Last April, when drag could still be performed in Tennessee without noticeable complaint, the curtains parted at Tennessee Tech University's Backdoor Playhouse to reveal Joshua Lancaster wearing a black cowl, white face paint, black lipstick and white contact lenses.
He was excited for the debut of his new drag persona, Witchcrafted. But the four-minute video of Lancaster lip-syncing and sashaying across the stage, recorded by his boyfriend, would sit on his Facebook page largely unseen for months until it was found by Landon Starbuck, a conservative activist.On Sept.
The Tennessee legislature passed the bill earlier this year banning "adult cabaret performances," including at least some drag acts, in public or in front of minors, with prison sentences for violations. Its impacts are already being felt. The video was broadcast by Tucker Carlson on Fox News and by other conservative news outlets. Lancaster, who lives in a one-story house with a cluttered porch in the farmlands outside Cookeville, a small city dominated by the Tennessee Tech campus, began receiving threatening messages. He peeled off the large Witchcrafted decal he had stuck on his car. The cowl he wore in the video he put out with the trash.
Last year she founded Freedom Forever, a non-profit organization that campaigns against the sexual abuse of children and gender-affirming medical treatment for minors, such as puberty blockers and surgery. By November, Senator Jack Johnson, a Republican, had introduced the bills restricting gender-affirming treatment and drag that the Starbucks had sought, in the latter case citing the videos he had seen. Landon Starbuck testified at hearings, where senators asked her about the Witchcrafted video and other videos she had since posted.
She noted there was reams of video from her group's annual Pride festival in downtown Knoxville over the years with both drag performers and children in attendance, yet no clips had gone viral "because responsible producers put on a responsible show."
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