Kenny Marks, a fixture of the St. Louis, Missouri DIY scene, is contending with similar issues for their soon-to-open space, Kenny’s Upstairs. “We’ve had meetings about what our security measures are going to be, which if I was cis—or if we weren’t a queer-owned spot—I don’t think we’d even be thinking about,” they say.
The business that previously occupied the space had a rich history of throwing queer house and drum’n’bass shows, and Marks believes theirs will be Missouri’s first trans-owned bar. Still, they have been hesitant to describe the bar as “trans-owned” in interviews with local publications, as a result of the hostile climate. (By the end of the 2023 legislative session in Missouri, the ACLU reported that they were tracking 48 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the state.) “I’ve mentioned I’m queer, but I’ve never straight up said I’m trans,” Marks says. “And it feels really wrong, because I’m so open in my day-to-day life about it. Instead I’ll talk about bullshit like cocktails.”
This pressure to self-censor is very palpable to QDP founders as well. Taylor says they are not allowing that fear to dictate “how we’re throwing the party, how we’re making artwork for the party, how we’re promoting the party.” But it doesn’t help that the drag bans are purposely written with ambiguity in mind, which leaves them susceptible to subjective interpretations and bias. “These laws want us to be scared and police ourselves so that they don’t have to,” adds QDP member T. Minton.
In the text of the Kansas bill, for example, drag performances in public are outlawed under the pretense that they are “promoting obscenity to minors.” Under these bans, drag is prohibited in several contexts, including drag story hours at public libraries, drag queen appearances at all-ages events, and Pride parades. While definitions vary across states, many bills describe drag queens and kings as “male or female impersonators” or entertainers who “exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer’s gender assigned at birth.”
This language has perplexed many in the community, who worry that gender non-conforming or trans folks may be harassed under such definitions. “The ambiguity in these bills is not a bug, it’s a feature,” says Andrew Ortiz, an attorney with the Transgender Law Center. “Proponents of these laws expect them to be used as justification to target and harass trans people, drag performers, anyone with insufficiently ‘normative’ gender expression, or even just queer people in general.”
Marks echoes the concern. “You could call me a ‘male impersonator’ because my gender markers are still female on all my licenses,” they say, frustrated. This confusing language has already had consequences: On June 1, a public library in Montana canceled a lecture by trans speaker Adria Jawort. County attorneys claimed that the talk, which was about queer Indigenous history and sexuality, would have violated the ban because minors may have been present.
