An Arizona drag queen stated she has one query for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio after he featured her in a marketing campaign advert: “Why are you so obsessive about me and Drag Story Hour?”
Lil Miss Sizzling Mess, a drag performer who lives in Arizona and performs in Los Angeles, stated a good friend messaged her on Sept. 28 telling her that they noticed her in one in every of Rubio’s marketing campaign adverts whereas watching the Climate Channel in Florida.
“The unconventional left will destroy youngsters if we don’t cease them,” Rubio says within the advert, which can be on Fb. “They indoctrinate youngsters, attempt to flip boys into ladies.”
As Rubio is talking, the advert reveals a video of Lil Miss Sizzling Mess studying to youngsters throughout a Drag Queen Story Hour — a nationwide program began in 2015 by which drag performers learn to children to encourage studying and have a good time variety, based on this system’s web site.
Lil Miss Sizzling Mess, who requested to go by her stage title as a result of security considerations, responded to Rubio’s advert in a video shared by GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy group.
“We’re merely out right here studying books to youngsters, encouraging them to make use of their creativeness to ascertain a extra simply and fabulous world,” Lil Miss Sizzling Mess stated within the video. “You, alternatively, are out right here throughout a hurricane that’s pummeling your state spreading hateful, homophobic and transphobic bigotry.”
She stated Rubio may as an alternative be addressing the impacts of local weather change, gun violence in colleges or the economic system.
“You’ll be able to both get up for these of us who deserve justice and rights on this nation, or you possibly can stand out of our means, as a result of we’re right here to unfold pleasure, justice and a extra fabulous future,” she stated.
She informed NBC Information that when she noticed the advert, she was aggravated, offended and embarrassed for Rubio.
The day her good friend messaged her in regards to the advert was the day Hurricane Ian hit Florida’s coast. “It simply appears so surprising that this was how he was prioritizing his marketing campaign {dollars} and the sorts of messages that he was crafting,” the performer stated. “It’s ridiculous to come back after drag queens for merely studying books to children.”
The demise toll as a result of Hurricane Ian’s devastating results in components of Florida reached almost 100 Monday.
This isn’t the primary time that Rubio has criticized Lil Miss Sizzling Mess, she stated.
In Might, a library on a U.S. Air Power base in Germany canceled a Drag Queen Story Hour occasion as a result of complaints, together with a letter from Rubio.
Within the letter, addressed to Frank Kendall, the secretary of the Air Power, Rubio described the story hour as a “politically divisive occasion” that might “place younger youngsters in shut proximity with adults who’re deliberately and explicitly sexualized.”
He then referred to as out Lil Miss Sizzling Mess’ youngsters’s e book, “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish.”
“The writer of the e book stated they wrote it in order that youngsters may ‘expertise the magic of drag and to get a bit of apply shaking their hips or shimmying their shoulders to know the way [they] can really feel fabulous inside [their] personal our bodies,’” Rubio wrote. “As I hope you possibly can agree, choices over youngsters and their our bodies needs to be left to mothers and dads serving our nation, not mediated by means of publicly funded propaganda on U.S. Air Power bases.”
Rubio’s letter parroted “harmful rhetoric suggesting that drag queens sexualize youngsters,” Lil Miss Sizzling Mess wrote in an op-ed for NBC Information in June. In actuality, she stated, “drag prompts creativity and play, increasing conventional methods of pondering.”
She referred to analysis that she printed with Harper Keenan, an assistant professor on the College of British Columbia. The 2 argue that Drag Queen Story Hour makes use of among the only studying practices, as a result of it invitations a way of marvel and curiosity and “encourages youngsters to ask why issues have all the time been carried out in sure methods.”
Rubio’s advert and letter are examples of a rising development by which Republican officers have labeled LGBTQ-inclusive occasions and drag performances as dangerous to youngsters. Some have even gone as far as to name them “grooming” — invoking a decades-old false trope about LGBTQ folks.
The language has additionally escalated into bodily threats. In June, which is LGBTQ Delight Month, at the very least three LGBTQ occasions have been focused by white nationalist teams. And final week, a gaggle of armed protesters confirmed up exterior of a Texas church to protest a drag bingo occasion.
Lil Miss Sizzling Mess stated the assaults make her assume twice in regards to the work that Drag Queen Story Hour does, however she stated she in the end believes that she and the opposite performers are “opening up youngsters’s imaginations and serving to them be their finest selves.”
“We’re not out right here on the defensive,” she stated. “We actually are out right here doing this as a result of we consider that it’s proper and since we consider that it does open up new potentialities for our world and for our future.”
Observe NBC Out on Twitter, Fb & Instagram.
