The King is not amused. King Anchovy, that is, or rather a former King Anchovy.
The City of San Antonio opposes bills in the Texas Legislature (most prominently SB 12, which nevertheless has passed the Senate) that would criminalize drag shows. City officials told legislators that the bill could put the city in jeopardy. The example: The city rents one of its facilities, the Empire Theatre, for the raucous Fiesta show, Cornyation. The city could thus be “liable and subject for a Class A misdemeanor.”
The city knows Cornyation is not a drag show, mainly. (Not that this means it would be safe from Texas politicians.) Former City Manager Sheryl Sculley was an expert on the topic. Not only did she regularly attend the event, in 2009 she presided over it — as King Anchovy.
The event, staged by the city’s gay community as a fundraiser for LGBTQ-related charities, does involve some gender bending. This year’s king is Ms. Anet Alaniz, the proprietor of Southtown’s Pig Liquors. That’s right, the show sometimes has female kings, and often features male queens.
The Cornyation is, at its base, a spoof of Fiesta’s Coronation of the Queen of the Order of the Alamo, the anachronistic pageant in which the daughters of the city’s old-money elite (and a few rich newcomers) march majestically across the Majestic Theatre stage in gowns pulling ornate trains that each cost enough to put several first-generation students through Palo Alto College.
But just having spoofers pull paper trains across the stage would be boring. So the Cornyation features a series of skits that satirize a broad range of victims and events. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this year’s offering include everything from the Spurs’ lackluster season to Elon Musk’s even-worse season with Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX.
The costumes can be outrageous, often featuring outfits that dramatically exaggerate the female features of women performers. Men who look like body builders sometimes appear in the opposite of drag, wearing only enough cloth to avoid being arrested.
Some of the skits are cartoonishly sexy, but few are at all erotic. The average Cornyation is slightly less R-rated than a Super Bowl’s worth of beer commercials and much less than the recent halftime show. But for sensitive folks, the six performances over three nights are labeled “adult oriented satire” on the official Fiesta San Antonio event calendar.
What’s more, our legislators need not worry about children being present. I’ve never seen any there, although years ago a Republican judge I knew brought his daughter and her friends, in their early teens, to one of the performances. As far as I know the only trouble that caused was to fan the outrage of my own daughter, who to this day resents the fact that I didn’t let her attend when I was King Anchovy in 1996. She was 6.
In those days there was an annual appearance by a drag group called the Pointless Sisters. Dressed in bright-colored flowing dresses, they performed Mexican folk dances. They were sort an amateur folkloric version of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. If you’ve never seen these guys, they are highly skilled male dancers who dress in tights and tutus and other traditional female ballet costumes and dance both comically and elegantly on pointed toes. The last time I saw them was in the Jones Concert Hall where the Houston Symphony performs, and the packed audience included quite a few young ballerinas in training who thoroughly enjoyed the show.
As it happened, I shared a dressing room with the Pointless Sisters when I was King Anchovy in 1996. They were down-home guys, including (don’t tell anybody) some school teachers, who joked as they stuffed the bodices of their very chaste folkloric costumes.
By the way, drag performances are not the equivalent of blackface that “stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others and discriminate against womanhood.” This was the charge leveled by the president of West Texas A&M University in Canyon when he shut down a campus drag show fundraiser last month. He called them “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.” It’s a trope taken up by some politicians and conservative think tanks such as the Texas Public Policy Foundation — groups not known for their passionate defense of the rights of women or Black people.
Whether in minstrel shows or in college or civic organization skits, blackface often involved white performers indulging in stereotypes of Black people as buffoons for the amusement of white audiences. In contrast, drag shows tend to involve performers engaging in admittedly exaggerated portrayals of women they admire, women who often are icons of a large portion of the gay community. I don’t think Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand or Lady Gaga ever has expressed offense at being widely celebrated in drag shows. Somehow feminist groups, outspoken on the many societal insults to women, have not taken up this cause.
It’s hard for me to imagine how the likes of the Pointless Sisters or any other drag performers can become the objects of such fear and hatred among a substantial portion of the American public. But an April 16 article in the New York Times last week helped shed some light.
The article focused on the broader phenomenon of the relatively recent and massively coordinated political attack on transgender people — as if they didn’t already face enough challenges. Its headline was “How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives.” The subhead elaborated: “Defeated on same-sex marriage, the religious right went searching for an issue that would re-energize supporters and donors. The campaign that followed has stunned political leaders across the spectrum.”
Political strategists for conservatives had a problem. They could no longer campaign against Jews or Blacks or Latinos, and in the wake of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision that issue has repeatedly rallied the wrong voters. When Americans’ support for gay marriage became apparent, they needed another avenue to raise fear and outrage to drive their base to the polls. Focus groups and other techniques showed them the way. So now we have attacks on transgender children and their parents and on cross-dressers and drag shows.
Even our librarians — professionals whom I have long regarded as the only heroic civil service class — are receiving death threats and being called “groomers.”
That is, of course, absurd. So is any hint that Cornyation is in any way a danger to our children. The danger to our children is currently holding its biennial performance in Austin.
