Idaho’s latest anti-drag crusade began with a falsehood, lawsuit says

Drag queen at center of Idaho culture war takes Christian Nationalist group to court

By Daniel Walters
InvestigateWest

The claim — a drag queen exposing his genitals to children — was so incendiary, so horrifying that the Idaho Family Policy Center demanded voters change the law to “address these vile sexual exhibitions in places where children are present.” 

But when Coeur d’Alene prosecutors reviewed unedited video of the drag performance at the city’s 2022 Pride in the Park festival, they concluded there had been no exposure of genitalia — nothing illegal, nothing to charge. A year later, a jury reached the same conclusion in a civil suit, awarding $1.1 million to the performer, Eric Posey, after finding that a right-wing blogger had defamed him by accusing him of indecent exposure. 

Yet the Idaho Family Policy Center — a Christian Nationalist nonprofit and a rising force in the state’s conservative politics — used that allegation as Exhibit A for its bill to ban “sexually provocative” performances in front of minors, claiming they could confirm the video footage “portrays public exposure of the performer’s genitalia.”

They didn’t use Posey’s name, but they posted an image of the performer with his legs open and his face and crotch blurred.

Now Posey is suing the group; its president, Blaine Conzatti; and a former podcast co-host for defamation, alleging they repeated a lie that has already been debunked in court. A court conference is scheduled for Friday, Aug. 29 to discuss a trial date.

“It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie,” Posey said in a deposition earlier this year. “I want the jury to hear the truth.”

The Idaho Family Policy Center has rapidly been gaining influence: Last month, InvestigateWest reported on how the center, having used its sway in the Legislature to pass new restrictions on abortion and controversial library books, had launched its own legal arm to help residents sue to enforce their new Christian-inspired standards. But Posey’s suit has put the center on the defensive, testing whether the center crossed the line between political advocacy and outright defamation. 

Conzatti, the center’s president, has doubled down — arguing that nothing they said was untrue, that there was a testicle briefly revealed in the performance and insisting publicly that “protecting our children from sexual exhibitions like drag shows in public places … is a hill we are willing to die on.” 

This case is about more than a dispute over a dance move. The Idaho Family Policy Center is part of a nationwide push by conservative lawmakers to curtail drag performances and overturn gay marriage, often under the banner of protecting children. Judges in states like Texas and Florida have ruled these drag bans in violation of the First Amendment. 

Sarah Lynch, executive director of the North Idaho Pride Alliance and a friend of Posey’s, told lawmakers in February that the deceptively edited video at the heart of the allegations “spurred a domino effect straight down to the Idaho Legislature nearly three years later.” 

The Idaho House overwhelmingly passed the policy center’s bill, voting to restrict certain types of “sexually provocative” performances, though it failed in the Senate. 

Adam Steinbaugh, attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group that has defended both the free speech of both religious conservatives and drag performers, said Idaho’s proposed law violates the First Amendment. After all, there are already laws to regulate obscenity. 

“Why do you need to have a new law?” Steinbaugh said. “The answer is obvious: It’s that they want to regulate drag. It’s not the exposure they’re worried about. It’s the performance.” 

Pride and prejudice

Even before it started, 2022’s Pride in the Park in Coeur d’Alene had become a battlefront in the culture war. Across the country, conservatives were deploying the phrase “groomer” — a word that had been reserved for pedophiles targeting children — against supporters of gay and trans rights. 

Far-right Idaho legislators, the local Panhandle Patriots motorcycle club and white nationalist Nick Fuentes had all spotlighted the Coeur d’Alene events, with many calling for actions and protest. Organizers braced for violence. Ultimately, police arrested 31 white nationalists who’d arrived packed into a U-Haul truck, armed with shields and a smoke grenade.

But Summer Bushnell, a local blogger for the local right-wing “Bushnell Report,” turned her sights on a video of Posey’s drag performance from the same event: At one moment, Posey snaps open his legs, then immediately covers his crotch with his hands, his mouth dropping open in an apparent expression of theatrical shock. But Bushnell’s post deceptively blurred out his crotch area and called for the performer to “be arrested for exposing his genitals to minors.” 

