Florida's War on Pride
Currents
They say that sunlight is the best disinfectant, but there’s something virulently noxious brewing in the Sunshine State. Hardly a week seems to go by without new efforts by Florida Republicans to restrict or ban some LGBT-related thing, all in the name of family values and protecting children. Amid their incessant culture warring, the populist right has become fixated on drag shows as the foremost menace to public decency, and drag performers as society’s most dangerous iteration of deviant superpredator. The latest offensive in this crusade against all things drag is a new Florida law introducing stiff fines and even jail time for businesses or individuals who host drag-like shows where children are present. On its surface, this seems like your garden-variety Floridian moral panic — gross, though so dime a dozen as to be barely worth covering at this point. But there is more to this bill than meets the eye. The manner in which the law is worded opens the door to an all-out war on Pride events, and it’s already begun.
This new bill, SB 1438, comes on the heels of a litany of other authoritarian legislation in Florida. In 2022, Florida enacted the "Parental Rights in Education" bill, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, which restricted schools from teaching about LGBT issues for certain age groups. That same year saw the passage of the Stop WOKE act, which prohibits instruction on race or diversity deemed “woke” as defined by Republicans — the folks who can’t tell the difference between Joe Manchin, Karl Marx, and Robin DiAngelo. Both of these laws have since been expanded in 2023 to broaden their scope. School districts across Florida have banned close to 600 books in the past couple of years alone for being “inappropriate” for children, including Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation (2017) because it covers, in passing, a crush Anne once had on another girl. In early 2023, there was even a bill filed in the Florida senate that would ban the Pride flag, among many others, from being flown on state grounds. Interestingly, an amendment to the legislation explicitly allowed continued use of the Confederate flag. Happily, the bill died in committee, but the ethos behind it is very much alive and well.
SB 1438, titled “Protection of Children” and signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis as part of a larger package he calls “Let Kids Be Kids”, takes matters in a far more chilling direction. Ostensibly drafted as part of the anti-drag fervor sweeping the cultural right, the bill never once mentions drag shows, favoring vague and expansive language that grants the state wide-ranging license to interpret and enforce as it sees fit. It bans establishments from admitting minors to “any show, exhibition, or other presentation in front of a live audience which, in whole or in part, depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or specific sexual activities as those terms are defined.” This includes anything considered to be “lewd conduct” or which “appeals to a prurient, shameful, or morbid interest”, or “is patently offensive to prevailing standards”, or is “without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
Businesses that knowingly admit minors to any such events may be subject to having public permits or liquor licenses denied, suspended, or revoked (which the DeSantis administration was already doing), along with $5,000 fines for first offenses and $10,000 fines thereafter. Any individual found in violation — from the owner of a venue to the organizer of an event, down to the college kid taking tickets, or the minimum wage lobby attendants — could be charged with a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to $1,000 in fines and one year in prison. No exception is made for parental consent or accompaniment.
It hardly needs saying that it is not appropriate to let children into XXX theaters, strip clubs, and live shows where actual sex acts are being performed (most drag shows don’t fall into this category). It should come as no surprise that Florida, like virtually every other state, already has common sense laws on the books prohibiting these sorts of things. SB 1438 isn’t that.
This bill would be draconian enough if it were only narrowly targeted at drag, but the way it’s written, it could apply to anything. Who gets to decide what constitutes “lewdness”, “shameful conduct”, or “patently offensive”? Is it Rep. Webster Barnaby, who, the day before SB 1438 passed the Florida senate, referred to transgender people as “demons and imps who come and parade before us and pretend that you are part of this world”? What about Rep. Jeff Holcomb, who said that LGBT rights “erode military effectiveness” because “Our terrorist enemies hate homosexuals more than we do” [emphasis added]? How about the fine fellow who rigged an electronic traffic sign in Orlando to read “KILL ALL GAYS”?
