OPINION:
A nearly nude, possibly transgender (according to the Daily Mail) stripper-dressed drag queen with dollar bills stuffed into gaudy lingerie struts across the neon-lit room, leading around a little girl by the hand. The breasts of the dancer are covered only by tiny adhesive pasties on the nipples. The girl looks 3 to 5 years old and holds a dollar bill in her hand in the pink and green light. When the video of the tawdry scene ends, her face is practically pressed against the stripper’s exposed buttocks.
The setting was the R House, a restaurant in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood where “Rainbow Churros” are served with “drag show dinners.” As part of its “Drag Brunch,” the eatery also offers a “Kids Brunch” for children “up to 12 years of age” that features a “fabulous show,” putting moral horrors and hors d’oeuvres on the same menu.
Similar incidents are popping up all over America. From libraries to lounges, children are getting front-row seats to obscene sexual theater. But Florida is fighting back. The Department of Business and Professional Regulation, Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco recommended R House lose its alcoholic beverage license over these performances in a complaint. Its approach could be a model for other states to follow.
In a nutshell, the agency is arguing that R House has “maintained a nuisance on the premises or otherwise allowed its agents, employees, or other persons to violate the laws of Florida” concerning public morals and decency. The Sunshine State is bulldozing the “free expression” defense that the purveyors of these performances have taken by appealing to something higher — the morals and manners necessary for a healthy social order — and enforcing existing laws designed to protect that. This is not, in other words, the typically toothless laissez-faire GOP approach and a welcome change at that.
The viral clip of the little girl participating in one of R House’s shows only scratched the surface of what these performances entail and why it is necessary to punish those who promote and profit from their depravity. Listed in the complaint are several incidents discovered or witnessed first-hand by investigators not reported in the media.
In a video uploaded to YouTube, a girl not older than 10 stands within just a few feet of a performer gyrating in front of her “while wearing a skintight red outfit with a hole cut directly between his buttocks.”
In separate clips uploaded to YouTube and TikTok, two boys as young as 3 and as old as 6 participate in similar scenes with dancers. One investigator filmed a particularly shocking incident where a girl between 10 and 12 “was seen recoiling and turning away in her seat as a Brunch performer climbed on the back of the child’s bench, squatted, and gyrated a couple a of feet above the child’s head.”
At the heart of Florida’s case against R House and underlying the relevant statutes is the idea that there is no liberty for license — or rather than virtue is a precondition of liberty. Until recently, it was widely accepted that demonstrably immoral behavior causes definable harm to society as a whole, to its individual members and institutions — its laws, social conventions and behavioral norms.
Whether it’s a drag queen story hour or drag brunch, these performances glorify unrestrained sexuality and perverse human appetites, the likes of which have been the object of social and religious censure and legal and political prohibition for centuries. It is only in the modern United States that these things have been singularly exalted not only in adults but in children — the most vulnerable and impressionable among us. Meanwhile, the perpetrators have assumed a sanctified status: To their fetishes and impulses, every norm must be sacrificed and every child exposed.
Florida’s stand against the times is refreshing and courageous. It also requires little more than the will to enforce existing laws.
• Pedro L. Gonzalez is the associate editor at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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