The reaction was fury. Posey said he was called racial slurs. Lynch testified in court that she saw people accuse her friend Posey of being a pedophile, calling for him to be arrested, executed or lynched. 

“He essentially went into a state of hiding. He was afraid, as we were, for his safety,” Lynch said, according to trial minutes. “It completely changed his life.”

After viewing the unedited version of the video, an Idaho jury concluded in 2024 that Posey had been defamed and even asked the judge if they could require the blogger to personally apologize to Posey. 

But at the legislative hearing this year, the policy center presented the Legislature with more than 7,000 signatures on a petition “to ensure children are not exposed to sexual exhibitions like drag shows” that had been promoted with the deceptively censored image of Posey. 

Wendy Olson, Posey’s attorney, said that she and Posey would not have any official comment until the lawsuit was over. But in deposition transcripts, Posey’s frustration was clear.

“They just picked up where [Bushnell] left off. I never really got to bask in my win,” Posey said of the Idaho Family Policy Center. “It was one demon down, another demon to slay.”

The Idaho bill would have allowed event organizers and entertainers to be sued if they hosted or performed in events that expose minors to live “sexual conduct” considered offensive to the standards of the community. 

It doesn’t mention drag by name, but it defines “sexual conduct” as including “sexually provocative” actions if performers use “accessories that exaggerate male or female primary or secondary sexual characteristics.” 

A similar law in Texas has already been declared unconstitutional by a U.S. District Court judge and is being litigated in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. 

There is a narrow exception in the First Amendment for obscene speech, Steinbaugh said, and the bar for considering speech obscene is a bit lower when it comes to protecting minors. Yet speech is much more likely to be protected from regulation if it has serious artistic or political value. 

“Drag as a performance certainly does have political and, in a certain sense, ideological messages — especially if you consider the political attacks on drag,” Steinbaugh said. 

In other words, all the focus on drag performances from groups like the Idaho Family Policy Center generally increases the First Amendment protections that such performances would have. 

On top of that, the Idaho legislation did not define what is “sexually provocative.” Posey has argued his dance certainly wasn’t. 

“It was a simple dance move that cheerleaders do,” Posey said during his deposition. 

Yet the bill makes it clear that school-sponsored cheerleader performances would be exempted from its rules.

“I am stunned by the hypocrisy of language that, on the one hand, calls for an immediate signing into law due to the existence of an emergency to protect children, yet simultaneously exempts performances by high school and college students,” Lynch, with the North Idaho Pride Alliance, said during a committee hearing for the bill. 

Steinbaugh, of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that provision is strong evidence that the bill seeks to regulate more than obscenity. 

“Why would you need to exempt a cheerleading performance?” Steinbaugh said. “That is not lewd. That is not obscene. It gives away the ball game.”

Legal exposure 

Conzatti’s legal defense hangs on the edge of a single testicle. 

In a public post responding to the lawsuit this year, Conzatti linked to a grainy, zoomed-in freeze-frame from a video of the performance. The image shows a view up the performer’s shorts and through a gap in his leotard, briefly revealing what looks, possibly, like the bulbous shape of the leftmost edge of a testicle.

“In this case, the phrase ‘don’t believe your lying eyes’ appears to be the mantra of Mr. Posey’s claim,” Conzatti’s attorney wrote. 

But that image isn’t unedited, either: The Idaho Family Policy Center, in a literal sense, digitally increased the exposure. 

The Coeur d’Alene police’s initial report on Posey’s performance allowed that there “may have been a testicle exposed.” But the officer also said the bad video quality meant he couldn’t be certain, and the Coeur d’Alene city attorney, assistant city attorney and chief criminal deputy prosecutor all concluded the video showed no exposure, according to the prosecutor’s deposition.  

