Six of America’s most well-known drag queens have come together to use their platforms to advocate for folks to show up and show out at the ballot box this fall.
Jinkx Monsoon, Monét X Change, Peppermint, Alaska, BenDeLaCreme and Willam — who all have appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race — launched Drag PAC, the country’s first political action committee focused on preventing legislation threatening to roll back LGBTQ+ rights.
“We as queer people have to recognize that we are part of a community,” said BenDeLaCreme. “It’s our job to keep things moving in the right direction.”
The PAC was announced at the end of Pride month with a video featuring all six queens, each of them explaining the weight this year’s election has on LGBTQ+ rights for the future. Each queen talked about the rampant legislative attacks against queer Americans, which include drag show bans, gender-affirming care bans and barring conversations about LGBTQ+ identities in schools.
Two states, Tennessee and Montana, have already banned drag performances. Just this year, 25 anti-drag performance bills have been proposed, and of those, 14 were defeated, eight were introduced and two are advancing this year. More than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were brought to state legislatures this year, according to the ACLU. Most of these bills target trans youth by restricting gender-affirming care for minors, including the one in effect in North Carolina.
“We’re in the middle of something historic,” Monét X Change says in a video introducing the PAC. “This is the most important election cycle for queer people’s rights and freedoms in our lifetime.”
On August 21, the star-studded PAC is partnering with Chicago Drag Queen Lucy Stoole to host “Drag Night Chicago: A Voter Registration Kiki,” the same night Kamala Harris will be formally nominated by the Democratic National Convention delegates. Some of the PAC queens will be performing, as well as other drag royalty including Detox, Bambi Banks-Couleé, Sheeza Woman, Sativa Diamond and Dusty Bahls.
“A lot of this political rhetoric does have real-life effects and consequences on people of multiple marginalized identities,” Peppermint said. “How you vote matters, and it literally defines the future of not just the country but your cities, your communities and your people.”
Monsoon released a statement, urging her fans to get involved and to “fight fiction with fact.”
“As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, you’re part of a community that includes all communities; a threat to someone’s rights in one part of our country is a threat to rights everywhere, because these things have a way of spreading if we do not fight fiction with fact,” she said. “What’s difficult is watching parts of this country vote in ways that strip away rights from people, just because there’s not enough people there to vote against it. Queer people exist there — they just don’t have the numbers to combat that kind of misinformation and targeted bigotry.
“Things do get better over time with progress, if we continue to push forward and not allow people to cause us to retreat.”