Kevin Bacon & Kyra Sedgwick Call U.S. Drag Bans ‘Bad Karma’ With a Little Help From Taylor Swift
As U.S. state legislatures continue to try and make this Pride season a “Cruel Summer” for drag performers, actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick are telling them “You Need to Calm Down” with the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
In an Instagram post on Sunday (April 23), Bacon and Sedgwick are dancing around their living room to Taylor Swift’s Midnights track “Karma,” while wearing T-shirts that read “drag is an art and drag is a right” over an image of a drag performer. Swift’s lyrics helped drive the message home, as she’s heard singing “I keep my side of the street clean/ You wouldn’t know what I mean” while the celebrity couple groove along — by doing the “Karma” dance that the pop star has been performing during her Eras Tour, of course.
Bacon expounded on the topic in the caption, urging his fans to support the ACLU’s Drag Defense Fund going after anti-drag bills being passed throughout the U.S. “Drag bans are bad karma. Right now, drag performers and the LGBTQIA+ community need our help,” he wrote. “Tap the link in my bio to shop the @SixDegreesOfKB campaign supporting the @aclu_nationwide Drag Defense Fund in the nationwide effort to protect creative expression or make a gift. #DragIsARight.”
After publishing their video, the couple received plenty of support from fellow actors such as Alyssa Milano and Rosanna Arquette in their comments section. Meanwhile, singer-songwriter Peter Frampton shared Bacon and Sedgwick’s video on Twitter, simply adding, “Yes #DragIsARight thank you guys!”
The couple’s video comes after multiple states have passed or forwarded legislation that would ban drag artists from performing in public spaces. Tennessee passed its drag ban in early March, before a federal judge temporarily blocked the law from taking effect via a temporary restraining order until May 26, calling the statute “both vague and overly broad.”
This also isn’t the first time that Bacon has spoken out on the state of anti-LGBTQ affairs this year. When the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 15 performed a “Rusical” based off of Footloose earlier this year, Bacon applauded the queens on his Instagram Stories, saying , “With all the recent anti-drag bills, this came at just the right time.”
Check out Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick’s dance clip below:
Stephen Daw
Billboard
