Dori: More holes than Swiss cheese in All Home’s story about trans stripper

When does government release information that they want to get minimal publicity on? That would be on Friday afternoons, as people are getting ready to head into the weekend. If you can do it on the Friday of a three-day weekend, so much the better. This practice is known as a “Friday news dump.”

We had a big Friday news dump this past week. You likely remember hearing about the December All Home conference — an annual conference for the bureaucrats in the homeless-industrial complex who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of “solving” homelessness — which made headlines for featuring a drag queen stripper as the lunchtime entertainment. The director of All Home, who made $123,000 per year, resigned amidst the backlash.

If you have seen the very explicit video (which can be viewed on filmmaker Christopher Rufo’s Twitter page by scrolling back to mid-December), you know how it made us a national laughingstock and showed what a joke the homeless-industrial complex is. The conference organizers called the entertainment by drag queen Beyoncé Black St. James a lunchtime “cultural performance.” I’m not sure what sort of cultural performance that was, but how could the conference organizers have thought that while people are sleeping outside in freezing temperatures, it was a good idea to bring in a topless stripper to twerk on bureaucrats?

As KOMO 4 reported on Friday, Beyoncé Black St. James said that a button broke on her jacket during the performance, accidentally exposing her breasts. I’m so confused because I would think if that happened by accident during a dance number, you would try to correct the problem. Perhaps you would try to hold the jacket closed, or cover up the exposed area with an arm. In the video, she does not appear to correct the problem at all. In fact, she opens the jacket up even wider, and eventually dances around with the jacket off entirely, shaking her breasts (conveniently featuring pasties) in attendees’ faces.

All Home spent your money on drag show at homelessness conference

Leo Flor, the head of King County’s Department of Community and Human Services, told KOMO 4 that when St. James invoiced the county, he paid for the performance out of his own pocket so that tax dollars would not be used.

This story has more holes than Bonnie and Clyde’s car.

If a button broke, why did the drag queen go forward with a stripping performance? If the whole thing was an innocent clothing mishap, why did the $123,000-per-year All Home director resign instead of explaining the error? If the department head paid for the performance but the invoice went to the county first, then he did so as a way to avoid the firestorm that had already gone national. I’m sure the original intent was that the taxpayers would pay for the strip tease. You may as well be taking money from the people sleeping on the streets at that point.

By the way, who paid for the stripper’s travel? St. James is from Spokane. Did the taxpayers and nonprofits have to pay for her to get from Spokane to Seattle?

There is one other point I want to address. I got this email from a listener named Susie:

I don’t understand why you have to call out a stripper. It should not make a difference whether this stripper was male, female or trans. You could simply call that person a stripper. It makes a big difference when you show respect.

I’m glad you brought that up, Susie. The reason why it is important that it was a transgender stripper is that the people who organized this conference would never have gotten a pole dancer from a First Avenue strip club or a Chippendales guy is because they know that people would be horrified. But when everything in your world is about identity politics, you think that a stripper being trans makes the whole performance appropriate. So yes, the stripper’s gender identity is very relevant, and that is why I brought it up.

This all just goes to show that the homelessness industry is not about helping the homeless. There was a 10-year-plan to end homelessness that was launched 16 years ago. Do you really think that the hoards of people making six figures off of homelessness really have any interest in ending homelessness? Do you think they want their jobs to end? Of course not. That is why they can bring in transgender strippers when they should instead be figuring out how to get people into shelter.

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

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