“This is a very similar tactic that they used with the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ or trans law”, Carlos Guillermo Smith told me. Smith, a former Florida state representative and current state Senate candidate, was the first openly LGBT Latino elected to Florida’s legislature. “They rely on vague language to confuse people and encourage them to self-censor their performances, and that’s exactly what this is.”
Equality Florida’s Brandon Wolf echoed this analysis, telling me that “The chilling effect, precipitated by vague language, is the bill's intended impact.”
This law holds serious implications for Pride events. Not only has drag long been a common component of Pride parades and events, but Pride, as a celebration of sexual freedom, has always embraced a strong culture of sexiness. Under SB 1438, how is a typical Pride parade any less targeted than standalone drag shows? We don’t have to wonder, because Pride events across the state of Florida have already been canceled in the wake of this new law. Meanwhile, other states are pursuing their own versions of Florida’s legislation.
Republican Florida State Senator Clay Yarborough, the author of SB 1438, did not respond to requests for comment. The office of Senator Keith Perry, the bill’s co-introducer, responded by making the distinction that “The bill does not ban any business or any public entity from hosting any kind of event or performance.” Rather, “It institutes penalties if a business admits a child to a live performance [as described in the bill].” When the “penalties'' include jail time, however, this is a distinction without a difference, especially with regard to public venues like Pride parades, where anyone can walk up. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, responded only to direct me to the governor’s recent press conference and press release, both of which contain little aside from spin-doctored partisan fluff.
Rep. Randy Fine, a sponsor of this bill, was happy to fill in the blanks more explicitly, telling reporters that “I've never been to a Pride parade. It's not my thing, not my group, but I have seen photos and videos from these things where you see participants behaving in ways that would not be appropriate [according to SB 1438]."
To remove the sexiness from Pride, or to mandate it be hidden behind closed doors, is to do away with it. Should people celebrate their sexual freedom with a candlelight vigil? Should they chant psalms? The whole purpose of Pride, from its inception, was to be out and proud. This law, in practice, forces Pride back into the closet. In a sense, it takes us back to the 1960s, before Stonewall. If Republicans truly wanted to shield children’s innocent eyes and ears from adult content, they would have to ban all minors from accessing the Internet. While the Christian right’s Taliban impersonators rant and rave about the “degeneracy” of drag shows and their effect on children, every kid is walking around with a portal to the world’s pornography in their pocket. But this was never about protecting children.
“They are revoking the rights of parents to decide for themselves what live performances are appropriate for their own families,” Smith told me. “Yet they are not taking away the rights of parents to bring their kid to an R-rated film or let them watch something for mature audiences at home on Netflix. This inconsistency just kind of exposes that it’s just about drag, it’s just about the bigotry.”
It’s time to put to rest, once and for all, any notion that the cultural right is pushing back against the cultural overreaches of the left, unless one considers LGBT rights themselves to be overreaches, as it increasingly appears some do. The Christian right lost their battle against LGBT rights in the US with the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015 and again in 2020 when the Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covered LGBT people. They have lost the battle for popular culture and the battle for hearts and minds. Their fallacious and stale appeals to tradition, the Bible, and “family values”, so long a bulwark against LGBT rights, were washed away by the tide of history. When, at long last, they largely fell silent about these issues, many of us mistook that silence, perhaps in wishful thinking, as a sign that they were moving on and evolving. While that was true of some, for many, their bigotry was left to seethe beneath the surface.
Sensing an opening in the culture wars around issues related to gender, the Christian right has begun to chip away at past progress under the pretext of protecting children. The cultural left has needlessly armed their opponents with easy ammunition, but let’s not kid ourselves; their counterparts across the aisle will seize every opportunity to roll back the clock on LGBT rights. The time to nip this in the bud is now — and it’s already begun in the courts. In Florida, Pride has extra meaning this year, and the LGBT community needs to be louder and prouder than ever.
“It’s been a while since just raising your rainbow flag was seen as an act of resistance,” Smith said, “but it is now, specifically in the state of Florida, and people should raise their flags and fly them high.”
Published May 25, 2023
