OPINION: Kari Lake is worried about the impact of drag shows on children but a well-known Valley drag queen in Phoenix says she performed at Lake’s house, in front of Lake’s young daughter.
Count Kari Lake among the outraged over the latest controversy to fire up the far right.
Drag queens, that would be.
It is, Lake assures us, positively indecent that children have attended drag performances.
“They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the Drag Queens,” she said on Friday, on Instagram and Twitter. “They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow. They seek to disarm Americans and militarize our Enemies. Let’s bring back the basics: God, Guns & Glory.”
While we’re at it, let’s also bring in a drag queen who has known Lake for well over two decades.
Rick Stevens is one of the Valley’s best known drag artists, performing for the last 25 years as Barbra Seville at theaters, bars and parties around town — and, he says, at parties held at Kari Lake’s home.
One of those parties, he says, was attended by Lake’s then-elementary school-aged daughter.
So you can imagine that Lake’s social media posts demonizing drag were a stunner.
“She’s friends with drag queens,” he told me. “She’s had her kid in front of a drag queen. I’ve done drag in her home for her friends and family. She’s not threatened by them. She would come to shows constantly. To make me be the bogeyman for political gain it was just too much.”
Stevens, who is supporting Democrat Katie Hobbs for governor, on Friday evening posted pictures of Lake posing with him and another drag performer as well as some of their correspondence from 2015. Similar pictures, dated 2012 and 2014, are posted to Kari Lake’s social media.
The Lake campaign says Lake’s daughter has never attended a drag show.
“Richard’s accusations were full of lies,” she said, in a statement emailed to me. “The event in question was a party at someone else’s house, and the performer was there as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. It wasn’t a drag show, and the issue we’re talking about isn’t adults attending drag shows, either. The issue is activists sexualizing young children, and that’s got to stop.”
Actually, a man dressing up as a female and entertaining an audience is considered a drag performance.
Drag shows are the latest front in America’s culture wars. It all started earlier this month in Texas (as so many things do) with a Dallas gay bar’s “Drag the Kids to Pride” event, which was billed as “a family friendly drag show.”
While conservative politicians were fairly fainting over what they called the “sexual perversion” of our children, it’s unclear what was giving them the vapors. In the video clip that went viral on social media, prompting all the outrage, the performers were clothed and the dancing didn’t appear overly sexual.
There was a neon sign that was rather risqué and a child was pictured handing a dollar bill to one of the dancers. But tipping a dancer doesn’t seem all that much different from tipping your garden variety street performer.
Regardless, Republican legislators in Arizona immediately swung into action week, vowing to “fight like hell to protect the most innocent from these horrifying and disturbing trends”.
Stevens is horrified and disturbed as well, though for a different reason: Hypocrisy.
He says he met Lake in the late 1990s when she and some of her Fox10 co-workers would come to the 307 Lounge, a downtown Phoenix gay bar that hosted (adult) drag shows featuring Barbra Seville, Ms. Ebony, Pussy Le Hoot and Celia Putty, among others.
“They (Lake and her co-workers) would come down to the 307 Lounge which was about a mile or two from the station and they would hang out,” he said. “She would come to the show pretty regularly. I wouldn’t say every week but it wasn’t uncommon.”
Stevens says he and Lake became friends — “I was sort of her go-to gay person sometimes” for interviews on news stories involving LGBTQ topics.
Stevens says Lake invited him to her central Phoenix home to perform as Marilyn Monroe at her birthday party 10 or 12 years ago and later to do a drag routine at a 2015 baby shower for a fellow news anchor. He says he specifically remembers Lake’s young daughter at one of the performances because she wore glasses and he sympathized, having hated wearing them when he was a child.
Drag shows can run the gamut from raunchy to G-rated, depending on the crowd. While there is no nudity involved, Stevens acknowledged there can be revealing costumes though that wouldn’t happen, he says, at a family event.
“The whole idea that you need to protect kids from drag is just ridiculous because there aren’t a lot of people that do that and there aren’t a lot of shows that cater to families,” he said.
