The Drag Queens Fighting Performance Bans in Texas

As a series of repressive bills targets drag shows across the country, performers in Texas try out a novel defense.
People testifying at the Texas State Capitol in March 2023. One person on the left is leaning back in their chair and...
The drag queen Brigitte Bandit testified at the Texas state capitol against S.B. 12, which would’ve criminalized certain drag events in the presence of minors.Photograph by Brandon Bell / Getty

In 2020, it seemed that the biggest threat to drag shows in Texas was the pandemic. When venues shut down and drag brunches were cancelled, some performers got resourceful. An Austin woman named Kerry Lynn launched Extragrams, a drag-queen telegram service: Kerry Lynn would show up at your house with a boom box and a queen in a glittery costume, and you’d get a brief, socially distanced drag show in your driveway, a little sparkle to liven up the long pandemic days.

One of Extragrams’ performers was Brigitte Bandit, an Austin native who often performs as Dolly Parton—huge hair, heavy eyeliner, ostentatious cleavage. “It’s wild to think about how we would just perform in people’s front yards,” Bandit told me recently. That kind of lighthearted public exuberance has become unthinkable in the past two years, as drag has become a culture-war flash point, and half a dozen states, including Texas, have passed anti-drag legislation. Now when Bandit is hired to perform an Extragram, she makes sure to do it somewhere more private—in a fenced-off back yard, say, or in a living room. “Just walking from my car to the gig, let alone doing a whole performance in someone’s driveway—we don’t even feel safe doing that,” she said.

Earlier this year, Bandit became one of five plaintiffs in a lawsuit that challenged Texas Senate Bill 12, which criminalized some drag performances if they occurred in the presence of minors. Her critiques of the legislation have repeatedly gone viral, making her a notable figure in the Austin drag scene. Her prominence has been questioned, because, unlike most people who perform as drag queens, she was born female. (Bandit is nonbinary and uses both they/them and she/her pronouns.)

Bandit grew up with the idea that femininity meant fashion, spangles, performance. The first concert she saw was Cher; the second was Parton. When Bandit was a child, her mother worked as a stripper. She had breast implants and wore elaborate costumes that she made by hand. “She was very, I guess, you know, gendered,” Bandit said. “She would put on these big production numbers with a lot of impersonations. Cher was a big one for her. She was basically doing drag in the strip clubs.” One day, Bandit’s mother saw an advertisement for a Cher-impersonation contest at a gay bar in Austin. “At first, people were, like, ‘This woman can’t enter the contest!’ ” Bandit said. Ultimately, her mother was allowed to compete, and won second place.

Bandit has always dressed flamboyantly and in bright colors; she was intrigued by the idea of performing in drag but assumed that it was off-limits to her. Then someone sent her a video of Sin Wai Kin, a drag queen who is a cisgendered woman. “I started crying,” Bandit said. “It was like a revelation to me.” Some people saw Bandit as an interloper in a space that is a haven for queer men and trans women. (“I have more drag in my pinkie finger than you’ll ever have in your whole life,” a fellow-queen told her.) Other performers were more welcoming. It helped that, though drag in other Texas cities was dominated by the pageant community, Austin’s scene was more expansive and experimental. “You don’t have to just be in rhinestones with big hair,” Tension, a longtime Austin performer, told me. “There are drag kings. There are burlesque-style performers and comedy shows and all-Black shows. There’s just such a wide variety.”

The outpouring of vitriol that began a year and a half ago caught the drag community by surprise. “It felt like day and night,” Tension said. “There was a lot online, but when it started happening in real life is when it started to get real.” A man named Tayler Hansen began attending drag shows in the Austin area, filming performances and posting clips online. He parlayed his viral clips into an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program. “There are no dads there ninety-nine per cent of the time,” Hansen told Carlson. “A lot of the time, the people that bring these kids to these shows are single mothers who happen to be obese. I don’t know if there’s a pattern there or what.” Posts by anti-drag activists were sometimes doctored in misleading ways, including one that spliced together images of children at an all-ages drag show with footage from a raunchier adults-only event.

Spurred on by conservative media, the drag backlash spread with disorienting speed. Bars and restaurants that had hosted drag events for years were suddenly inundated with threats. Some venues cancelled performances; others increased security. “We’ve had people stand outside the show and yell homophobic slurs,” Richard Montez, who hosts drag events at Tomatillos, his family’s restaurant and bar in suburban San Antonio, said. “We’ve had people record our entertainers. There was a group of people who called the police while our show was happening. They kept saying, ‘This is illegal.’ We knew better—we’d been following the laws, we knew nothing had passed yet. But they were just convinced that the police would shut us down.” In June, an anti-drag group posted the legal names and home towns of numerous Texas drag queens, including Bandit, identifying them as “groomers” and accusing them of “advocating for the sexualization of children.”

Drag performers believed that the proposed legislation was intended to push them into the shadows—and worried that it was working. Last summer, Bandit was booked to speak on a Pride Month panel hosted by the Texas Association of School Boards. Shortly before the event, one of the association’s directors rescinded the invitation. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry, but your bio says you’re a drag queen, and I know we’re going to lose sponsors. I can’t wait to have you back when everything’s calmed down,’ ” Bandit told me. “But how are things supposed to calm down if you’re not letting us have our voice?” (A spokesperson said that the invitation was withdrawn because the process for inviting external speakers was not followed.)

