Grand Canyon Times

Republican leaders in the Arizona Senate are creating potential legislation to make it a crime to take minors to so-called “drag shows.”

The move follows reports of a drag show at Tucson Magnet High School that the school said was an activity coordinated by students, not staff. Now Republicans want to outlaw such displays, though they have yet to specify how.

“In a civil society, you don’t bring your children up like that,” Sen. Vince Leach, of Saddlebrooke, a Republican, in a story in the Arizona Republic.

Gay rights groups counter that there is no inherent threat in such shows, and the backlash is not new.

“This is a national trend that we have been seeing pop up very quickly,” said Jeanne Woodbury, policy and communications director for Equality Arizona. “There is no violence associated with drag. Drag isn’t something that is violent. This is an agenda that is set out to drive gay people and queer people into the margins and prosecute trans people just for living.”

Woodbury said that such legislation to stifle public displays by gays sets society back to times like the 1960s, when gays were forced to congregate in bars like the Stonewall Inn in New York, the scene of the infamous “Stonewall Uprising” in 1969, in which police raided the establishment, resulting in a wave of LGBTQ+ protests.

“Pride is a month that we celebrate and commemorate the Stonewall uprising,” Woodbury said. “We need to look at this legislation as something that affects all of us, as something we can push back on collectively about being honest about what it is going to mean.”

Leach said that while he wanted to avoid infringing upon free speech, he said he wants to “protect our children” from sexualized content.

One such example was Pride Night at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, which was billed as a "family friendly'' event in which children were present.

"Performers were seen dressed in scantily clad attire while carrying out provocative dance moves that left little to the imagination as youngsters watched,'' a group of Republican senators write in a statement obtained by KAWC.

Leach supported the effort by other Republicans.

"If you had been researching this, you would have seen the videotape of mothers turning kids' heads to watch something when they turned away, something that's vile, disgusting, and outside of a civil society,'' Leach said in the KAWC story.

In addition to being inappropriate on the grounds of content, Leach counters that such things are age inappropriate as well. "A first grader, a kindergarten kid, doesn't even know what that's all about,'' he said. "They still want to be Superman or Spider-Man. And now we're going to teach them how to be drag queens?''

According to the statement by the GOP senators, the issue isn’t the mere existence of drag shows, it’s the audience that sees them.

"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,'' they said in the statement.

Leach said some things at the Pride Night event crossed boundaries.

"When you have a drag queen sitting on the steps with her ... crotch wide open and little kids sticking dollar bills in her g-belt, that's a problem with me," he said.

Leach said there is an established precedent of laws being written to set decency standards for minors.

"We don't allow kids into strip joints,'' he said. "Do you believe that a young first grader or a kindergartner should be hauled into a show, stuffing dollars bills into G-strings of a drag queen? Do you think that's good for our society?''

Leach added, "We don't have kids going in bars by themselves, We have movie ratings.''

Leach said he isn’t sure how far lawmakers can go in establishing decency laws.

"I don't know where that line is, he said, "but I'm sure as hell going to try to find it.''

"We will be damned if we won't fight like hell to protect the most innocent from these horrifying and disturbing trends that are spreading across the nation now that extremists Democrats are currently in control of our federal government,'' the statement said.

"This ignorance by public and private sectors promoting this behavior sends a message of complete and utter perversion that can have detrimental impacts on the social and emotional development of our children,'' the senators wrote in their statement.

Woodbury said that despite the venom, she would hope such measures would die thanks to more moderate Republicans.

“I know that there are Senate Republicans of good will that I have enjoyed working with over the course of this session, and I would like to think that they would look at this for what it is and what it would mean that they would not support it,” she said.

Leach and other Republicans, however, beg to differ.

"One of the reasons why we were elected as lawmakers by our constituents was to protect family values,'' the senators said.