Back When “Insurrection Barbie” Hit the Drag Show
On RaeLynn’s Performative “Allyship” and Right Wing, Anti-LGBTQ+ Trends in Country Music
Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived multiple lifetimes in my 23 years in Nashville. The things I said I believed when I first came here in 1999, as an 18-year-old closeted Southern Baptist kid, are way different than what I believe today now that I’ve experienced so much life. I got sober. I fell in love and got married. I’ve spent years finding peace with myself and working through the self-loathing, though it’s still there in subtle ways. Internalized queerphobia is a powerful thing and I continually push to unlearn it.
I see how much I’ve grown and evolved in that time, and in my better moments, I’m willing to explain my experience in hopes that my story will help other people understand what it’s like to be queer in the south in 2022. I also believe what Maya Angelou and Oprah said , “when someone shows you who they are, believe them.” But many people are experts at hiding their true selves in a quest to follow trends and try to make a buck. In this case, it is almost three years after the fact….
It was March 28, 2018, and RaeLynn had a new song out called “Queens Don’t” all about love and acceptance. I have always been a champion for women in country music. Having women succeed in country music meant the most to me because for a big part of my life their songs served as a country music proxy for my queer experience. So, to have an up and coming artist have her party at a gay club with drag queens meant the world to me! She even advertised it on her social media accounts! I’ll let RaeLynn’s words as she introduced the the drag performance speak for itself. Powerful words from a true queer ally… or so I thought.
It’s only with hindsight and a look back at my camera roll that I realize what this single launch party really was… performative queer allyship solely for marketing purposes that came at just about zero risk to RaeLynn at the time… because she wasn’t the first to do it…. by nearly three years.
On June 15, 2015, Kacey Musgraves held the launch party for her album Pageant Material at Play, the same bar RaeLynn talks about in that video from 2018. Kacey had drag queens performing her new songs for the Music Row crowd, and she’d already won CMA Song of the Year for writing “Follow Your Arrow” with Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, who are both openly gay. The fact that Tim Tebow presented that particular CMA trophy is especially delicious.
I was there with bells on for that Kacey drag show and even taped a fun pageant training video with Kacey before the party. (Yes, I’ve served as a pageant judge at the state and local level for years now. That’s something we can unpack at another time.)
Imagine my surprise when scrolling through my camera roll to see scenes from the Raelynn event in March 2018…what she said and those drag performances next to photos from a launch party for Kacey’s third album, Golden Hour, earlier that same month. That masterpiece would go on to win the GRAMMY Award for Album of the Year. That album made Kacey a superstar who is still using her platform to showcase queer people. Just look at her 2021 Star-Crossed film which featured multiple queer, transgender and drag performers.
Kacey had already paved the way for queers and drag queens in country music by 2018 when RaeLynn hosted this party and released “Queens Don’t,” and recruited drag queens to help her sell it. She was trading on queer culture and looking to Kacey’s leadership (and Dolly’s and Shania’s and Martina’s and K.T.’s and Reba’s and Garth’s and Trisha’s and many others who have stood up for LGBTQ+ folks long before her) to make sure there was no risk to her for going to this queer market.
Looking back at 2018 from the vantage point of 2022, I now understand why it was hard to see who RaeLynn was back then. Her words seemed sincere at an event where she was clearly embracing the LGBTQ+ community and seeing us as human beings.
Today It’s shocking to hear those words come out of her mouth when she is now telling us there is no racism in country music while trying to take on the “Insurrection Barbie” mantle for herself.
I also wonder what RaeLynn’s friend Candace Owens has to say about the inclusive language used at this drag event?
Candace Owens has led the charge in demonizing and dehumanizing parents of LGBTQ+ kids who are trying to keep their children alive. She wants you to believe that doctors are out here mutilating these kids’ genitals.
