A Florida official wants to cancel a sold-out Christmas drag show. The queens perform anyway He drags

The Drag Queen Christmas Tour has become an annual holiday tradition in Florida — and in recent years, the backlash that has followed has only grown.

Now in its 11th year, A Drag Queen Christmas, featuring performers from RuPaul’s Drag Race, will make a stop in the Florida Panhandle city of Pensacola on Tuesday night, despite efforts by state officials to cancel the show because of what they claim is an “anti-Christian” show at a city-owned theater.

The state’s attorney general spent nearly two months lobbying Pensacola officials to cancel the show, but to no avail. Instead, the 1,600-person capacity tourist terminal was sold.

“We can’t thank Pensacola enough for showing up and showing up. We’ll see you on December 23!” Tour host Nina West said in a video posted to social media on Sunday.

Queens has continued to perform across Florida, despite an anti-drag law that had been stuck in court for years until last week, and which was exacerbated by other anti-LGBTQ+ community laws and attacks in the state. Such challenges create an overall sense of unity in the scene, said Orlando organizer Violet Maldonado, who performs under the name Kisa Death.

“I don’t think the community here is going anywhere, or going quietly into the night,” Maldonado said.

Florida’s history of LGBTQ+ acceptance and attacks

Florida has a long legacy of being home to LGBTQ+ communities, including Pensacola. Local drag queen Edie Yacht noted that Pensacola’s LGBTQ+ history dates back to the 1950s with the launch of the Emma Jones Society, which for nearly 20 years has hosted the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ gathering on the city’s beaches. But in the past five years, under Gov. Ron DeSantis, a wave of anti-LGBTQ hostility has escalated into a nationwide “panic.”

Florida was one of several states to introduce 510 anti-LGBT bills in 2023, according to ACLU tracking. In Florida, a number of laws have been passed that focus heavily on “protecting” youth from gender-affirming care, transgender children in sports, and preferred pronouns. Nearly 50 bills across the country focused on recalls.

Anti-drag bills have been accompanied by intense attacks on drag shows, such as neo-Nazis appearing outside “drag queen story hours”; A Florida neo-Nazi said anti-drag sentiment helped fuel hate group numbers in 2023. In 2022, a donut shop in Oklahoma was firebombed after it hosted a drag show, and a mass shooting occurred at Club Q in Colorado during a drag show. That same year, the Proud Boys gathered in Clearwater, Florida, as a drag queen’s Christmas stop.

In 2022, the DeSantis administration investigated some Drag Queen Christmas stops in the state, based on Florida’s “debauchery” laws, alleging that the venues were hosting “sexually explicit performances marketed to children” apparently without evidence. Earlier that year, footage of a young child attending a brunch in Florida caught the attention of conservatives, according to the outlet Florida Politics.

Shortly after DeSantis signed the “child protection” ban into law in June 2023, a judge blocked its implementation. “The law is specifically designed to suppress the speech of drag artists,” U.S. District Judge Gregory Presnell of the Middle District of Florida wrote in his decision. In November of that year, the Supreme Court refused to overturn the suspension of the law.

However, after a Heritage Foundation employee claimed that A Drag Queen Christmas “mocks Christ” in a blog post this summer, controversy erupted again. In September, local church members flocked to a Pensacola City Council meeting to denounce the drag event as offensive to Christianity, arguing that the show’s contents were in line with the venue’s cancellation policy on content “harmful to the public health or general welfare of the community.” In a Nov. 7 letter to the City Council, state Attorney General James Othmeyer called for the parade to be rescinded. In it, Othmeier mistook Seattle-based Queen Bosco, the runner-up on the 2025 season of Drag Race: All-Stars, for being trans. Bosco is not scheduled to attend any of the Florida dates.

The Pensacola City Council made clear several times that it would not cancel the show, citing legal fees if the production company behind the tour decided to file a lawsuit. But a legal update to Florida’s drug control bill on Dec. 15, which put the law into effect, heightened fears that the City Council or parade organizers would back down. But that didn’t happen, and the drag community says they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

“We’ve been through some crazy stuff. Pulse hasn’t been in a long time,” said Jinda Envy, a drag queen from Orlando. “It’s going to take a lot. Ron DeSantis? Oh girl, you should come to my house.”

