"Blame It on the Girls"
We can debate how drag queen story hours affect our kids, but surely we can agree that whatever threat drag poses to the American Dream pales in comparison to that of, say, corporate greed...right?

I was sick all last week. Instead of chicken soup for the soul, I went out and got ice cream for the sore throat. It worked, fleetingly…and then gave me a stomach ache.
The relief some people feel gravitating to politicians who peddle in culture-war stuff seems like it would be similarly fleeting—and ultimately unproductive, if not counterproductive.
So that’s what I’m mulling over today, using this new crusade against drag queen shows as the prime example of some politicians’ misplaced priorities.
NOTE #1: I really tried to get this posted before the Super Bowl. It is mid-afternoon Sunday as I sit here typing this, aaaaaand…I give up, I’m just going to go eat chicken wings and finish this tomorrow. (NOTE #1a: Clearly didn’t finish Monday, either! Happy Belated Valentine’s Day!)
And there will be no way to prove this if I’m right, but, just for the record, I am picking the Eagles, 35-27. (NOTE #1b: [Insert *wrong answer* game show soundbite here.])
NOTE #2: You’re about to see a graphic reading “Insert dinkus here.” An anonymous reader (OK, it was my mom) expressed concern as to where in the dark reaches of the Internet she might be taken if she were to click on this graphic. So for Mom and anyone else with similar concerns, don’t worry: it takes you to the “Dinkus” Wikipedia page. A dinkus is a literary device, geez.
But before I start blathering on…
Going into last week, I hadn’t yet contributed the 10% of the income CeeGees has generated so far to the Red Cross as promised. The catastrophic earthquakes in Turkey and Syria got me to snap to it, though.
I had the nerve to be mopey last week about getting sick and utterly failing to reach my biggest couple goals of the week. Meanwhile, the death toll in the Middle East went from the godawful (1,500) to the truly stomach-churning (5,000) to…suddenly tens of thousands? And every day it’s kept climbing from there, to numbers that are impossible to fathom. They’ve now surpassed 40,000 dead as of this afternoon.
When you read about such events, what else can you do but just fall back on gratitude? And just be thankful I don’t have problems-problems, like those in Turkey and Syria whose lives have either been taken or turned upside down.
Help rush emergency relief to children and families via UNICEF if you have the means…
But yeah. I started getting sick two Sundays ago the way I usually start to get sick—with a sore throat. With most colds or flu (I tested negative for Covid four times in a row), the sore throat pretty quickly gives way to chills and aches and gunk gathering in my lungs that inspires some spirited coughing.
And that all happened, don’t worry! But the sore throat never went away. I still have it right now as I type here on Valentine’s Day, in fact, woo hoo! And my head still feels like:
But instead of, say, picking up some throat-numbing spray, and/or some flu medicine that wasn’t expired like the kind I’d been taking, and/or some healthier comfort food like chicken soup, I went a more decadent, undisciplined route.
Ice cream, at the time, seemed like what my tonsils needed above all else.
I couldn’t even tell you the last time I purchased ice cream. As in, purchased at a store, to transport to my home, to then consume at my home. Was it ten years ago? Longer?
So I probably could’ve gone completely crazy and gotten some extravagant Ben & Jerry’s flavor with all the calories, all the fat, all the carbs, and all the sugar. And I definitely took a good hard look at my options in that regard! Have you seen these “topped” B&J flavors? They sell something called “dirt cake” that, despite its name, looked particularly deee-lightful. The “dirt” amounted to a thick top layer of “chocolatey ganache.”
I don’t know what ganache is but I can’t imagine it’s great for the arteries.
The ice cream aisle has changed so much, though! I got overwhelmed with the selection immediately. All the sophisticated flavors and new artisan brands and hoity-toity non-dairy options…it was all too much. I ended up settling on what appeared to be a healthy-ish, but still milk-based, selection: Halo Top Peanut Butter and Chocolate.
