Drag doesn’t have to be misogynist or trans or groomerish. Monica Hesse in the Washington Post:

A not-small number of hours in my early 20s were spent attending drag shows in a basement-level gay club in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood. What you would do is arrive around midnight when “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé was playing, and by the time you’d heard “Crazy in Love” by Beyoncé for the eighth or 40th replay, it was time to go home.

In between were drag performers. Drag kings, mostly (this was ladies’ night), who would dress in fedoras or leather chaps and lip-sync to James Brown or Justin Timberlake. There was a performer who went by Ken Vegas. My friends and I thought Ken Vegas was a bona fide celebrity, and I’ve never really recovered from learning that Ken was just Kendra in daylight hours and worked in graphic design.

It was silly, it was campy — Lord, how many debates we could skirt these days if only every Republican would read and understand Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” — and it made me think in new ways about what it meant to behave as a man, or behave as a woman, to perform masculinity or perform femininity.

It sounds like a lost Utopia, doesn’t it?

But then we move on to the current scene, where we never ask why it’s only Drag Queen Story Hour and never Drag King, or better yet, both at once.

Some conservatives have decided that — forget about childhood poverty, or vaccine paranoia, or lax gun laws — the real threat to our children is when performers in glamorous hair and makeup come to libraries to teach lessons of tolerance and self-acceptance and read books out loud.

But why is it only the ones in glam hair and makeup? Why none in work boots and five o’clock shadow? Is there an extra message beyond the one of tolerance and self-acceptance? And anyway what do we mean by self-acceptance? Some people are all too self-accepting, to the point that they force their self-accepted selves on everyone else, including people who aren’t interested.

And so I’ve been asking myself whether I would have been comfortable with those performers reading a story to my daughter in the children’s section of the library on Tuesday morning. The answer I’ve been able to come up with is, Does anybody have Ken Vegas’s number?

But it isn’t about Ken Vegas. It’s not at all clear that Ken Vegas could get an invitation. Ken Vegas is a woman, and women aren’t cool any more, women are Karens. How about Karen Vegas? Would she do?