Lil Miss Hot Mess, a prominent drag queen, realized about a week ago that she had been pulled into a fight over abortion in Ohio, which is over a thousand miles from her current home. The news came via a message from a friend, who tipped Lil Miss Hot Mess off that she was starring in an ad paid for by the group Protect Women Ohio. The commercial warned an upcoming ballot measure, "State Issue 1," would allow "out-of-state special interest groups" to "enshrine late-term abortion in our constitution and abolish parental rights so someone can take your child to get an abortion or sex change operation without your consent." Along with this ominous message, the ad featured footage of Lil Miss Hot Mess participating in a "Drag Story Hour" event alongside images of happy families with prepubescent children.
According to Lil MIss Hot Mess, her reaction to the intensely dramatic commercial was, "honestly, an eyeroll."
Other people might be shocked to find their image in a television ad running in a state where they don't live, focused on an issue they have never weighed in on. But, as a prominent drag queen, Lil Miss Hot Mess has become used to political attacks of late. Even so, this new use of her image was different. The attack ad featuring Lil Miss Hot Mess was part of a political battle that was not directly related to drag or LGBTQ issues. Instead, it was a salvo in a multimillion dollar offensive that critics have described as a "disinformation campaign" for its strained attempts to harness right-wing hysteria surrounding the raging culture wars over gender and sexuality to defeat an abortion measure in Ohio.
Lil Miss Hot Mess is a board member of "Drag Story Hour," a program that stages events where drag performers read to children in an effort to entertain and give them "glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models." Though the organization has promoted readings since 2015, in more recent years the events have become a lightning rod amid rising threats and violence against the LGBTQ community. Drag Story Hour has been the focus of protests by neo-Nazi groups and a key inspiration for a wave of legislation in at least fourteen states seeking to limit drag performances. Lil Miss Hot Mess told TPM she has personally dealt with threats and protests — and the use of her image in political attacks.
"It's not the first time that they've used — they being the right kind of broadly — have used footage of me and other Drag Story events for various types of political advertisements. Marco Rubio used some imagery of me last fall," explained Lil Miss Hot Mess, who said she has consulted attorneys about potential legal action related to the use of her image.
The Ohio campaign takes it a step further. Unlike Rubio's ad, the Protect Women Ohio commercial isn't a direct shot in the far-right's manufactured culture war over sexuality, gender, and children's education. Instead, it's a convoluted attempt to bring right wing anger over drag into a fight over the democratic process and reproductive rights in the Buckeye State.
State Issue 1, which Ohioans will vote on in a special election on Aug. 8, is not explicitly about abortion. The ballot measure pushed by Republicans in the state legislature would make it more difficult to amend Ohio's constitution with ballot initiatives in the future. Currently, these changes can come up for a vote if backers obtain enough signatures to equal five percent of the votes cast in half of the state's counties in the most recent gubernatorial election. Once an initiative is on the ballot, it can pass with a simple majority. State Issue 1 seeks to change that by making tougher requirements for how these signatures are obtained and by raising the threshold for how ballot measures are passed to 60 percent.
"I did have to look up what Issue 1 was and, when I did, I was surprised that this was the tactic they were taking," Lil Miss Hot Mess said. "It became clear to me reading about Issue 1 just what a kind of anti-democratic power grab it is in general, but I think for them to be framing it in terms of these questions of gender, like it's just so far from the reality of what this legislation actually does. It's just like misleading, upon misleading, upon misleading."
Along with being confusing, Lil Miss Hot Mess suggested that drumming up false fears about the LGBTQ community during a rising tide of hate crimes could be dangerous.
"They are 100 percent inciting violence," she said of the commercial.
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