How Austin Drag Icon Brigitte Bandit Became a Political Powerhouse
It’s Brigitte, bitch
By Brant Bingamon, Fri., Sept. 22, 2023
It was another hot August night at Cheer Up Charlies' outdoor stage, but the air was moving and there was a good crowd. Gender Destruction wrapped up their routine, the people cheered, and Arinna Dior Heys, the host of the Cyber Queen drag showcase, called up the next artist.
“Oh my god, this is a queen who is literally on the front lines, fighting for our lives,” Heys called out, her voice booming to the condos across the street. “This is Texas drag, y'all, we do not fucking play! Make some noise for Brigitte Bandit!”
The crowd packed in tighter. A luminous figure appeared at stage right. Florence and the Machine's “Shake It Out” began to pump. The phones went up.
Brigitte Bandit came forward in a maroon cocktail dress, her face seemingly larger than physically possible, immaculate, made up in the whites, pinks, reds, and ambers of a Venetian oil painting. A precise line of eyeliner was drawn beneath the hollows of her eyes, with pools of white painted on the bottom lids, creating an effect that deepened and widened her eyes, making a frame with the black, bristling, crescent flowers of her lashes. Her brows were part of the illusion, erased and redrawn. Her lips were full and red. A cascade of pink and rainbow hair fell to her breasts, which were Dolly Parton big.
The breasts – actually, the breastplate – are part of Bandit's onstage identity, she told the Chronicle. She's known as the Dolly of Austin. “I have these big fake titties and I do outrageous stuff – just campy, goofy, big, colorful shit.”
But this wasn't a goofy kind of night. A new Texas law, Senate Bill 12, would be taking effect in a week. It was a product of the ongoing anti-LGBTQ hysteria, written to make drag performances in public spaces illegal. It had the potential to destroy the business Bandit has built over the last five years as a full-time drag artist.
So there was tension in Bandit's performance. As “Shake It Out” entered its final chorus – “It's hard to dance with the devil on your back” – she pulled off her wig and threw it to DJ Turito. She untied the straps of her blouse, moved to the edge of the stage, thrust out her breasts, and shook them as the crowd erupted. Then, in a reconstruction or deconstruction or abnegation of gender, Bandit tore away the artificial breasts and danced topless.
It was star power: delicate, brazen, urgent, effortless. “Shake It Out” ended and the applause rose up. Bandit took the mic to announce that she was suing the state of Texas.
“We'll be in court Monday morning to stop SB 12 because drag is expression, y'all, just like any other kind of art. And we are going to get this bill blocked. And I don't know if you heard, but just this afternoon the bill to stop trans kids from getting medically necessary health care was blocked: It's SB 14, the trans youth health ban bill? Everybody cheer!” The young people cheered and Bandit led them in a chant: “Fuck Ted Cruz! Fuck Greg Abbott! Trans Texans belong here! Drag queens belong here!”
She raised her voice to be heard over the screams: “Queer people belong here, bitch! No amount of laws targeting us will ever eradicate our existence, okay? Hopefully, the next time I see you this shit will be fucking ba-locked! See y'all laterrrr …”
Big Tits, Bigger Dreams
“I remember as a kid really struggling to learn the gender binary. I really struggled with understanding, like, okay, who's a boy and who's a girl? I remember the very first time I saw a butch lesbian – it blew my mind, it blew my mind! I think I've always understood that gender is something that's taught.”
Brigitte Bandit was born and raised in Northwest Austin and began working with kids at the age of 15. She was an art instructor at a summer camp, taught 5-year-olds how to swim at the YMCA, hosted birthday parties at Main Event, and volunteered in her church leading a youth group. “I've just been around kids in different ways throughout my life,” Bandit said. “It's comfortable for me. It's natural. I've always liked it.”
Bandit was 26 when she performed her first drag. “I was there that very first night five years ago,” said drag king Alexander the Great, the reigning Mr. Austin Entertainer of the Year. “She had entered a competition at Elysium and I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh – yes!' Then I watched as she came up, and when Kingdom, my show, was offered to me, and I only had two co-spots, I was like, ‘I need Brigitte!'”
