James Talarico Headlined Pride Event Alongside 11-Year-Old Child Drag Queen 'Kween Kee Kee': 'Absolute Cutest and Youngest of Our Drag Performers'

An 11-year-old billed as "the absolute cutest & youngest of our drag performers." Sit with that phrase for a second. Whoever wrote it thought it was a selling point. That tells you something about the culture around these events that no amount of "it's just performance art" spin can talk away.

Talarico markets himself as a seminary-trained, scripture-quoting Democrat, the guy who can win back religious voters in Texas by sounding thoughtful and pastoral. Fine, that's a real lane and there's an audience for it. But headlining a festival where a child is dressed up and paraded as a drag "kween" isn't a footnote he gets to wave off with a press release about inclusion. It's a choice about what he's willing to stand next to for a photo op and a stage credit.

Nobody's saying drag performers can't exist or that adults can't dress how they like at their own events. That's not the objection here. The objection is putting a child in that role, promoting it as the cute young standout, and then having a Senate candidate headline right alongside it like it's a county fair. If a Republican did anything remotely close to this with a kid at a campaign event, it would be the lead story on every network for a week.

Voters in Texas can decide for themselves what a candidate's presence at that lineup says about his judgment. But pretending this is a nothing story, or that asking about it is somehow the intolerant move, insults everyone's intelligence.