Emails show the sponsor of a new Florida law wanted to target drag queens

The controversial law is now being challenged in federal court as an unconstitutional attempt to suppress the First Amendment rights of people who perform in drag.

Photo credit: The Florida Channel

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In June, a restaurant in Orlando sued Gov. Ron DeSantis, challenging a vague new state law the governor signed this spring that critics say is designed to suppress drag shows in Florida.

Lawyers for the DeSantis administration responded by claiming in court that nothing in the new law — which makes it illegal to let anyone under the age of 18 attend certain kinds of live performances — is specifically aimed at drag shows.

“Nowhere does the Protection of Children Act target or even mention drag performances,” attorneys for the state wrote in a motion asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit, which was brought by Hamburger Mary’s, a bar and grille that hosts drag-themed brunches, bingo and other events.

But records show that one of the people who wrote the new law intended to target drag shows.

Emails obtained in a public-records request show that state Rep. Randy Fine — a Republican from Brevard County who sponsored the legislation in the state House — attempted to insert a clause into the bill that would have explicitly criminalized drag queens who perform in front of people under the age of 18.

Fine’s aim was breathtakingly broad. It would have applied to any show in which an artist dresses in a costume of another gender and then sings, dances or lip syncs for a crowd.

Drag Performance Amendment

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The idea never made it into the final legislation. But it offers a window into the motive behind the new law, which gives the DeSantis administration more power to raid, investigate and otherwise harass venues that host drag shows — and thus scare them out of hosting such events entirely.   

Fine said he did not remember proposing the amendment, so he could not say why he ultimately chose not to pursue it.

The emails show that he shared his idea with James Uthmeier, who was, at the time, the chief of staff to DeSantis and is now managing DeSantis’ campaign for president. But neither Uthmeier nor the Governor’s Office would say what feedback they gave Fine.

It seems pretty easy to guess what probably happened here, though.

Fine’s proposal was clumsy at best — a ham-handed attempt to suppress a single form of artistic expression that would have been clearly unconstitutional. And the attorneys on DeSantis’ staff would have immediately known that.

Instead, they tried to accomplish the same goal through a subtler approach. Specifically, SB 1438 targets a new category of show called an “adult live performance.” The definition never uses the word “drag” — but it does single out shows in which performers wear fake breasts.

Fine seemed to eventually grasp the importance of discretion. Near the end of this year’s legislative session, as lawmakers debated the bill on the House floor, he made sure to emphasize that his bill did not use the term “drag show.”

“If I had wanted to do that, I’m not afraid to say what I think,” Fine told his fellow House members. “The reason we did not do that is, you cannot say, as a matter of course, that two words equals something. That’s why there’s an approximately 20-line definition that has four separate tests that must be met by any performance in order to be considered an adult live performance.”

This has become a common theme during DeSantis’ time in Tallahassee, where he and a compliant Florida Legislature keep trying to find backdoor ways to accomplish unconstitutional goals.

Another recent example is DeSantis’ “Stop Woke Act” — another broadly written law that, among other things, tries to restrict what employers can say to their employees about topics like systemic racism and gender inequality.

DeSantis claimed he was trying to protect individual workers from being forced to listen to conversations about such topics against their will. But under questioning from judges, a lawyer for the Governor’s Office admitted the true goal — which is to stop companies from talking about these topics to anyone at all.

Florida’s attempt to cover its anti-drag law in a constitutional veneer hasn’t worked. At least not so far.

A federal judge issued an injunction in June that is currently preventing the DeSantis administration from enforcing the new law, because, the judge ruled, it is likely to be found unconstitutional. An appeals court affirmed that injunction last week.

And the judge presiding over the trial doesn’t seem to have any doubt about what Ron DeSantis, Randy Fine and other supporters of SB 1438 are really trying to do.

“This statute,” he wrote in his injunction ruling, “is specifically designed to suppress the speech of drag queen performers.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the bill number of Florida’s “Protection of Children Act.” It was Senate Bill 1438.