LGBTQ+ groups and drag performers suing the state argued Monday that Senate Bill 12 violates constitutionally-protected rights. The new law is set to go into effect on Friday unless a federal judge blocks it.
  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    1612·
    10 months ago

    There’s several Shakespeare plays involving cross-dressing. So basically they’re going to outlaw Shakespeare.

    • SCB@lemmy.world
      1001·
      10 months ago

      They already banned Shakespeare in several schools for being too sexual.

      • AzuleBlade@lemm.ee
        9·
        10 months ago

        My freshman year of high school, my AP English teacher made sure to point out all the sexual stuff in Shakespeare, much to our chagrin.

        • SCB@lemmy.world
          181·
          10 months ago

          My favorite things about Shakespeare as an English teacher was explaining the innuendos and explaining how Romeo and Juliet was absolutely not a love story lol

          I had a young woman who was a freshman yell at me, crying, that Romeo and Juliet was the greatest love story of all time and it was adorable.

          • MightBeAlpharius@lemmy.world
            111·
            10 months ago

            I feel like some of that comes down to… Well, us, the adults. For some ungodly reason, we’ve been calling it things like “a love story” and “a tragedy,” and now people just don’t know what to expect.

            We’ve also somewhat sanitized it. The pop-culture focus on it tends to be the lengths they go to in order to be together, or the families coming together at the end; but we tend to ignore that the couple is just trying to be together to bone, it’s full of dick jokes, and at the end they basically get cockblocked so hard that they die.

            Actually, now that I think of it, Kenneth Branaugh is great and all, but I’d love to see a Seth Rogen adaptation of this one.

          • SheeEttin@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            10 months ago

            It’s sort of a love story, but it’s obviously a tragic love story. I’m not sure I’d use the word “adorable” but it could certainly be touching, especially to a teen girl.

          • angrystego@lemmy.world
            3·
            10 months ago

            I’m a bit confused. Do the inuendos prevent it from being a love story? I always found it to be a tragic lovestory of two horny teenagers. I think hornyness is a common part of being in love.

            • SCB@lemmy.world
              101·
              10 months ago

              It’s a tragedy about two teens in who know each other for 4 days, get married after 24 hours, and cause the deaths of 6 people.

              The story opens with Romeo pining after a totally different young woman, which is why his friends take him to the party in the first place

              Ultimately, it’s a warning about foolish love

              • angrystego@lemmy.world
                6·
                10 months ago

                I agree with most of this. I differ in that I think foolish love is a Natural and integral part of the age of the protagonists. The teenagers are not ať fault in my eyes. So to me, it seems more like a warning about foolish adults with the prime example being friar Laurence - seriously, wtf man, what were you thinking, you were supposed to know better!

                • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world
                  4·
                  10 months ago

                  Yeah, Romeo and Juliet is the story about how two naive but innocent kids ended up as the victims of their families’ senseless feuding.

              • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
                4·
                10 months ago

                It’s pretty fucked all around. It’s not just any two teens, but the children of two powerful families who are feuding for no reason. I think we can generalize it as a warning against foolishness in general. In the end, all of them were Fortune’s fool, not just Romeo.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
            2·
            10 months ago

            It may not be a real love story, but Romeo and Juliet definitely go to bone town. And it was played by two men when Shakespeare wrote it.

    • JJROKCZ@lemmy.worldEnglish
      47·
      10 months ago

      Republicans see no issue with banning Shakespeare and any other expression of art

      • GreenMario@lemm.ee
        71·
        10 months ago

        The only book you need is the Bible and the only art is the CROSS. If you have time for entertainment you have time to work and if you’re a kid, go see your local pastor for “work”

        – them, most likely

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
      181·
      10 months ago

      Republicans only care about Shakespeare, beethoven, and other such classical plays and music when they can use it as a dog whistle in order to imply an inherent criminality to Black Culture

    • Ertebolle@kbin.social
      11·
      10 months ago

      And then they’ll turn around and ban all of the ones that don’t involve cross-dressing because in Shakespeare’s time the female parts were all played by men.

