Lawmakers behind many of the anti-drag proposals often allege that drag is somehow harmful to children, though fail to produce any evidence of this being the case. One of the Tennessee bill’s sponsors, the aforementioned Chris Todd, went as far as calling drag shows “child abuse” no matter what they contain and said they are “trash” and “inappropriate” for minors due to people being “naked and twerking” in front of them. This idea fails to recognise the breadth of drag that exists and that, like any other art form including film, TV and music, there are variations of it which are and are not suitable to people of all ages. “When I was a kid, everyone in my junior high was watching American Pie and loved it,” DeLa recalls. “It’s talking about sticking musical instruments up your privates and it’s all fucking a pie, you know? It’s like, why, when these straight, white kids are doing this is it acceptable? And parents get to decide like, ‘Oh, I don’t want my kids to see that’, but they’re not trying to ban it. They’re not trying to burn the book. It’s just so confounding and the idea that people really don’t seem to see, that going from the idea of, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea for children to see this’, leaping from that to, ‘I think it should be against the law’. I don’t understand how to bridge that dissonance. I don’t understand what to say to change people’s minds about that.”
The ramifications of this bill vary depending on how – or if – it will be enforced, the obvious being that it is a huge threat to the careers and livelihoods of drag performers in Tennessee. DeLa, Bella and Vidalia all question its use of the term “male and female impersonators”, the latter of which asks: “What does that mean? What female am I impersonating right now? Nobody looks like this. This isn’t an impersonation of anything, this is a character I’ve created.” DeLa expresses wider concerns that this bill “potentially really extends to trans people being in public places because, if a lawmaker decides that they personally don’t feel trans identity is valid, then they then get to decide idea that they are going to categorise them as an impersonator and then being in a public space is just them existing.” This is something that Bella is also distressed by as, out of drag, she is a non-binary person who could be negatively impacted by the bill’s obscurity. “I still present frequently in clothing that does not conform to my gender assigned at birth and I have worries that a legislation this sweeping and vague could be used by somebody who sees me in public, in a dress, and thinks that I’m being obscene in front of their children,” she says. “So, for me, it’s the concern of how vague a lot of the language is and what the true nature of the law is about.”