The ACLU of Iowa has sent letters to city councils in five communities, asking councilmembers to update their city codes and remove language classifying performances by male and female impersonators as “adult entertainment” banned or restricted by local law.
ACLU of Iowa staff attorney Shefali Aurora said during an online news conference on Wednesday that the language in the ordinances “restricts free speech and specifically targets LGBTQ folks.” It “effectively bans drag,” she added.
“Too often drag is equated with sexualized performances, but drag is not by definition ‘adult entertainment,’” Aurora said. “It can simply be someone wearing clothing and accessories conventionally worn by a person of a different gender.”
“If the cities were to enforce the ordinances as they are written, they might find that a female comedian who has short hair, is wearing a suit and tie, could be categorized as a male impersonator.”
The way the ordinances are written, family friendly drag performances, like drag queen storytimes, mainstream movies like Mrs. Doubtfire, musicals like La Cage Aux Folles and even plays by Shakespeare could be classified as adult entertainment and banned.
The five cities are Carroll, Harlan, Mt. Pleasant, Polk City and Webster City.
The city ordinance in Carroll defines “Adult amusement or entertainment” as “characterized by a predominant usage of, display of, or emphasis on acts or material depicting, describing or relating to sex acts or specified anatomical areas, as defined in this section, including, but not limited to, topless or bottomless dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or female impersonators or similar entertainment.” Other cities use slightly different language, but all include male and female impersonators with those other types of performances. Mt. Pleasant’s ordinance, for example, restricts “adult cabaret,” which it defines as “A cabaret which features go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, male or female impersonators, or similar entertainers.”
But as the ACLU says in its letters, the language in all the ordinances is so overly broad that it likely violates “the U.S. and Iowa Constitutions for at least three reasons.”
First, it impermissibly infringes on speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Iowa Constitution, because it is a content-based restriction that is not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. Second, the Ordinance is overbroad because it encompasses all “male or female impersonators” and “similar entertainment” under the definition of “adult amusement entertainment”, regardless of whether the expression is actually sexually explicit or not. Third, it violates equal protection because it targets the LGBTQ community on the basis of sex and gender expression and is motivated by animus toward the LGBTQ community.
None of the cities have used their ordinances to ban drag or other performances involving cross-dressing as far as the ACLU knows, Aurora said during the news conference, “but having these ordinances that are unconstitutional in their city codes and allowing for the potential of enforcement still remains an issue.”
In 2021, the city of Eagle Grove in Wright County used that sort of language in its municipal code to ban a drag performance. After hosting a very successful drag show in October of that year, Doña Martha’s Office, a recently opened bar, had another one scheduled for November, But that show was canceled after the bar received a letter from the Eagle Grove City Attorney saying the show would be illegal.
The letter cited the section of city code banning “entertainment characterized by an emphasis on sex acts or specified anatomical areas such as those depicting, describing or relating to sex acts or specified anatomical areas (i.e., female impersonators, strippers, or similar entertainment) within 1,000 feet of other businesses.”
The ACLU of Iowa subsequently contacted Eagle Grove officials and worked with them to revise the ordinance, removing the overly broad language.
Drag shows have long been closely associated with the LGBTQ community, and as political attacks on the rights of LGBTQ Americans and anti-transgender bigotry have become increasingly prominent in recent years, protests against events featuring drag performers and attempts by Republican lawmakers in states around the country to restrict them have proliferated.
During this year’s legislative session, Republicans in the Iowa House introduced a bill to make it a class D felony to “knowingly” take someone under 18 to a drag show or allow them to view one. The poorly written bill defined a drag show as any performance in which a main “performer sings, lip-syncs, dances, reads, or otherwise performs before an audience for entertainment, whether or not performed for payment” while that performer “exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth through the use of clothing, makeup, accessories, or other gender signifiers.”
Anyone charged under the bill would face a maximum penalty of a fine of between $1,025 and $10,245, and up to five years in prison. The venue where a minor saw a prohibited show would be fined $10,000 per violation. The bill also allows the “parent or legal guardian of a minor” to sue “for damages in the amount of not less than ten thousand dollars and up to fifty thousand dollars for each violation” of the drag show ban.
As more than one person pointed out during the subcommittee hearing on the bill, its definition of what is prohibited was so broad and so vague that it would make it illegal for any transgender person to read aloud from a prepared text if minors were present. The two Republicans on the three-person subcommittee voted to advance the bill.
At the committee level the bill was amended, making it illegal to take a minor to an obscene performance using the definition already in state law, which doesn’t include references to gender identity. There are, of course, already laws on the books preventing adults from taking minors to such shows. After it was amended, the bill died without going to a final vote.
On the national level, the Trump administration has been hostile to drag performances as part of its wide-ranging attack on transgender Americans, Philip Kennicott pointed out in a column in theWashington Post last month. Kennicott noted that Trump cited the Kennedy Center’s history of occasionally hosting drag shows as one of the reasons he fired the center’s governing board and replaced its members with people personally loyal to him.
“Identifying as trans is a very different thing than drag, which is an entertainment with a complex relationship to gender and sexuality,” Kennicott wrote. “But the frontal attack on trans rights and the sideswipe at drag shows are part of a larger conflict over gender and gender norms, or what the administration sometimes calls gender ideology.”
Kennicott quotes Scott Simpson, “an activist who helped found the organization Qommittee for Drag Media, which responds to hate attacks, including threats and violence, against drag performers.”
“Drag is a canary in the coal mine for all types of free expression,” according to Simpson. “It is a stand-in.”
The ACLU of Iowa has an ongoing project that reviews city codes for possibly unconstitutional ordinances. In 2022, it sent letters to Knoxville, Newton, Dyersville, Pella, Waukee and Grinnell, all of which had ordinances that equated drag performances with obscenity. Like Eagle Grove, all those cities made changes to their codes. The letters sent this week are the first ones the ACLU has sent since 2022.
It’s not a coincidence that the ACLU is contacting the five cities in June, Aurora explained during the news conference.
“We thought it was particularly important to raise this issue this month with it being Pride,” she said. “Which is why we’re sending out the letters this week, just to bring that to the forefront.”
