Opening Section

In early 2023, Tennessee became the first in a group of states to pass laws limiting drag performances and banning drag shows in “public” spaces. Tennessee was followed by Florida, where the legislature passed an anti-drag law claiming to be invested in protecting children from “an immediate, serious danger to the public health, safety, or welfare.” Other legislatures have passed or considered anti-drag bills, including Arizona, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Montana, and Texas. That these laws especially target trans women, increasing the ability of the police to harass and incarcerate transgender people, seems obvious to trans activists, LGBTQ+ organizations, and the ACLU, and anti-drag legislation in both Florida and Tennessee has been accompanied by laws banning gender-affirming care for trans people. In this way these anti-drag laws take their place within a history of transantagonist legislation limiting the labor, movement, assembly, socialization, healthcare, expression, and representation of trans people in the United States. What is new about these laws, however, is the recourse to the word “performance.” SB1438 in Florida, for example, doesn’t even mention “drag”; instead, it refers broadly to “adult live performance.” SB3 in Tennessee refers to “adult cabaret performance,” which is described as “entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest.” These laws, in other words, attempt to criminalize particular ways of donning clothes and wearing makeup precisely when these clothes and makeup become theatre. The new criminalization of drag in the U.S. hinges on performance.

In Florida, the state in which I live and work, the governor not only signed six anti-drag and anti-trans bills during the 2023 legislative session—a package announced by the State of Florida under the banner “Let KIDS Be KIDS”—in June of 2024 he also vetoed the legislature’s budget for arts funding in the state. This amount totaled $32 million. A few days after this veto, the Tampa Bay Times reported that Governor DeSantis made his cuts because of “sexual” theatre festivals. As the Times reported:

“You have your tax dollars being given in grants to things like the Fringe Festival, which is like a sexual festival where they’re doing all this stuff,” DeSantis said during a news conference Thursday, offering the first explanation about his decision to cut the entirety of the cultural grants and arts funding from the state budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

The culprit, apparently, was the Orlando International Fringe Theater Festival, “the oldest Fringe Festival in the US.” Orlando Fringe is a family-friendly theatre and arts festival that lasts two weeks and is hosted in and around the theatre complex of Orlando Shakes and Orlando Family Stage—the city’s Shakespeare Theater and its most well-known children’s theatre respectively—and Orlando Fringe is exactly the kind of perfectly bonkers theatre festival anyone would expect from something called “fringe” that also happens in Florida, easily one of the weirdest states in the US.

To be clear, the Florida governor has not shut down Orlando Fringe, but his objections to the Fringe, about which he seems to know very little, have strangely resulted in the cutting of all arts funding in the state. Moreover, the governor’s objections to drag performance, his transantagonist legislation, and his antitheatrical arts veto are all linked under a much larger umbrella objection to “the sexual” or “the adult” when they come into contact with those persons who ought, apparently, to have no contact— or at least no “public” contact—with “the sexual” or “the adult”: to wit, that group of people the law considers “children.” The State of Florida, from this point of view, has a particular set of fantasies about children and how they should and should not “be,” and the Florida legislature’s project of letting kids be kids involves transantagonism, sex negativity, and the antitheatrical prejudice. “Adults,” in this construction, are something different, defined instead by their access to trans healthcare, “sexual” performances, drag shows, and international fringe theatre festivals. The words adult and child, here, are wielded by legislators as self-evident facts rather than legal constructions.

The legislature in Florida, especially, has aimed to restrict what both adults and young people can decide about trans healthcare for young people. One might well ask what healthcare for trans youth has to do with drag, with adult cabaret performance, or with theatre more generally, but Jules Gill-Peterson, in her new book A Short History of Trans Misogyny, makes more than a few passing references to theatre and performance, and when we read those along with Jonas Barish’s varied references to trans-feminization in his foundational book The Antitheatrical Prejudice, we find more than a few connections between transantagonist state violence and accusations aimed at the theatre by a whole history of haters. I will begin with these links between Gill-Peterson’s history and Barish’s history and then look specifically at the language of these legislatures and the rhetoric surrounding them as texts in the history of antitheatrical prejudice.