Drag Queens Fume That Facebook Is Banning Aliases And Threaten to Drop Out Of It
"It's the largest f*** you out there to cross dress and still use a dude-ly moniker while being successful (Chad Michaels, RuPaul, Boy George, Charles Busch, Kevin Aviance, Me)," said William Belli, drag queen, who is one of the members fighting Facebook's declaration that it is going to delete hundreds of profiles that have dropped legal names, according to Daily Mail.
After a meeting with executives at the San Francisco City Hall on Wednesday, the group putting up its fists against the plan is furious.
Facebook may in fact be sent to Coventry by them, as stage names are now being banned from the social media site. In a tit-for-tat plan, the drag queens are planning to make the site taboo likewise.
Sister Roma and Heklina are among the hundreds whose profiles are exiled. They were the ones who started the protest drive. Heklina said: "I have been Heklina for 20 years, and I have Facebook telling me Heklina does not exist. So they're basically wiping you out of existence." One member, Willam Belli, said that all the "best queens" anyway use their male monikers.
Jinkx Monsoon, star of RuPaul's Drag Race, said to Daily Mail that Facebook needs to come to a good conclusion fast. Aliases have been part of life for so long that "it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone," he said. He added that they were wasting time squabbling over something that was irrelevant. Drag queen performers, or men who donned female clothes for nightclub shows, usually take on names that do not have any link with their real names.
A Change.org petition called the issue "discriminatory against transgender and other nonconforming individuals" who carry some painful baggage. After all, they have sought relief from adopting names that may not be the same as their driver's license. A few point out that Facebook is trying to earn money by forcing performers to shift to fan pages. Roma said that it is about your "profile matching your credit card---it's all about money."
What is also not clear is how Facebook plans to enforce the policy beyond the U.S. For instance, there are some Burmese accounts that have names from the days of yore: Burmese kings, princesses and poets who were dead long ago, says techcrunch.com
Facebook initially offered the group a two-week "grace period" to readjust their profiles and show their real names, or change the profiles into fan pages which would have cost them. However, the group felt that the "permission" was not enough. Sometimes a fake name would protect them from employers, family members or stalkers who wanted to target them. For some people, it was an important indication of their identity.
Not too many people are clear as to why exactly Facebook is doing it, but a clarification by a Facebook spokesperson, Chris Wolf, national chair of the Anti-Defamation League's Civil Rights Committee give some reasons. He said that he studied online hate for 20 years and feels that a real name would "prevent hate speech and harassment." Behind a smokescreen, people could engage in a lot of "harassment and bullying." He said that they want to abort evil intentions and behaviour, and set up a safe and "more accountable environment." Hence, it has decided to remove LGBT Facebook profiles that do not amend their profile names to match their legal ones.
