AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — At the Texas Capitol on Friday, a bill that has prompted deep anger and fear in the Texas LGBTQ+ community came up for a vote on the House floor.
Instead of voting against it, 42 Democrats registered themselves as "present not voting" — surprising even some of the reporters who were there to watch the vote.
The bill, Senate Bill 12, was pitched as a way of protecting children from drag performers. It mirrors other bills this year targeting LGBTQ+ people and culture in Texas and beyond, including SB 14, a Texas ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender children that passed last week after days of heated protests and debate.
With SB 14, Democrats spent around a week dragging out the bill — giving speeches against it, raising technical “points of order” and proposing amendments. Yet when it came to SB 12, Democrats tried a different approach.
After some light questioning by Democrats, the House moved onto a vote. There were no amendments and no points of order. The decision shocked some progressive Texans, who had expected a more full-throated defense of drag.
The explanation, it turned out, had to do with changes to the House version of SB 12. The Senate version explicitly called out drag performances as "sexually oriented." The House version did not.
After the vote, Mary González, a prominent Democratic lawmaker, told reporters she and other lawmakers voted present because "anti-LGBTQ" language was removed from the bill in the House version — though it remains in the Senate version.
"We don't support the legislation," González said, but "we also ... don't want children exposed to sexually explicit performances." The Texas House LGBTQ+ Caucus later put out a similar statement.
The full explanation is a bit more complicated — and for that, it helps to know Mike Hendrix. A lobbyist representing some of the biggest drag business interests in the state, Hendrix has emerged as a backer of this new Democratic strategy.
Hendrix, who is gay, has some controversial views on SB 12. He thinks drag performers should stay neutral — the approach apparently taken by Democrats on Friday.
Hendrix's thinking goes something like this: Republicans dominate Texas politics, and to avoid the worst aspects of SB 12, Democrats should work with Republicans to protect children from obscenity. That’s a tough sell for many drag performers because the fears that animated SB 12 — namely, concerns that they were regularly behaving inappropriately around children — started as a direct attack on the drag community.
This new strategy has cut a rift in the Texas LGBTQ+ community — and even before the vote on Friday, emotions were running on both sides.
Some activists see Hendrix as a self-interested interloper who is foolishly helping Republicans advance their bill. One said they mostly knew him as "a perennial candidate in Austin who runs for all sorts of things but never wins." (In response, Hendrix said he'd only run one time as a progressive Democrat and that he "did what I was hired to do [to] protect drag and remove it from the bill.") They argue SB 12 may have died in committee were it not for Hendrix giving it air.
Hendrix, for his part, says he's tired of people questioning his allegiances. He argues other LGBTQ+ groups aren't being pragmatic about protecting drag and instead are scaring people so that they can "raise money off their misery."
"The LGBTQ community can play and be a part of this process," Hendrix says, but we can't "chain ourselves to the gallery or scream or holler. That's not what gets stuff done in Texas."
That strategy started earlier this session, when two of the biggest drag companies in Texas — Caven Enterprises and HV Entertainment — hired Hendrix as a lobbyist. Hendrix is registered to work for a group called Texas Arts and Commerce, documents from the Texas Ethics Commission show.