At a brunch show celebrating Parton’s birthday, Bandit scanned the attendees, newly nervous. “It was just so heartbreaking to look at the crowd and not feel that sense of trust. Looking at every single person and being, like, ‘Are you a good person or not?’ ” Performers grew tense, paranoid. “I was doing my gig at this twenty-one-plus night club, and I remember thinking, Maybe I shouldn’t have my fake boobs out,” Tension told me. “And then I was, like, Wait, why? Why am I thinking like this? These things were getting in my head, making me second-guess myself, even when I know what I’m doing is perfectly fine, it’s not hurting anyone—it’s not. It was very confusing for a while.”

The drag community soon fought back. Performers began tracing viral anti-drag posts to their sources. Following the accounts of people like Hansen made Bandit queasy, but it felt better than not knowing what they were up to. At last summer’s Pride festival in Austin, a drag queen spotted Hansen in the crowd. The performer, a trans woman, was unsure how to publicize the information—“She was, like, ‘I don’t want to put a target on my back,’ ” Bandit recalled—but allowed Bandit to post it on her account, which had a much larger following. “After that, people were keeping an eye on him,” Bandit said. “When he was trying to do interviews, they’d be, like, ‘Don’t engage with this person.’ ”

In March, when the Texas Senate considered S.B. 12, a group of performers showed up to speak against it. Bandit opted for a high-femme aesthetic: floor-length pink gown, pink wig, theatrically gaudy makeup. The proposed bill criminalized “certain sexually oriented performances” in the presence of minors, including any event involving “a male performer exhibiting as a female, or a female performer exhibiting as a male.” The State Senate heard from the bill’s supporters first. It was late in the afternoon by the time that Bandit had the opportunity to speak, but, before she had a chance, she said, a large group of senators filed out of the chamber.

Bandit’s comments found another audience, however, when footage of her testimony went viral; a photograph of her that day was later named among Time’sTop 100 Photos of 2023.” In her testimony, Bandit pointed out that the law would not prohibit her from hosting a drag-queen story hour. “I am someone who was born female and does drag as a feminine person,” she said. “Why should I be able to continue the same kinds of events with similar content and costumes but not my male counterparts?”

Two months later, the state legislature considered a revised version of the bill that removed the references to men dressing as women, or vice versa; instead, it criminalized the “exhibition of sexual gesticulations using accessories or prosthetics that exaggerate male or female sexual characteristics” in the presence of minors. Once again, the drag community rallied. This time, Bandit understood that her primary audience was online. She briefly considered showing up dressed as Parton—the implication was, Why can Dolly dress like this and I can’t? Instead, she recruited her mother to make an outfit with virality in mind: a Texas-flag-themed dress emblazoned with the words “Protect Texas Kids”—the name of an anti-drag activist group—and the names of the nineteen children who died in the shooting in Uvalde. (The day before the hearing, legislators had let a bill championed by many Uvalde victims’ families, which would have raised the minimum age to buy a semi-automatic rifle from eighteen to twenty-one, die in committee.) “The first time, I was so polite. I really wanted them to hear me—I’m, like, ‘Good afternoon to the chair’ and everything,” Bandit told me. “The second time, it was, like, I don’t even care if you’re listening to me, because everyone else is going to want to.” It was nearly midnight by the time she addressed the chamber; when she went over her allotted two minutes, the capitol police escorted her from the room. When she got home, weepy with exhaustion and frustration, photos of her were already ricocheting around the Internet.

After Governor Greg Abbott signed S.B. 12 into law, the A.C.L.U. of Texas and the law firm Baker Botts filed a suit against it; Bandit, Extragrams, and Montez’s company were all listed as plaintiffs. The suit argued that the law was both discriminatory and vague. Read in a certain way, it could apply to everyone from the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders to high-school students acting in “Guys and Dolls.” “We were getting questions from not just drag performers but all types of artists saying, ‘My theatre show—my art—might be criminalized,’ and that’s just an extremely scary way to have to live,” Chloe Kempf, an attorney with the A.C.L.U. of Texas, said.

In district court, the case was assigned to David Hittner, a Reagan appointee in his eighties. One of the main points of contention was whether drag constitutes artistic expression, and is therefore deserving of First Amendment protection. On the stand, the state’s attorney repeatedly questioned Montez about twerking. “He finally said, ‘Well, can you demonstrate for us what twerking is?’ ” Montez recalled. It seemed to him that the attorney was trying to needle him to admit that the dance style was obscene. “I looked at my attorney, and she didn’t object,” Montez said. “And I looked at the judge, and he said, ‘Well, you haven’t heard me say you can’t.’ So I got off the stand, and I did it, in my suit and tie.” (Afterward, friends told him that he’d probably made history as the first person to twerk in federal court.) Montez told me that the moment was galvanizing. After he came out, at age thirty, he had vowed never to let himself be silenced again. “It really was one of those moments where I felt like I took back my power,” Montez said. “Because I wasn’t embarrassed. I wasn’t shy. And then I got right back on the stand and kept answering just as good as I was before. It didn’t throw me off at all. And I would do it again.” The moment seemed to have impressed the judge. “Darn it, it was interesting,” Hittner said, at the trial’s conclusion. “That’s one thing why the job never gets tiring: you learn about different things and different folks and different science every day.”

Hittner ultimately ruled that S.B. 12 was unconstitutional on five counts; judges in other states that have attempted to enact drag bans have ruled similarly. Texas has appealed the district court’s injunction. The case will now go to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguably the most conservative circuit court in the country. In the meantime, drag shows in Texas have resumed, albeit with caution. Bandit told me that she had learned a lot about herself, and her community, in the past year. “I never knew I would be able to write testimony the way I did, and deliver it the way I did, and make a point in under three minutes. Until I felt like I needed to fight this, I never would’ve known that I had that power within me. So I have to acknowledge the strength that I’ve found,” she said. “But I would rather it just not have happened.” ♦