Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is set to sign a bill that will make drag performances illegal in the state—a crime he may have committed in high school.
A photo emerged on Reddit over the weekend from the Franklin High Yearbook in 1977, where Lee attended, purportedly showing Lee dressed as a woman along with the caption “Hard Luck Woman.”
But that’s different, Lee’s office told The Daily Beast on Monday, saying that “lighthearted school traditions” shouldn’t be “conflated” with the issue the state is banning.
“The bill specifically protects children from obscene, sexualized entertainment, and any attempt to conflate this serious issue with lighthearted school traditions is dishonest and disrespectful to Tennessee families,” a spokesperson said.
When asked during a press conference Monday if he “remembered dressing in drag in 1977,” Lee didn’t deny the photo was of him—but he said it doesn’t change anything.
“What a ridiculous, ridiculous question that is,” Lee said. “Conflating something like that to sexualized entertainment in front of children, which is a very serious subject.”
However, the bill is vaguely worded and it’s unclear how it will be enforced, or if Lee wearing women’s clothing would be exempt from its felony categorization.
The bill associates any form of dressing outside one’s gender as “adult” entertainment, using the wording “male or female impersonators.” It makes it illegal to perform such entertainment in public or in places where it could potentially be seen by children.
For example, dressing up in drag at a high school, where children are, would be criminalized. And as a male impersonating a female in a photo, Lee could be classified as an “adult entertainer” in the public purview of children.
Critics have slammed the bill as unconstitutional, and say its intentionally vague wording could have a chilling effect on not only drag queens, but transgender people as a whole.
“These laws are written so broadly and vaguely that they would allow government officials to censor performers based on their own subjective viewpoints of what they deem appropriate on any given day,” the ACLU Tennessee wrote earlier this month.
The Tennessee bill follows a concerted anti-drag and anti-trans GOP movement in recent months, spurred by baseless accusations of drag performers grooming minors, leading to violent threats across the country.
Lee has routinely pushed anti-LGBTQ laws, passing a bill banning transgender girls from playing on school sports teams in 2021, as well as a law demanding teachers give parents a month’s notice before discussing any LGBTQ topics in the classroom.
