What The Hell America!

Ryan Woods hasn’t put the blonde wig on since November 5. It just doesn’t feel the same. 

“I can’t say that I’m disappointed yet, because we are just — what? — two months into his administration,” Woods told The 19th recently by phone. “That being said, some of the people he’s chosen to be in his administration, I am not excited about.” 

Woods is talking about President Donald Trump. Usually, “enthusiasm” is the first word that comes to mind about Woods and the current president, not that the two know each other personally.

For the better part of five years, Woods has exhausted himself and stretched his finances serving as the ultimate Trump cheerleader: Lady MAGA USA, a drag queen who sashays from rally to rally, posing for pictures, smiling down haters and trying to prove that gay people can be conservative, too. 

It’s hard to overstate the campy presence of Lady MAGA USA. In a sea of red hats and camo T-shirts, Lady MAGA stands out in flowing 19th-century gowns, often stark white. With bows and ruffles; pops of red, white and blue; and an enormous blonde wig, she looks like she stepped off the set of “Mary Poppins.” She sports pearls and a silk sash. Her makeup is only slightly overdone. 

Drag queens may have a reputation for the raunchy, but Lady MAGA is so earnest, so old-fashioned, she seems almost wholesome. And that’s intentional. Woods has taken great pains to create a character conservatives would want their kids to meet, that would hearken back to a bygone era, and he has inhabited that character proudly. She has made national headlines for this portrayal. 

That is, until this year. 

“It’s just not in me right now, and I’m not exactly sure why,” Woods said. 

It’s true that a lot of conservatives don’t want a drag queen, even the old-timey type, at their events anymore. 

Two years ago, still donning skirts and dresses, Woods stopped calling himself a drag queen. 

“The perception, especially among conservatives, of drag queens was getting more and more negative, and I wanted to differentiate myself,” he told The 19th at the time.

Since January, Trump has introduced a slew of anti-transgender executive orders, and federal agencies have swiftly moved to exclude transgender people from public life. 

Woods is emphatic that he is not transgender. Lady MAGA USA is just a character, and his opinions often echo the vitriolic anti-trans talking points of his conservative peers. A gay man, he has suggested that LGBTQ+ people are indoctrinating children into transition and transgender people are not legitimate. 

But unlike many of his conservative peers, Woods grew up bullied for being gender non-conforming. He was raised in Salt Lake City in the 1990s, a member of the Mormon Church. He spent his days twirling in his sister’s dresses in front of the mirror when no one else was home. He loved Barbies and Disney princesses. Other kids punished him for standing out; they called him a fairy and smashed eggs on his head. 

Instead of building empathy with trans people, these experiences solidified for Woods that it was possible to grow up liking traditionally girl-coded things and not feel the need to transition. 

But not even Woods is immune from the judgement of a GOP increasingly hostile to gender fluidity. And he knows it. 

Outwardly, he blames LGBTQ+ people, not Republicans, for conservatives’ discomfort with gender nonconformity. He says LGBTQ+ people make him feel unsafe, in more ways than one. He says he won’t go into a gay bar dressed as Lady MAGA because he fears he will be physically attacked.

“The LGBTQIA+ movement pushed more and more child-focused things like drag queen story hour and trans hormones and surgeries on children,” he said. “It made it harder and harder for me to be a drag queen because of what I would consider a predatory and radical agenda.” 

Whatever the reason, Woods is a queen without a country now. And his support for the president is increasingly a question mark, not because of LGBTQ+ issues, but because he expected more from Trump. He wanted the full Epstein files, a detailed accounting of officials implicated in the sex abuse scandal that brought down financier Jeffrey Epstein, released quicker. He worries Pam Bondi is a poor choice for attorney general. More than anything, he’s worried that Trump is flirting with foreign wars, something he vowed not to do.

“I did sort of sit back and complain for a few weeks there, but then it was pointed out to me that you need to chill out, because we have four years ahead of us, and it’s only been two months, and maybe I expected too much, too fast,” he said. 

But as an American, Woods feels it’s his job to be critical of those in power. It’s been costing him a lot of support from social media followers — 56,000 on his Facebook page and 17,000 on Instagram. He describes himself as a “lone wolf.” 

“I don’t worship Donald Trump, and I don’t put my faith in any government leader,” he said. “I scrutinize him, just as harsh as I would scrutinize [former President Joe] Biden.”

Many gay Republicans, who see themselves as separate from transgender Americans, still support the president. Log Cabin Republicans, the national conservative LGBT organization, has praised Trump’s anti-transgender executive orders, largely denying the existence of transgender women and decrying “radical gender ideology.” 

Republicans make up a shrinking percentage of the LGBTQ+ community, according to polling and research. In 2020, The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law reported that 15 percent of the 9 million registered queer voters identified as Republicans. 

Last year, The 19th’s annual poll with SurveyMonkey put the number of Republicans who identify as LGBTQ+  at 12 percent. 

Woods feels that Lady MAGA still has a following, but he admits that some of that is a love for himself, not just the character or even Trump.  

“My followers definitely love Lady MAGA,” Woods said. “When I openly talk about my lack of enthusiasm for dressing up or embodying the character, you know, they’ll say, we love Lady MAGA. Lady MAGA is the reason we follow you, but they also follow me because they’ve gotten to know me as a person.” 

Lately, that person is grappling with depression. 

“I know that clouds my judgment a little bit,” he said. “It kind of puts a cloud over a lot of my political opinions.” 

Woods has been using his sizable platform to put out yoga videos and meditations. He jokes that Lady MAGA is sitting somewhere in a “padded cell.” 

“I’m not going to be dramatic enough to say I’m never doing it again,” Woods said. 

If she does return, maybe it won’t be for the president. Maybe it will be for the things she thought he stood for. “I’m not Lady Trump,” Woods said. “I’m Lady MAGA.”