How depressing is it, by the way, that the marketing on ice cream containers now just assumes you’re going to eat the whole pint in one sitting? This particular Halo Top mini-carton trumpeted its per-pint net carbs tally louder than anything else. Only 8 grams of net carbs! Not in a serving, which there are three of in this container, but 8 grams of net carbs per the whole container!
And if you eat the whole damn thing you’ll take in 20 grams of protein, too! So you can go have a nice workout and then just slam a carton of Halo Top and you’ll be all buff and beefcakey in no time, I guess.
Another message on there suggested you leave the carton out of the freezer for a few minutes before consuming. “Let’s not rush this,” they say. A softer ice cream will make for a creamier experience. Sounded reasonable! So I waited for a few minutes, and then…
And then, indeed, I ate the entire pint in one sitting. AND I totally rushed it, too. My throat was really hurting!
The excuse I’d made to myself—that ice cream would be the quickest and most satisfying pathway to relief—held up in the moment. The cold and creaminess of the Halo Top numbed everything back there quite nicely. Up till then, every swallow really smarted. Zero pain accompanied the Halo Top, though.
And this was the creamiest ice cream I’d ever tasted! How did they get it to taste so fluffy and delicious? With only 8 grams of net carbs??
The relief was short-lived, however. After my last bite of ice cream, I took a swig of room-temperature water and OUCH. The pain was back already.
And then a little gurgling roiled up inside the ol’ tumbly-wumbly. And I started thinking, Not only has it been a decade since I’ve had ice cream…when was the last time I ingested just milk? Of any kind?
I guess I still eat cheese, and that certainly counts as dairy. But I don’t think I’ve consumed a proper glass of milk in maybe 15 years. I read an article about how humans don’t really need milk after infancy—and that’s human milk, let alone cow’s milk—and that made a lot of sense. “Why are human adults still drinking milk? And milk from another species, at that? Isn’t that kinda weird?” So I stopped drinking milk.
Plus—and this is something that occurred to me embarrassingly late in life (and it’s especially embarrassing since my grandfather was an American Jersey Cattle Association master breeder)—did you know that cows have to be PREGNANT in order to produce milk? It’s true! We’re knocking up these poor cows every year, three months after they last gave birth!
Well, we’re not knocking them up. Jersey cows are extraordinarily cute and all, but…
That said, upon further review, apparently most cows do get pregnant via artificial insemination. So humans really are the ones knocking them up. The poor ladies don’t even get to experience the fun part of the whole having-a-baby thing…no handsome bulls involved, just Farmer Fred equipped with an armpit-length glove and a glint in his eye.
(By the way, this is pretty good updated scientific analysis on whether drinking milk is “unnatural,” unhealthy, or cruel to cows, if you’re interested.)
But anyway. After depositing the full hunk of Halo Top into my gut, I decided to read the nutrition facts.
It’s not 8 grams of total carbs per pint. (Idiot!) It’s 44 grams of total carbs. 44 total grams minus 24 grams of sugar-alcohol carbs minus 12 grams of fiber carbs equals 8 net carbs. (Moron!)
Also: 48 grams of fat in the one pint. That’s 62% of one’s daily allowance. The saturated fat was even worse, the pint accounting for 115% of one’s daily allowance.
Look…I was delirious with fever when I drove to Kroger that day. That’s my best excuse. Couldn’t tell you how much fever because I never bothered to take my temperature, but, it had to have been a lot of fever.
My stomach wasn’t right for a couple days after the Great Dairy Bomb Dust-Up of 2023. That visceral ritual of digging into a pint of ice cream like that, which I hadn’t experienced for so many years, felt tremendous in the moment. Didn’t feel so great right after, though. And it did indeed make things worse in the long run.
And now to unveil the correlation between trying to fix a sore throat with ice cream and trying to fix our day-to-day fortunes as Americans by fanning the flames of cultural conflict.