  • kredditacc@lemmy.world
    1261·
    10 months ago

    The longer the Americans focus their attention to the culture war, the less likely they pay attention to economic issues.

        • kredditacc@lemmy.world
          311·
          10 months ago

          Both sides demonize each other. Both sides pay the large part of their attention span to the culture war and hate each other for it.

          US politics is 2 parties on paper, but in reality, it is a 1 party state with the purpose of dividing the common people by groups so that they are weak against the ruling class.

      • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
        6·
        10 months ago

        Only one party has to pull this shit to drag everyone down. You can’t just ignore dehumanization of LGBT people and continue to talk about the economy.

        It reminds me a bit of comic book superheroes. The nature of Good means the hero needs to watch out for everyone, and prioritize protecting people and saving lives. If forced to choose between saving a bystander and the crippling the villain, they pick the bystander. On the other hand, Evil doesn’t give a shit. Villains aren’t usually bothered by morality or collateral, especially if the ends justify the means.

        I know it’s a cartoonish viewpoint on the topic, but I think it’s applicable. We can’t ignore persecution of minorities, even when it’s very obviously an astroturfed cultural issue. Economic policy changes may help a greater number of people overall, but we can’t achieve that at the cost of the bystander in danger.

    • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      15·
      10 months ago

      Ding ding ding!

      This is the answer right here. Conservative politicians don’t give a shit about any of this but as per usual they found het another irrelevant issue that they can use to rile ou their constituents to ensure the sheep folk votes for them and against their own interests.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
      15·
      10 months ago

      We need to start hammering them. The media clearly is unwilling or unable to do it. Every time one of those right-wing family value fuckers starts talking about this stuff yell some catchphrase at them like

      “How about rent?” “What about the rising debt?” “Why isn’t insulin free?”.

      I am going to start with my local ones.

      • Adeptfuckup@lemmy.world
        9·
        10 months ago

        Don’t forget the infrastructure failures either. You know… the train derailments, the collapsing bridges, the tens of thousands of people killed on our roads everyday. Point out that the right is waging a culture war at the expense of public safety. This is really fucking dangerous. Good luck as I am not sure much can be done because words have become meaningless.

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
          3·
          10 months ago

          Big hunk of my workload is for infrastructure. Doing my part every day I stagger into work.

          For no reason whatsoever: If you are ever in Toronto ON, drink bottled water only.

    • bankimu@lemm.ee
      55·
      10 months ago

      Economy is gone, look at the cumulated inflation over the last few years. And depleting Treasury.

  • TheJims@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10410·
    10 months ago

    Don’t let Republicans pretend they care about children while allowing them to get slaughtered in the classroom and raped at bible camp and forcing them to give birth,

    • spider@lemmy.nz
      352·
      10 months ago

      allowing them to get slaughtered in the classroom and raped at bible camp and forcing them to give birth,

      while restricting the books they can read.

      First things first.

    • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      7·
      10 months ago

      They don’t give a shit about children.

      They care about people voting for them (and with that, against their own interests) and the only way to get that done is to rile these people up with irrelevant issues like drag queens. Why do you think fox news all of the sudden jumps on top of issues like this?

      If people have nothing to freak out about they might look at real issues and notice that the conservative parties are working hard to thing their lives. Can’t have that, so let’s ruin the lives of others too by demonizing them. In the past it was the gays, this time it’s the drag queens because let’s face it: easy target and gays are acceptable now. Colored people and people with “funny” languages are also always a popular target for this bullshit.

    • mind@lemmy.world
      31·
      10 months ago

      Don’t let Republicans pretend they care about children while allowing them to get slaughtered in the classroom

      Disarming the working class will hurt those kids more in the long run than the risk of a school shooting.

