Welcome listeners to the editor's desk, the regular First Things podcast that I host, Rusty Reno,

Editor of First Things, and I am at the editor's desk, and I have with me via the miracle of the

internet. Daryl Paul, author of Drag Queens in the February 23 issue, Daryl is a professor of political science at Williams

College. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, Rusty, glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. So Drag Queens.

Your thesis here is that drag is part of this larger queering of mainstream American culture.

So what does queering mean?

Wow, that's a big question to start off with.

I think there's a narrow definition and then there's a broad one.

So I'll start with the narrow one.

And the narrow one is probably obvious to most.

It has to do with a

kind of normalization, I guess I call it that, of gay identities, and now well beyond that, right? So

in my earlier work from even just five years ago or so, I'd much more use the language of

homosexuality or gay, but I think the kinds of

identities that have spun out of this kind of phenomenon of sexuality becomes so many. And we can

just see that because the LGBT acronym just gets longer and longer and longer all the time. So I use queer as a kind of an overarching

umbrella term for that phenomenon, which I think is quite widely used among academics and

proponents as well. So I don't think it's anything that one might consider a slur. So it is

the normalization of these kinds of identities. But I think going beyond that,

what queering is, because nowadays one can hear claims that literally anything and everything can be

queered. And I think what that is fundamentally about is the attempt to undermine and ultimately

destroy what one might simply call normality, that

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