Pensacola City Council chambers were nearly filled Thursday night with a crowd demanding the city cancel a drag show scheduled two days before Christmas at the city-owned Saenger Theatre.
“A Drag Queen Christmas” is set to come to the Saengar Theatre on Dec. 23, but the show’s proximity to the Christmas holiday has drawn outrage from members of local churches.
The show is a national tour of prominent drag performers that is stopping in 37 cities in November and December and that bills itself as “the longest running drag tour.” The show is only open to people 18 years and older.
The show will go on as Pensacola officials said their contract with the company that operates the Saenger Theatre and the First Amendment prevent the city from canceling it.
James Johnson, pastor of Northstone Baptist Church on Nine Mile Road, argued the city’s contract with ASM Global, the management company that operates the venue, gave the ability to cancel a show if it was “injurious to public health or to the general welfare of the community.”
“You don’t have to be a Christian to know that drag queen Christmas is mentally and sociologically and spiritually injurious to the general welfare of our community,” Johnson said. “Drag Queen Christmas is profanity-laden and it is blatantly sexual. Barely clothed performers are simulating sex acts on each other on a taxpayer-funded stage.”
Johnson added that the men performing in the drag show are “mocking the beauty of femininity,” and it should make true feminists indignant that the performers are “mocking females everywhere.”
“I’m telling you that biblically informed Christians throughout Pensacola are not going to stand for this,” Johnson said.
Among the speakers was former State Rep. Mike Hill who said the show was a “direct attack on Christianity.”
“If you allow this to continue, you are in danger of bringing God’s judgment and retribution upon yourselves and upon this city,” Hill said. “Correct this mistake.”
Hill was not the only former politician who spoke. Former Councilwoman Sherri Myers also spoke against the show saying she used to go to drag shows and enjoyed them, but now she sees them as no different than a minstrel show where white actors would dress in blackface and portray racial stereotypes of African Americans.
“I find drag shows now very offensive,” Myers said. “I think they’re sexist. I think they’re misogynistic, and I think that for the government to be involved in having a contract with an organization that is making fun of women, treating us like we are a joke, is honestly a form of discrimination.”
Many of those who came were affiliated with churches, speaker Joe Wade said it was six churches that had organized opposition to the show.
“Not to act is to act,” Wade said. “You’ve awakened a sleeping army of Pensacola Christian community right now, and they will be on site at the Saenger, if this event happens.”
While the speakers said they were representative of Christians, national survey data from the Pew Research Center shows that a majority of Christians may not agree with their position.
A 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Surveythat polled more than 35,000 Americans found that 55% of U.S. Christians support same-sex marriage. A question on the impact the growing acceptance of transgender people has had on society, a minority of Christians, 47%, said it was a change for the worse, while 29% of Christians said it was a change for the better, and 22% said it hasn’t made much of a difference.
The firestorm over the event appears to trace back to July when Zack Smith, a Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow and trustee at both the University of West Florida and Pensacola State College, wrote an article on the conservative news and commentary website The Daily Signal, calling out Pensacola’s Saenger Theatre for hosting a drag show “mocking Christ” two days before Christmas.
ASM Global released a statement to the city on its response to the controversy, noting they respect there are differing views on the performance.
“While the views and messages expressed are those of the artists and do not necessarily reflect the theatre or its partners, our role is to provide a space where live entertainment can be shared and enjoyed,” the statement said. “Above all, the safety and comfort of our guests, staff, and performers is our top priority. Each event undergoes a thorough evaluation to ensure appropriate measures are in place for it to proceed responsibly. The event in question has been evaluated through this process, and consistent with similar past events, no safety concerns have been identified.”
Smith wrote a follow-up article on Aug. 26 calling the show “blasphemous” and argued the city has the power to cancel the show in its contract with ASM Global, the management company that operates the venue.
However, City Attorney Adam Cobb told the City Council on Sept. 11 that the city does not have the power to cancel a show once it’s been booked and doing so would be a violation of its contract with ASM Global. Cobb added that there is the additional liability of running afoul of the U.S. and Florida constitutions.
“We also have the prospect of constitutional liability, in addition to and on top of that potential contractual liability,” Cobb said. “Free speech under the First and 14th Amendment as applied to the states and also the state constitutions. So my point is that there would be a significant risk that would accompany a decision like this, and based on that, my recommendation would be, again, to not cancel that contract.”
City council members who commented after the second public forum, held late in the evening at the Sept. 11 meeting, agreed with the city attorney on this particular show but expressed openness to evaluating whether such shows should be permitted in the future.
“I think there should be a discussion if we want to have it about whether we should have acts, whatever they are, whether drag shows or anything where there’s lewd and lascivious behavior in the Saenger, we should have that conversation,” Councilwoman Allison Patton said. “I would be very much in favor of standards, if that is something that we should be discussing.”
Council President Jared Moore said free speech allows for disrespectful speech, but there is a conversation worth having on whether some type of regulation can be applied, similar to how the land development code limits areas where strip clubs can operate.
“I suppose a drag show is a provocative thing by nature, but the drag-Christmas combination, I find that disrespectful,” Moore said. “I do find that disrespectful, and so I empathize and understand why the indignation that has been demonstrated this evening.”
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Churches demand Pensacola cancel ‘A Drag Queen Christmas’ at the Saenger Theatre
Reporting by Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
