Real Men Don’t Hate Drag — Fragile Ones Do

Matt Walsh is going to get someone killed. And from what I can tell, he won’t care if he does.

First, it was his obsession with trans folks, for whom the Daily Wire commentator and podcaster has made clear his hatred in recent months. In addition to flatly denying that trans or non-binary persons even exist, Walsh led the attack on Vanderbilt University Hospital for offering gender-affirming care by mischaracterizing that care as genital mutilation done on impressionable teens.

He was lying.

And now, he is lying again in the service of his hatreds — this time aimed at drag performers (most of whom are not trans), and anyone who supports their existence, all of whom he insists are “evil.”

In a recent rant, he suggested hatred of drag queens was pretty much a litmus test for any politician wanting his vote. Apparently, whether they are willing to have such monsters dragged off stage and beaten is the key to Walsh’s support. As he explains, he doesn’t want to “share a planet” with them or anyone who enables their existence.

Which means, by definition, he wants to see them exterminated.

Matt Walsh is, in effect, advocating the murder of drag performers. At the very least, he supports their mass imprisonment.

He does this, he says, because of the threat these types supposedly pose to children — as in grooming them, sexualizing them, and no doubt fondling them when given a chance.

That’s why they went into an art form that puts them primarily in clubs at nighttime, around adults — all so they could diddle kids.

Makes sense.

Matt Walsh is lying about all-ages drag shows

And yes, I know, there are all-ages drag shows. Indeed, in his above-mentioned murderous screed, he plays a clip from one of these events, in which, he tells us, a drag performer is speaking directly to a child in the audience, asking if that child wants to suckle her breasts.

He does not, of course, show us this “child.”

And not because he wanted to protect that child’s identity but because it wasn’t, in all likelihood, a child at all. As with the attacks on Vanderbilt Hospital, he is most certainly lying.

Although we can’t know for sure — Walsh provides no evidence but merely asks us to trust him — the remarks about breast-feeding were almost surely made to another adult whom the performer was taunting because they were staring at the performer’s fake boobs, displayed in a shadow box attached to her chest.

But because the taunt involved nursing, Matt immediately assumed: My God! That must be an infant at that show!

His outrage is nothing if not earnest, even though the queen’s taunt is only funny if the person to whom it’s directed is nowhere near breast-feeding age. If the audience member were 18 months old, or 11 years old for that matter, it wouldn’t be funny at all. And that’s precisely why no self-respecting queen would have said it to such a person.

But if that person was 36, like Matt Walsh? Then it’s fucking hilarious.

Walsh doesn’t understand how comedy works.

Or all-ages shows, for that matter.

Or maybe Walsh knows all too well what they are (and are not) but lies to gin up outrage among the masses who are too stupid to think it through.

Typically held at clubs or restaurants, these are not events like drag queen story time, where drag performers read innocuous children’s books to kids at the library or local bookstore. Those events, specifically for kids, are not sexual or burlesque-like in any way, and Walsh knows it.

So-called all-ages drag shows, typically held at clubs or bars, are no different than all-ages shows involving musical acts. They are meant to allow young adults, 18–20, to attend because they usually can’t get into a club at night because they aren’t old enough to drink.

Oh sure, some who are perhaps 15–17 will come to these if the show is early enough in the evening. But having attended many an all-ages concert when I was that age, I assure you, there are no young children in the audience.

There are no 10-year-olds, no elementary school kids. No toddlers, for fuck’s sake.

The people at these shows were not, contrary to everything Matt Walsh says, a bunch of elementary and middle schoolers brought there by their libertine parents, intent on exposing them to sexual comedic, and musical content.

So when right-wingers like Walsh accuse all-ages drag shows of sexualizing children — and they don’t want you to envision 17-year-olds who are technically children here, but rather, much younger persons than that — they are painting a deliberately false narrative.

All-ages shows exist to allow 18–20-year-olds to enter a place that usually serves booze. Period. And these 18–20-year-olds are, wait for it, adults. Not kids.

They are old enough to vote and to dodge bullets on a battlefield, so surely they are old enough to see drag.

Why this hatred of drag? What’s behind all this?

But beyond Walsh’s penchant for prevarication, what’s with all this anti-drag hatred? What is it about drag that so many men, in particular, find so threatening or disturbing?

On a personal level, it boggles my mind.

I was in attendance at one of the first performances by the now-legendary Varla Jean Merman (pictured above), in the fall of 1990, because my girlfriend at the time was friends with Varla’s alter ego, Jeff Roberson.

A few months later, we invited Varla to perform at a house party for one of our roommates’ 18th birthday. She came festooned in her finest Pucci catsuit and put on a great show. The party was at 1805 Robert Street in New Orleans, right next door to the house where Truman Capote was first brought home as a baby.

But neither Varla nor the proximity to Truman’s first abode threatened my heterosexuality.

Nor did I ever think to myself: Wow, I’d look good in a Pucci catsuit. Quite the opposite. But Varla looked great!

Ultimately, none of the straight men in those two Varla audiences were being groomed, nor did we become groomers.

And having met hundreds of drag queens over the years and hundreds of Christian fundamentalist youth ministers, I assure you I’d have been far more likely to let my small kids be around the former than the latter.

In fact, when my wife and I did have small kids, her cousin — a legendary O.G. drag queen from the ’50s and ’60s (the Jewel Box Review days) — was around them all the time.

And, surprise, surprise, no molestation, no sexualization, no nothing except love, support, and kindness.

Imagine that.

In any event, the only conclusion I can reach is that men who are angered by trans folk or drag performance — and to some extent by homosexuality itself — are fundamentally afraid of sex and gender expressions that aren’t rigid and set in stone.

Because trans folk defy rigid notions of gender and suggest that gender is socially constructed — and thus, not necessarily consistent with biologically-defined sex at birth — they insert ambiguity into a place where insecure people cannot abide it.

Because their own positions of authority in the sex and gender hierarchy rely on traditional understandings of both concepts.

So too, with drag. For someone to engage in a gendered performance, in which the very idea of gender is largely mocked and shown to be farcical, is to challenge the notion of gender as fixed, binary, God-given, and unambiguous.

And what we know about reactionary minds is that they are deathly afraid of ambiguity and uncertainty. In this case, if gender can be played with, altered, deconstructed, and reconstructed, then the sex and gender hierarchies to which these people are wedded are at risk.

This means that their own positions of power and dominance are threatened, as is their worldview, so often rooted in Biblical literalism.

Additionally, perhaps if they were more secure in their masculinity, they wouldn’t let any of this bother them. But if they feel “less than manly” (in traditional terms), they are often the most outwardly likely to be homophobic or transphobic.

So note, anti-LGBTQ rage from incels (as with their misogynistic rage) and other right-wingers is typically not coming from men who evince a secure masculinity.

It’s typically coming from less physically imposing men, less “macho” guys, or guys like the Proud Boys.

And what are the Proud Boys?

They’re a collection of beer-bellied wanna-be MMA fighters whose masculinity is so fragile they call themselves boys and have to start fights to feel like men.

And when it comes to Matt Walsh…

Seriously, look at him. Does he look or sound like a secure man to you?

He looks like a craft cocktail mixologist at the worst bar in Dubuque. He is projecting his own insecurities when he attacks queer folks, drag queens, trans folks, and others in the LGBTQ community.

Because hating such persons isn’t what a real man does. It’s what a scared little boy does.

No exceptions.

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This post was previously published on Tim Wise’s blog.

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