      Strict gun control would be much more palatable if the police were demilitarized first, but the most vocal gun control advocates don’t talk about that.

      They might want “a discussion about racial sensitivity” or some other ineffective method of reforming the police, but never want to talk about power, class, and institutionalized violence in a meaningful way.

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
    889·
    10 months ago

    I drove through a tiny rural town, population 4300, in my province earlier this summer, which barely has enough people living there to support running a donut shop, let alone any sort of drag venue, and some idiot had signs at the end of his driveway saying “No more kids at drag shows!”. I mean, it’s literally the asshole of northern Ontario, a drag queen has never had a reason to go anywhere near there, he’s obviously never left the town in his life, let alone seen a drag queen in person, and yet he paid to put up signs on his driveway people will mostly ignore about a subject that has nothing to do with him. Conservativism really is like a brain fever or something. The things they believe are so exquisitely stupid.

    Anyway, I love drag and want to marry Naomi Smalls, and I’m hopeful this psychotic legislation in the US all gets struck down.

      • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
        3·
        10 months ago

        Probably so but the thing is most people wouldn’t even notice his signs, I just happened to look up as a passenger at the right second, and he lives on a rural highway with few neighbours. He wants attention but isn’t going to get it.

  • victron@programming.devEnglish
    544·
    10 months ago

    This feels so stupid. There are people out there that really want to ban such shows? It’s an art like any other. What’s next, ban street mimes? Make improv ilegal?

    • bankimu@lemm.ee
      221·
      10 months ago

      Who is banning such shows? Nay, why, let’s all also make lap dances and pole dancing available to kids in school. Sure they are art forms and first amendment applies there too. /s

      • Stinkywinks@lemmy.world
        10·
        10 months ago

        Lap dances and pole dancing are not the same as a drag show, but while we are on the topic. You cool with me whipping Jesus in public, then nailing him to a fake cross with fake blood running down his face?

        • bankimu@lemm.ee
          213·
          10 months ago

          The topic was first amendment. Stay in context. Either acknowledge that it’s not a good argument, or accept that they are “the same as drag show” within that context.

          Not even sure what the Jesus thing is about, but I suppose everything is being allowed under the pretext of first amendment so why not. It sounds like an enactment which is a - what did people call it - an “art form”.

    • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
      94·
      10 months ago

      They used to do drag shows in WW2 during downtime from killing Nazis

      You’re not trying to get republicans on board like that, are you?

  • LostDeer@infosec.pubEnglish
    30·
    10 months ago

    I know of a judge who would be happy to disagree… once he’s back from his 5th vacation trip this month.

    • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
      9·
      10 months ago

      You mean happy to agree, happy to disagree. Depends on who is paying for the vacation this month.

          • Viking_Hippie@feddit.dk
            2·
            10 months ago

            Maybe, but even if so, the Venn diagram of the kind of person who’d want to have anything to do with him and the kind of person who thinks minorities should have rights is just two circles.

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    101·
    10 months ago

    Maybe they can pay for Rudy Giuliani to go down there and testify about that time he dressed up in drag and got motorboated by Donald Trump. Rudy’s low on cash right now, I bet he would do it.

  • SamHamilton@lemmy.world
    1318·
    10 months ago

    I find the whole concept of drag queen story hour confusing. Drag is this kind of specific performance art that seems like it is custom tailored for stage performance, so doing drag queen story hour seems as random as doing “the cast of the broadway musical cats!” story hour or something like that. What’s the idea behind putting drag queens + story hour together at all?

    • ron@lemmy.world
      332·
      10 months ago

      It teaches children about acceptance and that they can be anything they want. Some children find it a calming environment to learn social skills because of dress up

    • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      291·
      10 months ago

      Well, it started with libraries not having people volunteering to read to kids. And then adults who did read to kids wanted to make it fun and engaging for them, so they began dressing up in fantasy outfits and effectively cosplay. And then the gay community heard of it and likely just naturally fell into it. Some gay people grt very very excited about dressing up, doing theatrics, and drag.

      • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶@lemmy.nz
        181·
        10 months ago

        Really?? Huh, well there you go. I’ll switch my status from ‘indifference’ to ‘supporting.’ No one ever took me to the library to have books read to me.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          61·
          10 months ago

          That’s really sad. I have treasured memories of going to the library and having one of the librarians read a picture book. I took my daughter to the library for the same reason when she was little.

          That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to libraries these days, by the way. My wife is a library administrator. This town has less than 80,000 people, but the library has three 3D printers 100% free for use, take-home kits of things like a ukulele with an instruction book, an HTC Vive and a PS5 for teens to play with any time they want, and they’re building a new branch that includes a room (one person at a time with a lockable door) with a free washer/dryer and a shower!

          Support your local library. Go there. Have fun. Buy something at the book sale to throw them a few bucks.

          • SamHamilton@lemmy.world
            3·
            10 months ago

            Our library is awesome in that way too. They have 3d printers as well, and they invest a lot in online resources as also. LinkedIn learning, Rosetta stone, O’Reilly’s entire learning catalog, and a ton more, all free with a library card. AND they have a lot of good services for the homeless as well. I actually sent my city councilwoman a letter asking to increase funding to the library.

          • AA5B@lemmy.world
            31·
            10 months ago

            Ours is arguably too good about being online. I haven’t been there since before COViD, but read library books on my Kindle all the time

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
              2·
              10 months ago

              Yep. Libraries have ebooks for free. And audiobooks. My wife hasn’t paid for either in years. I only have once because there was no other way to get a specific BBC radio drama I wanted.

              Some libraries even have streaming movies!

      • SamHamilton@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 months ago

        That’s pretty interesting! Do you know of any good articles that trace the history going that far back? Seems like it would be a good read.

    • chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      111·
      10 months ago

      I find the comparison to clowns quite helpful, as they fill a weirdly similar niche – in most cases a performance art with clearly defined tropes, based on exaggerated makeup, carefully choreographed routines, while retaining an ability to improvise with a crowd, and of course some people have an irrational fear of them. From that perspective, it makes perfect sense to have them do the reading for kids. The makeup turns them into a cartoon character that kids find exciting; the practice with improv means children, who aren’t always the best listeners, can be managed without harshing the vibe; and their general stage experience and presence helps them retain that tough crowd to get them to listen to the story.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
      41·
      10 months ago

      I can definitely see it. When I read to my kids when they were little, I’d at least do the voices and sound effects. However I would never do that in front of people I don’t know, let alone an audience. But I can see putting on a persona would help me drop that inhibition. Maybe that persona is represented by a funny hat or vest or glasses or something, or I can see drag being similar

    • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶@lemmy.nz
      44·
      10 months ago

      Yeah that’s where I fall as well. I’m not inherently opposed to it, it just seems like a wierd thing to exist.

      Apparently 10 people think we’re transphobic wrong word, uh… dragphobic? for having this opinion too.

      • Khotetsu@lib.lgbtEnglish
        121·
        10 months ago

        I think both drag performers and Broadway actors have the perfect skill set for reading books to kids. It’s like the difference between reading the lyrics to a song and hearing a musician sing it, regardless of whether they’re a country singer or an opera singer or a movie music composer. An actor, whether Broadway or not, would know exactly when to pause to create dramatic tension, be able to give characters their own unique voices or personalities, etc. And the fantastical, exaggerated costumes of drag I imagine just make it all the more exciting for the kids.

        As for how drag performers reading books to kids started, I have no idea, but somebody else said it started from people volunteering to read books to kids at local libraries, and the LGBT community got into helping out in that way, which led to drag performers doing it. And that makes sense to me. The LGBT community seems to be heavily made up of people who want to support their communities. Probably because they’ve often had to band together and create their own.