In a large handful of states, including my own (Tennessee), politicians have decided to prioritize a new nationwide scourge this year. Taking into careful account how economic woes, a flailing democracy, a struggling education system, obscene health care costs, and widespread energy concerns were on the tops of Americans’ minds in 2022 as they voted in the midterms, our representatives came up with a brand new plan.
They concluded that we must take down the drag queen shows.
Ridding our libraries of “Drag Story Hour” and our bistros of Sunday drag brunches is going to do the trick, apparently, when it comes to clearing a path for us to pursue happiness.
The fact that this is what they came up with? Infuriating. But I also have a confession to make.
Meet “Desmond Is Amazing,” which is the drag queen name of 11-year-old Desmond Napoles (he’s actually 15 now, but here he is at 11 as he was first gaining notoriety):
My confession: I have to say I felt icky when I saw little Desmond come out from behind that curtain. I know it’s the straight white American male (SWAM) in me that’s making me feel this way for the most part. What can I say, sometimes gay stuff makes me uncomfortable.
Not always, but I wouldn’t say rarely, either.
Feeling like this bothers me. I’m definitely up for suggestions on how to liberate myself from hangups like this, which I know are based in ignorance and fear. But regardless…they exist.
That said, also making me feel icky is that DESMOND WAS ELEVEN when he guested on Good Morning America in the above video.
The GMA hostess closes the segment by thanking Desmond “for reminding us all to be who we are on the inside.”
And when she said that, I couldn’t help but think: Does an 11-year-old really know who he is on the inside yet? Did I know who I was on the inside yet when I was his age?
And you know what, I guess I did. At least when it comes to gender identity and sexuality.
I was an early bloomer, blossoming along with the girls in my class. As they grew new curves, I was growing hair in inconspicuous places and pimples in very-much-conspicuous places. I got comments like “Why don’t you wash your face?” or “Hey Magnum, why don’t you shave your mustache?”
But by the time the other little dudes started dealing with their own bodily outbreaks, I’d known for a long time that I liked girls.
So if I knew I was straight at 9 or 10 (and come to think of it, it was probably 5 if I’m being honest), Desmond surely knew he was gay by age 11.
To take the correlation further…I probably discovered MTV and started my Twisted Sister obsession around the same time Desmond discovered RuPaul’s Drag Race or a similar show and started his obsession with drag queens. When he was 10, he probably dressed up like one of his heroes from the exciting new world of drag he’d discovered—just like I dressed up like one of my heroes from the exciting new world of glam rock I’d discovered:

So yeah, common ground…I’m seeing it here between Desmond and me a little bit. But at the same time, to privately explore your gender identity at a young age with the support of encouraging parents is one thing. To have become a full-on celebrity drag queen at 11 is another.
When he sashays out from the curtain on GMA, Desmond immediately kind of shrugs his white fur jacket off his spindly shoulders, does a couple turns like a runway diva, and prowls and pouts his way to his seat next to the hosts. To me, his body language was not that of a little kid who’s having fun playing dress-up and being gloriously over-the-top. It looked to me—just one SWAM’s opinion—like there was an air of sexualized energy to him, too.
And when the adult drag queens come out, they don’t have that same aura about them. They enter larger than life, but not really with the same kind of supermodel vibe. They’re wearing long sequined gowns from collarbone to toe, almost no skin is being shown. And they just shuffle or glide their way to the stage, emanating fierceness, fun, and femininity—but not really much in the way of sexiness, in my view.
So am I looking for ickiness where it doesn’t exist, because of my SWAMmy insecurities? Was this 11-year-old just announcing to the world who he is on the inside and having a blast like any other kid partaking in a favorite hobby? And it’s nothing to worry about that he’s made a career out of appearing as the famous “drag kid,” sometimes dancing in gay clubs and getting tipped dollar bills by adults?
Now, Desmond’s mom clarifies that he isn’t allowed anywhere near the bar part of the club. And it’s not like he’s dancing “suggestively,” she insists. And the dollar bills are handed to him, they aren’t being placed in a bra or something like at a strip club.
