The News
A fight over drag has broken out in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Democratic Mayor Paige Cognetti is running for Congress against Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan.
It began with a photo of the mayor and a drag queen at the city’s 2025 Pride flag raising. It escalated with the congressman’s opponents rediscovering a charity video of him working out in heels. Republicans were happy to battle it out, pointing out that the images of the congressman in pink were for a breast cancer awareness event.
At issue: a new TV ad that Bresnahan and the National Republican Congressional Committee began running on Aug. 12. Titled With Them, evoking the 2024 Trump campaign spot that accused Kamala Harris of siding with “they/them” over “you,” it displayed a photo the city of Scranton shared last June, showing Cognetti next to drag queen Frank Carey.“Cognetti’s a member of the radical group trying to force grown men in girls’ bathrooms and women’s sports,” says the ad. The “group” was Action Together PA, which campaigned for Luzerne County’s new, gender identity-inclusive non-discrimination ordinance.
Carey appears twice in the ad. He protested that on social media, with friends launching a GoFundMe to support possible legal action.
“Sometimes you have to stand up and say enough is enough,” Carey wrote on his personal Facebook page, promising to fight back for his drag personas, who go by “Lady Lydia” and “Chlamydia Berns.” “This Queen isn’t going quietly,” he wrote.
The NRCC continued attacking Cognetti, denouncing her for appearing with the drag queen “with small children present.” Cognetti’s campaign didn’t respond to a question about the ad, and Brosnahan’s campaign spokeswoman, Samantha Bullock, said that the picture had now “been shown in the context of Cognetti’s true liberal agenda.”
Democrats angry at the ad suggested that the congressman was demonizing drag queens as a politician while apparently having no issues with them as a citizen. In 2023, Bresnahan joined his wife, Chelsea, at a fundraiser for the KISS Theatre Company in Wilkes-Barre. Carey was a member of the company at the time.
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David’s view
Most Democrats haven’t altered their positions on transgender rights since 2024, and Republicans are very confidently rebooting the messaging that worked for them that year — though less so in 2025.
This week, as Carey protested the Bresnahan/NRCC ad, one of the House GOP’s independent groups went up with a spot thanking the congressman for “making sure our tax dollars don’t fund sex-change operations.”
How does Bresnahan’s GOP square that with the congressman helping a LGBTQ-friendly theater group raise money, or wearing bright pink heels for charity? The difference, they say, is that the Democratic mayor put drag in front of children, for ideological purposes. (Carey was dressed as “Lady Lydia,” his more family-friendly character, at the city’s Pride event; Republicans prefer to talk about “Chlamydia Berns,” his more ribald character.)
Republicans have embraced the normative aspects of gay rights. There’s a conservative legal effort to overturn same-sex marriage rights, but the Trump administration doesn’t support it. There’s plenty of conservative commentary and activism against surrogacy and adoption rights for gay couples, but not much momentum for legislation. Only Louisiana, for example, limits surrogacy to creating children who will be “genetically related to both parents.”
Instead, Republicans campaign against gender healthcare for minors, gender self-identification for adults, and anything that introduces children to LGBTQ themes. (The fact that Carey is not transgender is, to them, beside the point.)
Notable
- In The Advocate, Jacob Ogles covered how Florida’s new nominee for governor started his general election campaign by accusing his Republican-turned-Democratic opponent of wanting “boys to be in girl sports.”
- Republicans “are making me out as a trans woman, and I am not,” Carey told the Scranton Times-Tribune, noting that he uses the men’s room even in drag.