The Washington Post’s 2,600-word love letter to a drag queen

(The Daily Signal) – Anyone who reads The Washington Post regularly knows that, in its view, the LGBTQ community can do no wrong, that there’s no wretched excess that the fringe elements of that special-interest group can engage in that the Post won’t defend—no matter how flamboyant, distasteful, or outrageous.

To the contrary, the Post is more likely than not to showcase, glamorize, and even glorify it. But it surely outdid itself Sunday by devoting four full pages in the print edition of its “Arts & Style” section to a gushing—even sycophantic—biographical profile of a drag queen who goes by the stage name of “Sasha Velour.” The article was arguably even more hagiographic than “RBG,” the 2018 biopic of the late left-wing icon, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

Writer Maura Judkis’ profile, “Sasha Velour Sashays Into the Culture Wars,” is so self-indulgently long that if you listen to the online version of it being read, it says it will take a full 16 minutes.

We’re informed that in the gaudy, ostentatious world of drag queens, Velour—“dressed in head-to-toe silver, looking like an art deco skyscraper, with red lips, contoured cheeks, and catlike eyeliner”—occupies a niche of fame (or notoriety) second only to RuPaul.

The print article runs a whopping 2,600 words, which is only about 45 words shorter than a personal profile of a very different sort that we at The Daily Signal published—coincidentally—also on Sunday. That profile was about an 88-year-old survivor of a World War II-era Yugoslavian death camp who is currently facing prosecution—many would call it persecution—by the Biden Justice Department for her activism on behalf of the unborn.

It’s extremely doubtful that the pro-abortion Washington Post would ever deign to publish an in-depth profile of South Carolinian Eva Edl, whose childhood experience in Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia made her so reverential of the sanctity of life that she says she’s mentally preparing herself for the possibility of dying in prison if convicted of alleged violations of the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act.

When Judkis introduces readers to Velour (referred to throughout as “she,” despite his real name being Alexander Hedges Steinberg), it’s with an account of an incident in which Velour is confronted by “a pair of anti-drag activists.”

TV cameras for the HBO series “We’re Here” were rolling as, according to Judkis, “[T]he activists—a bearded father and his teenage daughter—called her (sic) ‘sir.’ They said that ‘God created man with a penis’ and ‘woman with a vagina.’ They referenced the Bible and referred to ‘the LGBTQ religion’ as a ‘cult.’ They told her: ‘Something’s wrong with you.’”

In Judkis’ view, however, it’s those who are opposed to the normalization (and celebration) of the abnormal—like that gender-non-confused father and daughter—who are wrong, or as the writer put it, “ignorant” and “bigoted.”

At one point, Judkis further laments: “In one America, drag is practically illegal. In another, it’s never been more mainstream. Some drag artists get picketed and threatened with arrest, while others get Super Bowl commercials and Emmy Awards. The emotional and geographical distance between the two is growing depressingly distant.”

That’s because, in what she (and presumably almost everyone else in the Post’s ideologically insular newsroom) would disparagingly regard as “flyover country”—that is, between Manhattan, New York, and Manhattan Beach, California—drag queens are considered “curioddities” at best, and certainly are not to be celebrated. And even more certainly, are not found reading books like “Gender Queer” to prepubescents in elementary school classrooms or local library “Drag Queen Story Hours.”

Today’s drag queen world of Velour is far removed from the days of campy film comedies like 1959’s Oscar-winning “Some Like It Hot” with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, about two musicians who disguise themselves by dressing as women to escape from mafia mobsters who they witnessed committing a crime; or even 1982’s “Tootsie,” in which Dustin Hoffman’s unsuccessful actor character, Michael Dorsey, pretends to be female in order to get a role on a TV soap opera. The cross-dressing wasn’t to be taken seriously, much less be treated as normal or else you’re somehow a “hater.”

Pandering to the LGBTQ Left and thumbing one’s nose to a mass audience with novella-length articles glorifying behavior most of middle America still regards as aberrant, it’s small wonder that the Post has lost about 500,000 subscribers since the end of 2020 and was set to lose $100 million last year, according to The New York Times.

When Sally Buzbee took over as executive editor of the Post in June 2021—and more recently, when William Lewis became CEO and publisher in January—I was hopeful they would steer the Post to the political center ideologically. That obviously hasn’t happened. 

I might soon become No. 500,001. I already cut back my print-edition home delivery of the Post after many, many years from seven days a week to Sundays only. And after Judkis’ four pages of wet kisses to “Sasha Velour,” I’m “this close” to canceling even that.