I can’t make BBC News’ infatuation with drag seem any less bizarre. It is bizarre. But I can tell you about some of the push factors that have brought it to saturation point. 

If calling it an infatuation seems extreme, look first at the numbers: firstly, 44 stories this year on the BBC’s Drag Queen page tag. That’s one a week, but it’s not all of them.  

This, for example, about the death of the drag queen that inspired It’s A Sin doesn’t appear on the BBC’s Drag Queen page. Nor does this — a very worrying piece this week about the sexual abuse of a child who went on to become a Drag Race contestant, which suggests drag is a kind of healing therapy for abuse.  

Plenty of items involving drag are dotted around the regions, on Tiktok (drag queen interviews Economics Editor Faisal Islam) Newsbeat (drag queen goes out on the town), on Instagram (drag queen funeral) and other news programme pages without the “drag tag”.  

More can be found on the page for RuPaul’s Drag Race, some duplicated, some fresh, all affirmative, all about men. Then you have BBC Three’s pages for the global Drag Race programmes. You can see how numbingly effusively it’s treated by the media centre, here promoting Queen of the Mother Pucking World and Drag Race Down Under. 

Drag culture is inserted when you least expect it: need someone to raise awareness about diabetes? No problem. Kids feeling left out? Don’t worry, here’s Bitesize — part of “Learn and Revise”, no less. 

Drag is promoted internally too: staff-wide emails, front page of the internal Gateway intranet, promo screens as you enter the buildings. “Drag Race is a cultural phenomenon loved by so many around the world, not just for its fabulousness but also for shining a light on the LGBTQ communities and issues,” says the BBC’s PR team. 

“We don’t just report the story — we live it” is the current slogan. We know, BBC: your petticoat is showing. 

There are three main reasons for drag’s routine presence on the news pages.  The BBC’s need to promote its own drag programming, the relative independence of its regional websites, and its enthusiasm for gender identity culture.  

It doesn’t mean they’re good reasons. They are actually terrible reasons for promoting this repulsive and misogynistic pastiche of women. But they help to drive the BBC’s now infamous promotion of men who dress up as ugly women for a living, perform stunts such as the “snatch game” for compliments like “fishy”, “leading the way for transgender youngsters”, “appearing at Pride”, “dazzling in Lego mosaics”, “finding empowerment”, “electrifying their local scene”, gathering for conventions, drag in the Philippines, drag in a castle, drag running the marathon, drag on Dr Who, “taking drag to the countryside”, drag workouts, being arrested, being ill, retiring, dying or — ironically — calling for greater drag representation.

To many people — including some BBC journalists — these are unfathomable editorial decisions

The BBC even published a story on a drag queen appealing over a stolen van, with a picture of the van — then another, longer, story a day later when the van came back. When a furious row broke out over Gaza, Eurovision and Israel’s inclusion, a drag queen was invited onto Newsnight to discuss the matter. The cost of living as a drag queen was pitched, commissioned and published — a 45 paragraph story including the advice that “maybe a £1,000 outfit isn’t advisable”. 

To many people — including some BBC journalists — these are unfathomable editorial decisions. 

One BBC staffer says: “It’s become a running joke in the team, especially among Gen Z members. ‘We need more drag guests’. Israel? ‘Drag’. Brexit? ‘Drag’. Terrorism? ‘WHERE IS THE DRAG?’”

Says another: 

The website mystifies me.  I know how hard it is to get through the commissioning process.  The stories covered clearly don’t constitute ‘news’ and those of a cynical turn of mind might wonder if the BBC is actually using its news website to promote one of its own entertainment shows. 

There’s no dissenting view of drag to be found anywhere, and I can tell you for a fact that if someone pitched a piece ‘why some feminists have a problem with drag’ it wouldn’t get on, yet we churn this stuff out. 

I can only assume that someone somewhere has decided that drag appeals to younger and “underserved” audience [by which the BBC usually means poor, female, and less well-educated] and that shoehorning it into a news website is the objective, no matter how patronising nor how ridiculous it makes us to look to people who pay the licence fee and value the BBC. It’s actually deeply damaging. 