Bandit has been part of Alexander's weekly show at Oilcan Harry's for the last year and a half. She has appeared for more than two years at Coco Cxnts, the Coconut Club's drag brunch. She is a regular with Neon Rainbows, the queer country showcase at Cheer Ups. And she has hosted a half-dozen drag storytimes, performances where drag queens dress as princesses and read books to kids, at various venues.
“I got the drag storytime gigs because no one wanted to do it,” Bandit said. “And I had worked with kids so many times, I didn't even think twice. But what I didn't understand was how much kids would love drag. They love it. I think it's fun for them to see any kind of character who looks like a princess. It's like going to Disneyland. But you're also showing the importance of reading books. And kids love books – oh my gosh.”
Bandit's biggest project at the moment is not a kid thing. It's a drag showcase for the 21-and-up crowd at Cheer Ups called Big Tits, Bigger Dreams, and it happens on the first Saturday of every month. As the host, Bandit has a front-row seat to Austin's fast-changing, experimental drag culture.
“We get so many new drag performers – in fact, this Saturday we actually had a record number of very-first-time drag performers on the stage,” Bandit said. “And we see so much gender diversity in Austin, much more than some other cities. We have a lot of really amazing drag kings here, and it's a lot of AFAB [assigned female at birth]. You know, anybody can do drag and have fun with it.”
SB 12
Cisgender, straight people may not be aware of it, but we are living through one of the most active periods of hatred against the LGBTQ community in the last 30 years. Since the end of the COVID pandemic, the entire right-wing spectrum, from neo-Nazis to conventional Republicans, has adopted an identical message: that LGBTQ people and their allies are “pedos” and “groomers.” Ignoring the “kitchen table” issues Texas legislators promised to address this session – like the failing grid and exodus of teachers from public schools – Republicans instead used those accusations as fodder for the passage of three new anti-queer laws this spring: House Bill 900, which purports to ban pornography in school libraries; SB 14, to stop parents and doctors from providing gender affirming care to trans kids; and SB 12, to end public drag shows.
SB 12 reads like it was written in the 1970s. It bans any performance in a public space, or where minors are present, that displays a “prurient interest in sex.” It prohibits the “exhibition or representation” of “actual or simulated” male and female genitals “in a lewd state.” It forbids “sexual gesticulations using accessories or prosthetics.” Anyone convicted of violating SB 12 can be jailed for up to a year. Venues can be fined $10,000 for each violation.
The Texas ACLU – joined by Bandit and others – filed suit against the state of Texas to overturn SB 12. They argue that the law is an unconstitutional attack on free expression and that it is vague enough to apply to all kinds of performances – touring Broadway plays, Dallas Cowboys cheerleading routines, even karaoke nights. Its enforcement is currently on hold as the court challenge proceeds.
“I think the perception is that businesses will pivot if SB 12 takes effect. But businesses like ours, queer-owned businesses, cannot pivot as much as folks think,” said Cheer Up Charlies co-owner Maggie Lea. “Because it's hard to pivot away from your queerness and your identity. Like, maybe some other corporate place can just stop doing drag shows, but drag shows are part of the fabric of the community we serve.”
He/Him-ing a Queen
Lea was one of the members of Austin's queer community who signed up to testify against SB 12 last March, as it began making its way through the Texas Legislature. She was joined by some of the performers she books at Cheer Ups – Alexander the Great, Maxine LaQueene, Bobby Pudrido, Travis Randy Travis, and, of course, Bandit.
At that point, SB 12 was focused on ending drag storytimes. Bandit arrived to last March's Senate hearing in one of her storytime costumes – a Barbie-pink, full-sleeved princess dress, full makeup, and a plume of pink hair. She told the senators about her lifetime of working with kids. She assured them she modifies her performances to make them appropriate for children.
Bandit then dropped a fact that she knew would confound the Republicans – that the law would not apply to her because she was born a woman. “I let them know that I'm AFAB,” she said, “that I'm somebody who does drag as a feminine persona. I feel like that kind of blew everybody's mind. Like, ‘Whoa, we didn't realize that female people could do drag!'
“And these people were he/him-ing me when I'm dressed in full glam drag – I'm wearing a dress, I'm wearing makeup, wearing a wig – I'm wearing what they would expect a woman to wear but they're calling me a man. Which goes to show that gender is socially constructed.
