti-gay campaigns, but when it comes to the well-being of actual children, they display breathtaking indifference.
When her own grandchild came out to Bryant a few years ago, the crusader refused to accept her, instead praying for her to convert. With prayer like that, who needs damnation? “She wants a relationship with a person who doesn’t exist because I’m not the person she wants me to be,” Sarah Green said on Slate’s podcast “One Year” about the famous homophobe in the family.
And not a week after three 9-year-olds were shot and killed in a Nashville mass shooting that would have shocked the conscience of a nation less inured to massacre, DeSantis toured a Georgia gun store to help drive sales of his new book. First thing the following Monday, he signed into law Florida’s unconscionable HB 543, which now lets residents carry a concealed firearm without a permit.
A meme making the rounds defines gun worship as a religion that requires the sacrifice of other people’s children. No less could be said of the governor’s ambition.
Is any of this hypocrisy and regress surprising? Only if you didn’t watch the late pope preside over the rampant sexual abuse of children by his clergy while he was on record attacking the sexuality of law-abiding gay people as “a tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil” against whom “irrational and violent reactions” should come as no surprise.
Sexual minorities are well accustomed to being attacked on moral grounds by people who have no moral ground to stand on.
Gay people, trans people, drag queens — it’s political open season on us all in 2023, with — by the ACLU’s count — 491 bills advancing across the nation to criminalize everything from transition care to drag shows to the discussion by high school seniors of, say, Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Perhaps bullying sexual minorities at home is sound strategy for a foreign policy featherweight who struggles to distinguish a vicious war of Russian revanchism from a “territorial dispute” in which the United States has no “vital national interest.” Geopolitics is tough — better to pick a fight with Florida’s drag queens.
Or is it, Rhonda? Because that is a fight I would gladly watch: not the chief executive of the nation’s third-most populous state abusing his office to attack the politically vulnerable, but the eminently dislikable apostle of politicized sexual sanctimony going head to head with any number of brilliant and beloved entertainers whose medium is drag. And the first area in which I’d like to see the governor schooled is the one where he has exhibited the most shocking ignorance and the world of drag is especially well equipped to educate him: the family.
Want a focus on the family? Visit a drag club. Want a good dose of family values — a place where family is made and bedazzled out of whole cloth and valued for that reason? Drag club.
The structure and language of the drag world is all about family: We speak of drag houses and drag mothers and of their children. One of the most brilliantly organized and influential drag groups is the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an international network of service-oriented activists now under attack by the DeSantis-inflamed right and a group in which the familial sense of sisters is as sincere as the religious sense is satirical.
Family is more than metaphor in the drag world, reflecting a genuine support structure that has helped countless people sharpen their wits, redirect their energies toward work that mattered to them, get sober, learn to become themselves and take care of each other.
One reason these drag families need to form is the destructive effect anti-gay crusaders like Bryant and DeSantis have on blood families.
“When someone has rejection from their mother and father, their family,” says the late drag-house mother Pepper LaBeija in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning,” “they search for someone to fill that void. I know this from experience because I’ve had kids come to me and latch hold of me like I’m their mother or like I’m their father.”
Elsewhere in the film, the late drag personality Dorian Corey defines the drag house: “They’re families for a lot of children who don’t have families. It’s a question of a group of human beings in a mutual bond.”
A group of human beings in a mutual bond — there are worse definitions of nationhood afoot. But it’s a tough sell in a country where a demagogic bully is reelected governor by 19 percentage points and is more or less tied in opinion polls with an incumbent president who by word and deed has stood for the progress of tolerance and human decency. Prospects for America’s mutual bond lie, as ever, with its electorate, which should follow the lead of the Florida Citrus Commission and repudiate its apostle of national division.