Since June 2022, GLAAD’s ALERT Desk tracked over 365 anti-drag incidents in the US.
I’m Salina EsTitties from the Emmy-award winning Season 15 of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Our season was filmed in 2022. I’ll never forget when the producers stopped us mid-makeup to show us a video of Ru speaking on a late night show about some new anti-LGBTQ legislation that was being debated while we filmed.
Here we were, queens on the biggest platform for drag artists, filming for MTV, of all places, with careers about to take off — and BAM, we hear about more anti-drag laws in the US.
I’m a Los Angeles queen and of course I live in West Hollywood, in my little melting pot of a queer bubble also known as Gay Town USA. I’ve gotten the privilege to fly and perform all around the world thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race.
And yet – I remember my castmate Aura Mayari talking about navigating anti-drag bills while performing back home in Nashville after our season wrapped.
I remember performing at South Padre Island Pride in Texas in 2023. It was their first Pride ever, capitalizing on the popular spring break location. Cops came to shut down that Pride, sending me and a 19 year-old local drag artist home before we could perform.
I remember booking another Pride event this year, only to be taken off the bill because of my drag name, “EsTitties.” The organization did not want to offend the right-wing bigots in town who had tried to get the FBI to shut down the Pride event the year before.
Ever since the Dylan Mulvaney x Bud Light controversy, brands aren’t collaborating as much with LGBTQ creators, including drag queens. Not that I care for corporate rainbow-washing, but I will say – many drag artists benefit financially from these deals and have taken a serious hit to their income as businesses pull away from utilizing us in their campaigns and collabs.
And I haven’t even mentioned the extremists online! During my season specifically, not only was I getting hate from anti-drag, anti-queer keyboard warriors, but I was also getting so much racially-charged hate for being so vocal about my Latinness on the show. I saw everything from death threats to hateful comments and DMs, saying I should kill myself or quit drag. Some even said that God was punishing me for my work, claiming that’s why my mother passed away during my season.
A couple months ago, I did a TikTok with the content creator @Cherdleys where I appeared in drag and he asked me what it means to be “LGBTQIA+.” The video was posted on August 8, 2024 and has over 15 MILLION views. It’s obviously satire, but not to the millions of people who let us know in the comments exactly how against us they are. To this day, I still get over 100 comment notifications daily of people spewing anti-LGBTQ hate. Just a couple weeks ago, someone commented “shoot it in between the eyes like a pig,” referring to me.
This is the insane stuff that I still encounter every now and again on my feed. And I know this goes beyond just me – this month, GLAAD launched the ALERT Desk which tracks anti-LGBTQ incidents all across the US. Their team found a shocking 112% rise in anti-LGBTQ hate, with over 365 anti-drag incidents documented since June 2022. Drag artists all across the US are impacted by this hate, from protests and bomb threats targeting our shows to anti-drag bills aimed at restricting our freedom of expression.
And despite it all – we remain. Drag queens are pillars in our communities. We’re out here as the loudest, biggest personalities in the room. With all this hate out there, it’s easy for us to cower away and hide. But drag queens have never been the ones to be afraid. We will continue to be out here, representing the LGBTQ community.