The drag community refuses to stand down

All this denial flies in the face of an obvious fact – Florida is a prime habitat for modern drag. Five of the 14 queens on the upcoming season of RuPaul’s Drag Race hail from the state. Every Floridian I spoke to for this story emphasized that this rollback — or the conservative elected officials who are making headlines about it — is unrepresentative of the state’s population, which is very diverse not only ideologically but also in terms of identity.

While anti-drag critics claim the law protects young people, drag shows are important for young people, too. Jewel Sparkles, 24, a current touring cast member and Drag Race season 17 runner-up, recalled seeing the show when she was a high school student in an interview earlier this year. “I lived in Miami when I was little, and my mom would drive me to the theater in Fort Lauderdale where the Christmas tour was going,” Sparkles told Out South Florida. “She was waiting in that parking lot while I went to watch Shea and all the other queens. I still have pictures from the reunion and I swear I’ll be saving them for months!”

Orlando drag queen Jinda Envy started dragging at age 17 and graduated high school the year the Child Protection Act was signed. While she had a safe home environment, she said, “I’m like the Republican Party’s worst nightmare.” Jinda Envi said her friends and classmates “who were not in good situations” were afraid.

As a child, Jinda Envy knew that sex was more complicated than the way she learned it in school. “I was always looked at as a little girl when I was a little kid. When I was a kid, I was called ‘princess’ at Disney. I had to stop correcting people, because that happened a lot,” Envy says. “When I became an adult and joined Orlando [drag scene]It made me feel like it was okay that maybe I wasn’t like everyone else. Maybe there are a bunch of other people who aren’t like everyone else either. Maybe no one is really like anyone else.

“Having a support system, and not only that, but mixed with creative expression, hard work and ambition, is what I think is so beautiful about drag,” she continued.

The queens were part of the fabric of the greater Pensacola community, Yacht said. Most recently, the drag show was a Toys for Tots campaign; Attendees had to bring a toy to get in the door. “I love doing charity shows and helping people,” she said. “If your Chihuahua has cataracts and you need someone to come out and go around for a few bucks to raise some money to do surgery on him, I’m all for it.”

Yacht said performers may have to continue making adjustments as the law goes back into effect, but that won’t stop her from performing. “If we were to go back to the easy-talking way of the 1920s — but with an emphasis on drag — you would find me in those bars performing,” Yacht said.

Despite its importance, the drag community isn’t just art and fun, the queens say. It also serves as a lifeline for members of society who, like art itself, are publicly condemned and vilified, including those in positions of power. When Maldonado lost her day job in part due to her work as a drag queen, she said organizing an alternative drag event in Orlando, called the Gala of Ghouls, put her in touch with the community, which then helped her rebuild her life. Of the nine shows it hosted this year in Orlando, nearly all tickets were sold out, and each event had at least 250 people.

Fans have also been at the heart of the rejection process, with the constant appearance of what can sometimes be strongly protested or censored performances. Pensacola resident Carson Wilbur has launched a GoFundMe to cover the estimated amount the city of Pensacola has funded for the event through venue fees: $1,363. As of writing, the fundraiser has received more than double that number. “It has nothing to do with taxpayer money, the law, safety or child protection,” Wilbur said of any backlash against the show. “For many [critics]It’s an abstract moral truth they want to impose on the rest of us. I think this is wrong.

The best thing people can do to respond to drag bans is to continue drag shows, said Qommittee, a national coalition of drag performers, advocates and allies. “Show up, support the performers, and tip generously,” the group said in a press release. “If you are an artist, don’t back down – keep performing, know your rights, and protect yourself. The goal of this campaign of intimidation is to make us disappear. We will not give up.” [Florida AG Uthmeier] What he wants. Silence is submission.”

For those who have been told they have no right to exist, or that being themselves means risking shame, violence, or erasure, drag remains a necessary community gathering place, a respite from a hostile world and a reminder that queer and trans people keep each other safe (while also looking cool).

“Towing is the center of our community,” Yacht said. “We’re like kings: We’re the ones who see first, hear first, and speak on behalf of our community. They’re attacking the boss of the community, so to speak, and once we’re gone and silenced, what’s next? I feel like Pensacola is the spark of the fire they’re trying to ignite.”