COLORADO SPRINGS — Lady MAGA USA knows she’s not really a lady. Her busty-blonde figure might make her look like a lady. The swing of her hips propped up on white heels might make her move like a lady. Her fabricated falsetto might make her sound like a lady, and her elegant manners might make her act like a lady. But Lady MAGA will be the first to tell you he’s just a man draped in hair and makeup playing a “lady,” careful to maintain the dignity the title demands.
“That’s why I dress tastefully, from head to toe,” he says proudly as he whips his champagne-colored wig to greet the next guest entering the second floor of a Colorado Springs distillery.
“Underneath this wig, I’m just an angry white man,” he told the small crowd of Log Cabin Republicans gathered on a Saturday night, where turnout at the small three-story distillery was just as depressed as turnout in the midterm elections.
Lady MAGA USA, the brainchild of Mormon-raised Utah drag performer Ryan Woods, is something of an enigma, a mascot for the counterculture against the counterculture. He’s an outcast among mainstream drag stars while still a minority to the constituency he caters. He doesn’t believe men and women can transition to the opposite sex, he’s endorsed Dollywood over Disney for Mickey Mouse’s “woketopian” makeover, and he’s a critic of “lazy conservatives” apathetic to the culture wars.
“Even though I’m dressed up, I’m one of the most alpha men in America right now,” Woods told the few who braved the 20-degree November weather, issuing an indictment of conservative men in particular.
The man dressed in glitter, however, isn’t guaranteed acceptance in conservative circles either.
Most conservatives today generally fall into two camps when it comes to drag. There are conservatives who write off drag as a fringe activity among mentally ill men cross-dressing to satisfy some fetish, and there are others who appreciate the artistry but believe it should never be presented to children. Woods falls into the latter, who, dressed as a pro-gun cheerleader with the Betsy Ross flag embroidered to his right arm, hosted a pep rally for the Right in the last Colorado Republican stronghold hours before a shooting seven miles away would draw the routine vitriol of the Left.
Down the road at Club Q, a deranged gunman killed five and left at least another 25 injured. Comments flooded social media blaming Woods and his activism for the killing spree — never mind the fact that the 22-year-old suspect was almost certainly mentally ill, was in a standoff with authorities just last year, and identifies as “non-binary.”
“Just saw what you caused in Colorado Springs,” read one post on Facebook. “I hope you’re happy.”
Woods later said in an interview that the attacks against him aren’t new.
“I’m told that I’m responsible for trans-youth suicides,” Woods said, noting he opposes exposing underage patients to so-called “gender-affirming care,” which really just makes them lifelong patients from which the healthcare system can continue to profit. “No, those kids are killing themselves because you’re drugging them and you’re mutilating them … they’re too young to know what they’re doing. That’s why they’re killing themselves, not because of Lady MAGA,” he said.
In fact, a study from the Heritage Foundation published this summer found that “easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates.”
Meanwhile, the endless cascade of gender activists exploiting drag to co-opt children, whether it be by “drag queen story hour” or provocative strip performances disguised as “all-ages drag shows,” is not something Woods is going to ignore. After all, his desire to protect his more than 50 nieces and nephews from transgender hysteria served as inspiration to leave behind his routine Britney Spears impersonation and become a megastar for the MAGA movement.
In 2019, Woods came out as a conservative Trump-supporting artist after three years of a successful drag career with “packed shows all the time.” He says his decision to go public with his politics “was quite literally 1,000 times more difficult than coming out of the closet as a gay Mormon.”
Woods was immediately excommunicated from LGBT spaces, kicked from drag show lineups, and now worries for his safety after multiple assaults and routine threats provoked by his homosexual heresy. He also says he lost his eight-year career in the airline industry after activists reported him enough times to identify him as an extremist.
“It’s a very collectivist environment, where you cannot dissent and if you do you will be punished,” Wood said. “Without exaggeration, I lost every single drag show friend I had and every single LGBTQ close friend I had.”
In contrast, he describes his reception at a New Mexico Trump rally as “literally a love fest.”
“It was pictures, it was smiles, it was kindness,” Woods said, but added it is becoming more difficult to capture the same reaction from conservatives who are skeptical that he might be associated with mainstream drag culture.
Inappropriate performances going viral nearly every day have stigmatized drag artists everywhere.
“Of course I’m stereotyped,” Woods complained as Lady MAGA in Colorado Springs, drawing a roar of applause among the small audience every time he demanded child-baiting drag performers “go to Hell!”
“I am covered from head to toe because I have dignity,” he said. “I want nothing to do with the alphabet mafia.”
Whether Woods can save mainstream drag is unlikely, but that also doesn’t seem to be the point. Woods sees no change on the horizon, with incumbent drag artists allergic to toning down the sexualization of their performances, which, at the end of the day, are inherently sexual.
For Woods, a theater kid at heart, drag is supposed to be an innocent act of cosplay for those who like to dress up, not a premature measure of gender to convince children they need to chop their balls off. He wants to offer a fun, creative alternative to mainstream drag culture while inspiring others to join the conservative cause along the way.
“I have seen the LGBTQ movement getting worse and worse and worse,” Woods said. “I do not see mainstream drag queens coming back to a place of dignity until dignified drag queens step up and say enough is enough.”
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Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for the Federalist. His work has been featured in the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal, Real Clear Politics, and Fox News. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan.