He considers the recent attacks on drag queens a calculated response designed to rouse the right and distract people from the real danger to children.
“Everyone knows what’s going on,” he said. “People needed something else to talk about because the conversation was getting too real about gun control and children being killed in schools so people want to say let’s protect kids from drag queens instead of protecting kids from gun violence.”
As for Lake’s response in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre, she wants to end the tax on ammunition.
But oh, those dangerous drag shows.
Stevens believes Lake’s reincarnation as a warrior for the far right is an act.
“She supported Obama and now I’m here to tell you that she supported drag queens and had her kid in front of drag kids,” he said “So if I can do anything to expose the hypocrisy and if I can do anything to keep someone like that, a few votes away, from power, I’m happy to do that.”
After Kari Lake’s former Drag Queen friend called her out on hypocrisy and posted several photos, Lake issues a statement threatening to sue, and wants to know why the media isn’t focusing on Hunter Biden. pic.twitter.com/0w9H0dSFAL
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 19, 2022
Here’s another drag show Kari Lake posted from in 2014.
Two different protest groups were asked to leave downtown Franklin Saturday after attempting to disrupt the Juneteenth celebration.
Franklin Police said one of the groups consisted of people carrying signs that read “White Lives Matter” and “Stop White Replacement.” They added that another group, who said they were a buffer between festival-goers and the other group, included people who were armed and wearing ballistic vests.
Members of each group were also reportedly handling out pamphlets saying they are protesting because “the anti-white system is committed to our physical genocide” to festival attendees before police arrived.
Authorities asked both groups to leave and they complied. No violence or arrests were reported after Franklin officers intervened.
Aside from the confrontation, there were big smiles for the celebration organized by the Franklin Justice and Equity Coalition.
“It unites people together and you get networking,” Carol Johnson said. “It shows the world that we can come together and unite to do different things.”
More than 100 businesses, food vendors and churches participated in the event.
The Texas Republican Party passed a resolution over the weekend rejecting the 2020 election, calling President Biden the “acting” president, and outlining policy goals that include overturning same-sex marriage and possibly seceding from the United States. CBS News political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns joins anchors Tanya Rivero and Tony Dokoupil with details.
Hello Randy. An incredibly beautiful video. It is just sad that a child that young had to make it. It breaks my heart that a child her age understand people hate her for just existing. Hugs
Lauren Boebert is now demanding more than $33 million for an infrastructure project after voting against the infrastructure bill. Texas Paul gives his thoughts.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw and his staff were violently confronted at the Republican Party of Texas convention a short time ago, when far-right social media activist Alex Stein and others whom witnesses described as Proud Boys began shouting “eyepatch McCain” at him – an attempted insult coined by Tucker Carlson. A witness to the incident tells Mediaite that in addition to Stein and others being escorted out of the building, “some arrests” were made at the scene.
Read the full article. Alex Stein, you may recall, was part of the mob of extremists that attempted to storm a Dallas gay bar earlier this month.
Dan Crenshaw and Mike Pence have had to learn the hard way that fascism cannot be bottled and used without it blowing up in your face. Both have now faced threats from violent assailants to hang them.
Confrontations like this will become a regular feature of Republican politics. pic.twitter.com/qz7FgfeNbP
Tucker’s so happy that at this point in his pathetic wimpy life, the bad boys on the playground have moved on from throwing rocks at lil’ Tuckums and throwing them at Tuckum’s targets.
Dan Crenshaw was physically assaulted by Right Wing attackers shouting ‘Eyepatch McCain.’ The Log Cabin Republicans were excluded from the Texas GOP event.
When you enable and appease hate, eventually they will always come for you.
I want to add something that this cartoon series leaves out. Up until puberty kicked in and his body started becoming more clearly female he was able to pass as an androgynous boy. The medically approved treatment is to use puberty blockers so the body doesn’t go through the wrong puberty locking in features that will forever make the outside body appearance does not match the inside gender identity. It also reduces the need for some body changing surgeries. Hugs
Laurie Roberts
Scottie's Playtime 