Drag Queen Invited to White House, Receives Death Threats

It seems that every day, someone new is being called a pedophile by right-wing media for the simple crime of existing as a trans/nonbinary person or performing drag. This time, it is Marti Gould Cummings, a drag queen who was invited to the White House by President Joe Biden for the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act.

Twitter Account “Libs of TikTok,” which seems to spend most of its time retweeting Elon Musk, celebrating the continuing bans of left-wing Twitter accounts under Musk’s ownership, and, of course, posting TikToks from trans/nonbinary people to mock them, posted an out-of-context Tweet from Marti Gould Cummings saying, “The kids are out to sing and suck d!”

Cummings quickly clarified that (obviously) they were not referring to actual children, but to their friends. “In queer culture, we have a lot of different colloquialisms, one of them being that we call our friends the kids and the children,” they explained. The Tweet was in response to a friend’s Tweet about their night out at a piano bar, which “Libs of TikTok” must have forgotten is not a typical hangout spot for children.

But the damage was already done. Not only were their DMs chock full of death threats, but Fox News, the Daily Wire, and Breitbart all published pieces on Cummings, attacking their anti-police positions and political campaigns, flagrantly misrepresenting the Tweet in question (Breitbart even quotes it as “kids are out to sing and suck d”) and routinely connecting Cummings’ adult performances to their family-friendly shows as if they are the same kind of performances.

As is typical for right-wing media, they also misgender Marti Gould Cummings at every turn, using he/him pronouns instead of the preferred they/them that Cummings puts in their Twitter bio. Tucker Carlson took this a step further, insinuating in an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight that they were “interested in children in all the wrong ways.”

For Marti Gould Cummings, a survivor of childhood sexual assault themself, these accusations are, in their words, “traumatizing, hurtful… It’s libel and slander. I’ll be able to handle it,” they promise, “But how many people are they gonna target that maybe don’t have the support system or the network that I do?”

Given the right wing’s near-constant insisting that they are trying to “protect children,” they ought to consider the impact of their words on queer children, who are four times as likely to commit suicide due to systemic queerphobia.

In response to this hate, Cummings promised to “continue to spread a message of love and acceptance and… use my platforms to support our community.”