“But it also goes to show that people have a very misogynistic view of women and what women should look like. And they think that drag performers only put on drag as a kink, that people would only want to express themselves in this hyperfeminine way to get some kind of sexual kick out of it. For me, that's not what it's about at all. And I feel like that's rooted in misogyny. That's another reason why I speak out about these bills – I fucking hate misogyny, I hate transphobia. It's all interconnected.”
Protect Trans Kids
Bandit had already been getting threats online, but after her Senate testimony, it got worse. “I've had people say things about wanting to hurt me, wanting to see me gone, wanting to see me even die, you know?” she said. “It happens a lot on Twitter, a lot on Facebook. And these people – honestly, it's a little scary.”
Two groups, in particular, have gone after Bandit. Protect Texas Kids, led by 23-year-old Kelly Neidert, a self-described “Christian fascist,” has put Bandit's personal information online. And, after SB 12 cleared the Senate and moved on to the House, members of Defend Our Kids, a spinoff of Texas Family Project, posted a manipulated video of one of Bandit's drag storytimes.
“They made this ad for SB 12 and they had taken an image from an outdoor daytime story hour I hosted and edited the background into a dark nightclub,” Bandit said. “So I took the original image and the edited image and I posted that side by side on Twitter, and that went viral. So they were mad. And then SB 12 got scheduled for a committee hearing in the House the next week. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have to be in a room with all these people that I pissed off.'”
During Bandit's first testimony at the Capitol, she had encountered the parents of the children murdered in Uvalde in May of 2022. The parents had been lobbying Republicans for weeks to raise the age at which a person can buy an assault rifle from 18 to 21, because the Uvalde murderer had purchased his AR-15s within days of turning 18.
As the House's hearing on SB 12 neared, it became obvious that the Republicans were turning their backs on the Uvalde parents. A week before Bandit was set to speak before legislators, another right-wing murderer used an AR-15 in a mass shooting, this time killing eight people, several of them children, at a mall in Allen. One day before SB 12's hearing, Republicans allowed the bill Uvalde parents had advocated for to die.
Bandit decided to make the obvious point: that Republicans only care about kids when it suits their agenda. “I called my mom up, because I don't know how to sew, and she sewed a dress for me,” Bandit said. “The top of it was the Texas flag and underneath the Texas flag we wrote all the names of the kids from Uvalde. And also the kids that died in the Allen shooting the weekend before. And on the back of the dress, I wrote ‘Protect Texas Kids' – the name of the organization that pushes the anti-drag legislation. And then there's the other one, Defend Our Kids, and I used their name too. It said, ‘Defend our kids against gun violence. Restrict guns, not drag.'”
Bandit spent 13 hours at the Capitol in full drag, waiting to testify, before she was finally called. When she spoke, she made certain the Republicans understood that they are directly supporting the hate groups that want to liquidate LGBTQ people from the face of the earth.
“This bill is symbolic of the deceitful and dangerous, blatant lies of these hate groups,” Bandit said, her voice quavering. “No matter what happens to this bill, we will be facing the repercussions of this rhetoric that y'all have legitimized, entertaining these ideas based in falsehoods. Just this past Saturday, we had open neo-Nazis waving flags at an all-ages event in New Braunfels. And north of us, on the same day, we had a gunman with the same kind of neo-Nazi ideation take the lives of eight Texans going to the mall. By passing this legislation, you stand with these hate groups and violence – real violence – that is actually threatening our Texans.”
As Bandit went over her two-minute time limit, troopers moved to the podium and escorted her out.
Trauma Bonding
The Republicans in the House passed SB 12 two weeks later. Gov. Greg Abbott signed it into law in June, sending out a tweet that left no question as to what it was about: “Texas Governor Signs Law Banning Drag Performances in Public. That's right.”
The Texas ACLU filed suit against SB 12 in August. Pride groups in Abilene and The Woodlands joined the suit, along with Extragrams and 360 Queen Entertainment – businesses that sponsor drag-themed performances. Bandit signed on, too.
And so it was that on August 28, Bandit found herself testifying against SB 12 for the third time, this time before a federal judge, 84-year-old David Hittner. “He was very sharp,” Bandit said. “He was very interested in what we had to say and he really pushed back on a lot of what the state attorneys said. Their argument was that drag is not protected by the First Amendment because it's not expressive, it doesn't express anything – can you believe that? And then I had to explain to the judge what a breastplate is. And did you hear that one of the plaintiffs twerked?”
