Filmmaker Chris Rufo on video of drag queen at homelessness conference

Last week, outrage exploded in Seattle when it was first reported by The C is for Crank that a drag queen was hired to perform at a homelessness conference attended by public leaders and nonprofits alike.

And over the weekend, documentary filmmaker and community activist Christopher Rufo put a visual element to the story by finding and posting a video of the drag show.

Spokane drag queen Beyoncé Black St. James was chosen as the midday entertainment at the annual conference for All Home, an umbrella organization of government and private groups whose stated missions are ending homelessness in the region.

Rufo scarcely believed his eyes when he first watched the clip, sent to him from an anonymous tipster.

“At first, my reaction was, ‘This can’t be real video from inside the conference,'” he said to KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson.

Dori: All Home spent your money on drag show at homelessness conference

But as he did his research, he confirmed that the room in the video was indeed South Seattle College (the location of the homelessness conference), and that people spotted in the video were people who attended the event. Rufo also noticed All Home posters on the walls.

Once he confirmed that the video was authentic, he posted it on his Twitter page (warning: video contains explicit material).

In the video, St. James can be seen taking off her top to reveal bare breasts, save for two pasties. She sticks her buttocks in the air, twerks on attendees, and takes dollar bills from audience members, at one point even grasping one with her mouth from a conference-goer’s mouth in a kiss-like fashion.

Since posting the video on Twitter Saturday, it has received nearly 1 million views.

Rufo has no problem with people choosing to watch a drag show on their own time and money. But he is infuriated by government leaders using tax dollars, donations, and time that are all meant to go toward helping people get off the streets on a drag show instead.

“This is a symbol of the homeless-industrial complex at its worst,” Rufo said. “These are people who operate with impunity behind closed doors.”

According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, $1 billion is spent on homelessness in the region. Rufo believes these public employees “are more interested in perpetuating a permanent bureaucracy and more interested in earning a six-figure salary from taxpayers” than actually ending homelessness.

“They ask for more money, more money, more money, when you can actually peek behind the scenes and see that the money that they have, which is enormous, they’re squandering … If these people are in control of homelessness policy in the region, can we really expect it to get any better?” he asked.

Rufo guessed that a cis-gendered stripper would never have been brought in as entertainment for an official conference, but that the conference organizers must have assumed that an African-American drag queen would be free from censure.

“They felt that because this was specifically the identity category — black, transgender, drag queen stripper — they felt like, for some reason, that exempted any of the other laws and expectations around the appropriateness of this,” he said.

All Home’s acting director, Kira Zylstra — who previously made $123,000 per year in the role — has resigned after being placed on administrative leave. All Home is currently investigating the incident.

This comes at a time when Seattle and King County are working more and more together on the homelessness crisis. Rufo hopes that everyone who lives in other cities in King County besides Seattle will call their county council members and ask them not to adopt Seattle’s policies.

“I hope that as this video gets out there, as the news starts to pick it up, as it starts to go national, people will start to question, ‘Wait a minute, if these are the people in control of homelessness — if we’re giving them $1 billion a year to solve the problem — and it continues to get worse, is it time for a fundamental change?'” he said.

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.