Branden Durst, a former state schools superintendent candidate who was working for the policy center at the time [and served a brief though volatile stint as superintendent of West Bonner County School District], said in his deposition that he spent as long as six hours editing the video footage — slowing it down, running depixelation filters, changing color balances, increasing brightness — to help him “get to the result we were trying to get to,” the claim that “Mr. Posey’s reproductive system was clearly visible.”

Conzatti acknowledged during his deposition that he wouldn’t “state that there is clear exposure” if the image wasn’t brightened. Posey’s attorney introduced an expert to argue that lightening and depixelating an image can sometimes introduce deceptive artifacts into an image. 

Posey testified that even an accidental slip would have been impossible. In deposition transcripts, he described that during his drag performance, his testicles are tucked up inside his abdomen, and his genitals are folded in such a way that, for anything to be exposed, they would have to twist and bend in a way that would cause him “excruciating pain.” On top of that area, he said, he added liquid latex, a duct-tape-gaffer-tape thong, two layers of skin-tone tights, spandex shorts and a leotard. 

Conzatti’s attorney countered with his own drag expert: Benjamin Blake Howard, a former drag queen and author of From Mascara to Manhood, a book about leaving the “gay/lesbian/drag lifestyle.” Howard argued that Posey didn’t appear to be wearing tights in the video footage and that a wardrobe malfunction was likely. 

Today, Conzatti maintains that the performer exposed himself but says it was accidental. 

“One of the things that I’m proud of is how our organization handles ourselves. We don’t lie,” Conzatti argued in an interview with InvestigateWest. “We don’t overstate things.”

Yet Conzatti’s rhetoric goes far beyond the claim that one drag show resulted in a half-second flash of a half testicle so subtle it took digital editing software to see. He scoffed in a video podcast at moderate Republicans in the state Legislature who “want to deny that these types of problems are taking place here.” 

The center has simultaneously argued the exposure in this case was accidental while promoting the case as evidence that “drag performers often become sexually aroused when they imitate sexualized behaviors of the opposite sex in public” and that “public drag shows exploit children” for the “depraved purpose of sexually gratifying the performer.” 

In his deposition, Posey furiously disagrees with the claim that drag is inherently sexual. His performance, he said, was about entertaining the community and bringing them together. 

“This is absolutely appalling. ‘Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex,’” he said. “Idaho Family Policy Center made this sexual. They made it all about sex.”

Doug Flanders, a Boise resident who has been doing drag for four decades, said there are wide varieties of drag performances — ranging from G-rated charity events for all ages to very risque and bawdy shows in adults-only venues. But even there, the point is to obscure male anatomy, not expose it. 

“When I’m in drag, I’m trying to look like a woman,” said Flanders. 

In a message to supporters in April on the policy center website, Conzatti positioned himself as a moral hero facing persecution, claiming the lawsuit “smacks of the politically motivated lawfare that has characterized the progressive left.” 

“If they succeed, they’ll try to take our homes, our cars and our personal property — destroying us financially,” Conzatti wrote. “When you stand boldly for righteousness and confront evil, the wicked always lash out in desperation.”

Nationally, Steinbaugh said he’s seen a number of defamation lawsuits from librarians and drag performers against people who accuse them of “grooming” or “predatory behavior” — but those are the kind of insulting and hyperbolic statements that are typically part of the “rough-and-tumble political discourse” protected by the First Amendment. 

This case, he said, is different: There were specific allegations made about a man exposing himself to children — effectively the definition of defamation if they were false. 

For his part, Posey has a painful past with religious conservatism. His dad, he said in his deposition, was a pastor who beat him for being gay. Still, he stressed during his deposition that the lawsuit wasn’t about trying to destroy the Idaho Family Policy Center. 

“All I wanted your client to do was just apologize and take it down,” Posey said. “Whatever your belief system is, whatever it may be, that’s on you. But just don’t use me.”

InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. A Report for America corps member, Daniel Walters covers democracy and extremism across the region. He can be reached at [email protected]. Visit investigatewest.org for more information.