Richard Montez, the owner of 360 Queen Entertainment in San Antonio, was the plaintiff who twerked. He explained to the court that twerking could be interpreted as a sexual gesticulation but that it is a form of free expression, protected by the Constitution, and shouldn't cause a person to spend a year in jail. He later described in an Instagram post how Assistant Attorney General Johnathan Stone responded by throwing his head back in frustration and asking Montez to demonstrate twerking.
“He thought, ‘Well, here's my opportunity to embarrass him,'” Montez said. “My attorney didn't object – because I think she knew I was going to do it. The judge didn't object. So I did it. And I think I made my point.” According to several accounts, the courtroom erupted in laughter, with Judge Hittner joining in.
Days later, Hittner placed a temporary restraining order on SB 12. “I want to thank the attorneys for putting on one of the most interesting cases that I've had in 37 years on the federal bench,” he said at the trial's conclusion. “And darn it, it was interesting; and that's one thing why the job never gets tiring. You learn about different things and different folks and different science every day.”
Hittner said he'll issue his complete decision on the suit by the end of September. Brian Klosterboer, one of the ACLU attorneys who argued the suit, told us that whatever that decision is, it will almost certainly be appealed. Meanwhile, similar suits challenging similar laws in other states are moving through the courts. One of them – SB 14, blocking hormone treatment for trans minors – will almost certainly be heard by the Supreme Court.
Gothess Jasmine is a full-time drag artist and also a parent; their life is doubly threatened by SB 12 and SB 14. “My kid is 13 and he's been …” Gothess pauses for a moment – “I'm sorry, it's really upsetting – he just has a fear of existing, in general. Public school is hard because, as I'm sure you're aware, teachers are being targeted for providing gender affirming care. Because gender affirming care isn't just provided by medical professionals – it's provided by society. It's a societal thing. It isn't just hormones. It isn't just top surgery. It's also respect. It's also acknowledging their identity. It's using their preferred pronouns. It's encouraging them to be whoever they are – period.”
Gothess Jasmine said it feels like the beginning of a civil war in Texas, with the explicit threats of violence by hate groups, backed by the state's dominant political party. With the situation deteriorating, Gothess, like most drag artists, has bid farewell to friends who have left Texas or soon will. Gothess is not in a position to join them.
“I want to make sure my child is safe,” Gothess said, “but not everybody can afford to move when they see that they themselves or their child is in danger. And that's essentially where I am. Being a full-time performer and artist here does not pay me enough to have a foundation to move anywhere else, where it's safer for my child. We're just one of the examples of that.”
Alexander the Great's best friend, Kingsley, moved to Portland in July, seeking a new home where their trans kid can legally receive gender affirming care. Alexander has felt the pain of gender dysphoria and understands why families need to move. But he says he's in a privileged position – he doesn't have to leave Austin. So he won't.
“You know, we're in Texas,” he said. “I was born and raised in Austin. And we have always been told to be rough and tough. That's who we are as Texans. That's Brigitte. She's from here and that's what we're taught: We don't take no shit. So I feel like, if SB 12 does go into effect, I will still go to H-E-B in drag for cat food before my show, if I need to. Arrest me if you're going to arrest me – whatever. There are those of us in the community that just are going to keep doing what we're doing and if you're going to stop us, then – try to stop us. I do one-handed cartwheels and high kicks on stage, bitch! I dare you to try to arrest me during a number. Like, try to catch me, bitch.”
“That's Alexander,” Bandit said. “Yeah, we are going to continue doing what we do. And I think that's what queer people have always done – look at the Stonewall riots. Drag queens have always had to fight for our right to just exist.
“And I feel like doing this stuff is hard. But it's been really interesting – from being at the Capitol to preparing for court, we've had a lot of people trying to figure out how to fight these oppressors. And we found we were still able to find specific moments of queer joy in it all, and, like, laugh together and have fun together. That shows who we are. No matter what happens, we have each other, and we have our community, and we're still going to celebrate.”
Qmmunity Editor James Scott contributed to this report.
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