Anti-trans crusade claims a local performance

Fear and ignorance win in Lake Luzerne

The enlightened but overwhelmed folks at Rockwell Falls Public Library who scheduled a drag queen story hour with Scarlet Sagamore for Saturday decided to postpone the event. 

A better although impractical solution would have been to schedule a drag queen story hour for every Saturday morning. The ranks of the outraged would have thinned quickly, especially if it was raining.

I don’t believe the protesters actually object to cross-dressing performances, which are now and have been for at least my lifetime part of our culture.

As a kid, I saw men I knew dressed as women, doing high kicks on stage as part of the Rotary Show during the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival.

That show is still in the carnival, although this year’s costumes were a mix of male and female — with top hats, American flag shirts, blonde wigs and orange skirts. But it still involves playing with gender to entertain local children and adults, as it did 50 years ago.

Older readers may remember the cross-dressing plot of “Some Like it Hot,” a hit movie in 1959, starring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon disguising themselves as women. At the end, Lemmon’s character tries to put off a marriage proposal by removing his wig and announcing, “I’m a man!”

“Well,” comes the reply, “nobody’s perfect.”

A sense of fun pervades cross-dressing, of tiptoeing into forbidden territory like a child into his mom’s closet.

But shows like Scarlet Sagamore’s have been dragged into a contemporary obsession with trans individuals that is, more than anything, a distraction from our real misfortunes.

While some of us fret over gender nonconformity, the country is being shaken, again and again, by mass shootings. Gunfire is killing our children, and those who aren’t shot are traumatized.

Who shows up in Lake Luzerne or anywhere else to protest the opening of another gun shop?

In 2018, in neighboring Corinth, a local man who was cleaning a gun accidentally shot and killed his wife, who was sitting on a couch nearby.

It was a horrible event, for the community and for the family — the couple had three young children. As much as the man was at fault for his negligence, also to blame is our culture, which defends the proliferation and normalization of guns, so that some men sling guns over their shoulders like pocketbooks when they go out in public and others think nothing of cleaning them in the living room.

The carnage that results from our casual approach to guns is enormous, but we tolerate it in the name of liberty.

At the same time, our tolerance for drag shows is limited, and we have sought to repress transgender citizens’ deepest expressions of who they are.

No one was being forced to attend the event at the library, and those who wanted it canceled weren’t going to attend themselves or send their children.

They weren’t protesting for their own sake. They wanted to make sure no one else saw the show.

Across the country, Republican leaders and legislatures are making drag shows illegal. Gender-affirming health care is under legislative attack, and books about transgender youths and adults are being pulled from library shelves.

Whatever the motivation, this has become a crusade of condemnation, meant to force certain members of our communities into the shadows. It is being fought in statehouses across the country and in small town schools and libraries.

If you want to know how it’s going, look at Lake Luzerne, where Scarlet Sagamore’s performance has been indefinitely delayed.