The number of these ridiculous stories hasn’t gone unnoticed and is turning us into a laughing stock. 

That’s certainly true. The BBC’s “we love drag” reputation has led to social media baiting. “But what does the Budget mean for drag queens, BBC?” “If you want daily updates on the lives of drag queens – and who doesn’t – the BBC is the place to go!” “These days I wait for pithy commentary from drag queens before making my mind up about the day’s news.” I checked for a drag queen response to the Trump victory — it would be entirely unsurprising. 

More seriously, former MP Neale Hanvey has accused the BBC of making “an overt political statement that seeks to normalise queer theory and gender ideology.” The feminist Julie Bindel wrote last year: “Drag is part of porn culture – and its messages are deeply regressive and misogynistic.” Their views are not outliers.   

Many BBC licence fee payers now loathe drag after previously indulging it as slightly risqué humour. I had my own hen night in Madame JoJo’s, but now I find drag full of hate for women. I don’t, for example, think drag should be a wrap-around solution for a dry news day, I don’t think readers and viewers should be incessantly bombarded with its nasty stereotypes, and I’m struck by the imbalance of reporting drag news compared to the number of stories about women’s rights. Drag Race UK is popular: that doesn’t mean every drag story deserves a forever spot on the BBC website. 

The drag explosion in the UK began when the BBC commissioned Drag Race UK in 2019. It was instantly popular but still needs to be promoted. A constant diet of apparently unrelated drag stories is a different kind of PR, but it’s PR all the same — based perhaps on the analogy that if you eat enough junk food you’ll get addicted. 

As for the Nations and Regions, they’re in an odd situation. They upload material to their own websites without central oversight. The team at New Broadcasting House in London controls only what they put on the front page and the UK index. It’s odd because about three years ago the BBC’s editorial leadership developed a central commissioning model for news and current affairs, so that bulletins, website and programme output is rather more consistent. But the Nations and Regions commission and publish their own content. If they wanted to publish rubbish, there’s no one in London to stop them. 

There’s no visible story hierarchy on the website, beyond the “on the day” front page.  So this very, very local journalism is given undue significance by its global visibility. 

As with all local journalism, you want a bit of colour every day.  For example, Pride events fulfill the old local news role of the school fete: plenty of fun photos, with lots of people in them who will all click and scroll. BBC local staffing is cut to the bone, and drag stories are easy and enormously self-promoting. They’re natural fillers.  

There are nearly 60 BBC local news tags — and 44 drag stories is not even one each this year. Collectively, though, it’s excessive, and the BBC will know that it has invited ridicule. But it can’t stop it happening. There is no editor who thinks it important enough to send out an email saying “can we row back on the drag”, and none willing to put their name on such an email anyway. It would leak, and you can imagine the headline: “BBC Pride fury as bosses tell staff to stop writing about drag queens.”

The BBC has a history of enthusiastic gender identity and “queer culture” (apologies) affirmation. To put it simply: there’s more trouble in an editor’s life if she or he pushes against that affirmation. They’d have to come up with reasons that might veer dangerously close to the view that drag is the most overtly sexist mockery of women to be allowed on mainstream TV. 

The response from the BBC is that because they are local interest stories from local news teams, it might explain why I feel they are not topics of general national interest. Not really the question. We still don’t know if they’re counted as female in the 50:50 data, nor why BBC teams are so interested in drag, nor how the BBC feels about complaints that it’s deeply misogynistic. We may get more comment on the story that suggests drag is a therapy for sexual abuse. 

I’ll give the final word to another BBC staffer:

It’s just embarrassing. The BBC has asked drag queens about the Middle East, the cost of living, overcoming anxiety, and diabetes. It’s become a joke, a punchline. And all in stark contrast to stories that have been ignored or buried.  

You remember that movie, Up?  The dog that can talk, and every time he starts saying something he’s distracted by a squirrel? Drag is the BBC News squirrel.