Of course, Desmond dancing in front of a gay audience does not, in and of itself, mean he’s somehow being sexualized. But if it’s a gay “bar?” Man, I don’t know; when people go to a straight bar, where there’s dancing (and booze)…in my experience sexuality is inherently a factor in that setting. Most people, I’d hope, would flip the sexuality switch to ‘off’ once they recognize that it’s a child who’s performing. But why put a child in that position in the first place?
Morning talk shows, fine. Nighttime bars, not-so-fine.
I also feel icky about this in the same way I feel icky about 11-year-old girls being dolled up by their mothers to compete in beauty pageants. I just can’t not feel like things must get troublesome in there somewhere along the line.
BOTTOM LINE: I know conservatives and progressives find it difficult to agree on what most ails us in America. But what does it say about our leaders when we ask them to help us—or at least not hinder us—in our pursuit of happiness, and they respond by, what, restricting drag shows?
Personally, the Desmond Is Amazing scenario seems a little off to me. (I know, who asked me.) But Desmond is a unique case—one of the first and the few “drag kids” with a public persona. When it comes down to it—understanding that some drag queen shows do present content that’s inappropriate for children—how many kids are truly being exposed to such content?
How many kids are going to drag queen brunches on Sundays, which is one of the more popular drag events that would be outlawed by Tennessee’s proposed law? I watched some footage from a few of these brunches, and saw zero kids in attendance. That doesn’t mean kids are never exposed to them, but don’t we trust parents to say, upon arriving at a drag queen-hosted brunch, “Whoops, didn’t know this was a drag queen brunch, let’s go somewhere else” if they’re concerned about the content?
On the flip side, maybe some people have an Uncle Sammy who everybody knows occasionally performs in drag as Mötlee Crüella, but since Uncle Sammy is the nicest uncle ever, drag is no big deal to his little nieces and nephews. So that family probably goes ahead and attends the brunch despite discovering it’s being hosted by a drag queen.
And then if the drag performer doesn’t have the good sense—like I imagine the vast majority of drag performers do—to avoid the bawdy stuff and play to all ages at 11 a.m. on a Sunday, then the parents can complain to the restaurant and the restaurant can replace the performer.
In other words, we don’t need our representatives in government spending their limited legislative energies regulating drag queen shows.
The ratio of misbehaving drag queens to misbehaving Wall Street kings in America is perversely lopsided in favor of the drag queens. (I have no data proving this, but c’mon—you and I both know it’s true.) The regulating we should be doing should have a much stronger chance of improving a ton of average everyday citizens’ lives. Whereas this just makes ultra-conservative folks feel better on a surface level, for a little while, even though it’s a problem most of them have never directly experienced…and it suppresses and worsens the lives of the LGBTQ+ community in the process.
I can understand why it might sound good to a cautious mom who’s fiercely protective of her kids to hear drag queens will no longer be able to read to kids at public libraries.
But ma’am, would you really have taken your kids to such an event in the first place?
Yours,
~Dean
P.S. Check out the below piece from NBC News on Tennessee’s plans to outlaw drag-related events in public spaces where kids could be in attendance. That means Veronika Electronika, featured here, could no longer host her drag brunches at East Nashville’s new 5 Points Diner.
She makes great points, stressing that drag shows are not overtly sexual, and that tipping is for servers, bartenders, hairstylists, and yes, drag queens. “It’s just a gesture of appreciation” like with any other service. Another gentlemen points out how it’s strange that cheerleaders and dance teams can shake their hips quite extensively at sporting events—and with far less clothes on—but when drag queens do it, it’s way too sexual?
Then again, Veronika is shown with dollar bills stuffed into her gown’s straps and down her bountiful bra.
But then again, the brunch is strictly 21 and over. So the problem was solved before it actually became a problem. Which is how I believe most of these cases would end up—they’d work themselves out.