For Tennessee activists who had spent weeks and months organizing against the recent spate of anti-LGBTQ legislation in their states, the timing could not be more devastating.
“I think maybe I’m still finding my words about what’s going on,” OUT Memphis Executive Director Molly Rose Quinn told BuzzFeed News. “I think the mood is somber, the mood is exhausted, the mood is definitely overwhelming.”
“I think all of us feel like we have so much anger and so much grief that it’s hard to know if we’ll ever be able to process all that we’ve been through and are going through right now,” Quinn said.
Alie Stewart, an event planner in Nashville, said that they too were indefinitely postponing Saturday night’s “drag crawl” as a mark of respect and out of concern for the safety of participants.
“We were gearing up for it and then the news broke about the shooting, and we all just knew right away to take a pause,” Stewart said.
She was expecting at least 500 people to don extravagant costumes and makeup before touring a series of bars and pubs as a visual show of support to the city’s drag community.
“We had a lot of safety measures in place that we were confident about, but when the second roll of news came out that the shooter was a trans person, someone a part of the LGBTQ community, we knew that there would be backlash from that,” Stewart said.
Tennessee’s anti-drag law that takes effect on Saturday, April 1, bans “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest” from performing in public spaces or in front of minors.
Drag queen Vidalia Anne Gentry told BuzzFeed News that she did not believe people would actually be prosecuted under the law in Nashville, which has a Democratic district attorney, but that she feared how other more conservative parts of the state might enforce it.
“I don’t see Saturday being a threshold that we’re going to cross or something’s going to immediately change so much as it just being a temporal marker for the chipping away of our First Amendment rights,” she said.
In addition to free speech concerns over the law’s vague wording and unclear enforcement, activists say the law is inextricably bound to other attacks on the transgender community and plays on outdated fears and tropes that children could be “groomed” or otherwise made LGBTQ by being exposed to queer people.
“The far right and anti-LGBT forces have always had the conviction that LGBT people are inherently dangerous for children, but it’s harder for them to say that now with a straight face when so many more people know LGBT people,” said Adam Polaski, spokesperson for the Campaign for Southern Equality. “And so they have to take that anti-LGBT message — the LGBTQ community is bad for children — and they have to find a new target and a new way to hook it. So they picked drag queens.”
Hundreds of tickets have been sold for an all-ages drag brunch that is still set to go ahead on Sunday in Nashville to raise money for Inclusion Tennessee. But others in the city had already taken steps to exclude children from drag audiences after several incidents, including in Tennessee, in which far-right extremists have shown up at all-ages events.
“We just decided for both a business model and the safety of our patrons, to not allow that anymore,” said Todd Roman, a co-owner of the Nashville gay bars Play and Tribe, about their decision to no longer allow children to attend a drag brunch at another of their venues or ride in their drag party bus.
“Even though we think it’s completely harmless, and that a parent should absolutely have the right to attend and it’s not at all what [right-wing lawmakers] described, we thought it was a wise business decision to take ourselves out of that conversation,” Roman said. “If there’s so much hate and resistance to that, then we will just elect not to participate.”
But Nashville is not without protest in the wake of the shooting.
More than a thousand demonstrators calling for gun control gathered outside the state Capitol on Thursday before entering the building and filling the public gallery in heated and emotional scenes. Chants of “Save our children!” echoed throughout the halls of the Republican-led legislature.
“I also feel like the Covenant shooting is something that impacted a lot of people in our community very directly,” high school junior Davern Cigarran told the Tennessean newspaper. “I think this is something that can’t just be, you know, ignored or protested for four days and then forgotten about.”