GLAAD is keeping track of Candace Owens’ anti-trans campaign. It’s really anti-LGBTQ+ across the board if anyone tries to tell you she’s not coming for the queer community. — https://www.glaad.org/gap/candace-owens
Candace also came for me in a very public way in January, and I talked about it in an Instagram Live video you can watch here. More details on the timeline are available in my Instagram Story Highlights — Receipts. Transcript of Instagram Live video here.
All Candace and her followers, like Brittany Aldean, want to talk about is kids’ genitals because it’s shocking. It’s also a lie they’re being fed from the top GOP brass who tell them what to focus on in their posts. And it’s making me sick to my stomach to type it. As a sex abuse survivor who still remembers what happened to my three-year-old genitals with great detail, my blood boils to see them throw this around so casually and with such ease to stoke fear and get votes for their political party.
If they actually got to know some of these kids and their families, they’d realize the statistics about LGBTQ+ youth suicide rates and attempted suicide are all too real even if that kid is in a best-case scenario with incredible support surrounding them. Candace and Brittany and now RaeLynn NEVER want to talk about bigots like them who end up with queer kids and either cast them out on the street to fend for themselves or drive them out to escape the mental and physical torture they endure for being who they are.
It infuriates me because I lived this. I tried my best to hide my sexuality growing up in small-town Alabama. I wanted to fit in with my friends and kept praying every Sunday for God to take this away and make me straight. Today I’m thankful for unanswered prayers but it wasn’t easy to get to this point. The biggest mental breakdown I ever had was in 2004 when I knew I couldn’t hide it any longer from my parents and eventually the world. I’d broken up with my last girlfriend, and I was seriously spiraling. I never got to the point of contemplating suicide, but today with X years of sobriety under my belt, I recognize I was actually working on ending my life with years of alcohol abuse. And I had a family that got me counseling as a kid to deal with being molested. There are so many kids, even ones I grew up with and know today, that never had that support.
That’s why it’s so important to lift and up support organizations that are doing this work — like The Trevor Project on a nationwide basis and The Oasis Center here in Nashville.
Give what you can. The Trevor Project is an especially great resource for talking points to bring this conversation back to what matters — the mental health of these LGBTQ+ youth who are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers.
I know what these kids are dealing with first-hand and it’s taken me a long time to be truly OK with myself and who I am — especially around straight men. It was women who made me feel it was OK to be myself. I felt I could trust them and take them at their word when they accepted me.
RaeLynn made me feel like that back in 2018. Now I realize she didn’t see me or those drag queens at her party as full human beings deserving of respect and equality. We were only part of a marketing tool for her. Since pretending to be a queer ally didn’t make her rich and famous, she has now revealed her true belief…that queer people are sub-human and undeserving of respect and equality. All of this while palling around with the original “Insurrection Barbie” and Candace Owens.
It’s also worth noting that September is National Suicide Awareness Prevention month, which makes it even more heinous that Brittany Aldean and Kasi Rosa are kicking off the month trying to make a buck on making at-risk LGBTQ+ kids’ lives even more of a living hell.
So, what did George W. Bush say back in the 2000s? Fool me once, shame on me…. you can’t fool me again! I’ll have to be more careful in the future before I trust an LGBTQ+ “ally” looking to market their career on the back of my queer identity.
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And another thing! That racism comment from RaeLynn from Turning Point USA in December 2021 (where she shared a bill with Kyle Rittenhouse along with country artists Brantley Gilbert, Dustin Lynch and Russell Dickerson) is directly tied to her willingness to throw the LGBTQ+ community under the bus now that we’re of no use to her. Two clicks on Google will inform you there would be no gay rights movement from the 70s until today without the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, also to this day. It was trans women of color like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson leading the charge at Stonewall that led to me being able to marry my husband this past June and not live in fear that we would be arrested for having sex in the privacy of our own home. Learn your HERstory before you become that oblivious, white, straight man trying to tell me that Brittany Aldean demonizing trans youth has nothing to do with my life as a gay man.
One more thing! Thank you to Maren Morris, Ryan Hurd, Lindsay Ell, and especially Cassadee Pope for speaking up on this shitstorm. Your voices change things.