Jonathan Van Ness Is Proud To Be Your Cheer Captain

The Queer Eye star reveals a catchy LGBTQ+ cheer and sounds off against anti-drag legislation.

by Jake Viswanath
Updated: 
Originally Published: 
Bustle 2023 Pride Yearbook

Jonathan Van Ness is more than just Queer Eye’s grooming guru. “I just really want to be head cheerleader for the queer community,” Van Ness tells Bustle. Throughout five years on Queer Eye, which premiered its seventh season in May, Van Ness has done that for everyone whose life the Fab Five has helped improve. The 36-year-old nonbinary hairstylist goes beyond using hair products and shaving creams to make people feel empowered. With rapid-fire wit and relentless positivity becoming trademarks, Van Ness also routinely cheers on the sidelines as Antoni Porowski teaches a cooking lesson or Tan France gives a fashion makeover.

Van Ness has parlayed that cheerleader energy into the long-running Getting Curious podcast, JVN hair and beauty lines, and standup comedy tours. However, nothing gets Van Ness riled up like the current onslaught of legislation across the United States targeting drag queens and trans people, which only motivates Van Ness to cheer on the LGBTQ+ community even more. “That’s a hundreds-of-years-old problem that we’re up against,” Van Ness says. “So it’s a question of our time, not only for drag bans, but the trans bans and the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bills. None of this is new. We’ve had oppression from the government for hundreds of years. Now we have to figure out how to get in front of it.”

Below, Van Ness picks his Pride Yearbook superlative and explains why it’s important to combat anti-drag laws without casting aside the lawmakers proposing them.

Jonathan Van Ness On Drag Bans & Stopping The Spread Of Misinformation

What superlative would you give yourself for the 2023 Pride Yearbook?

Definitely Most School Spirit. That’s totally me because I want to put on a great polyester cheer skirt and a cropped cheer top and get really springy pom-poms, and I just want to give you Most School Spirit, like: L-G-B-T-Q-I-A! Let’s go! We are No. 1! And so much fun! Yay, us go! Or Best Hair! Only because genetically, I just don’t know how much longer I’m going to have it. So while I have it, it may be Best Hair. But that’s a really stiff competition. Maybe Most School Spirit is more realistic. I like to be realistic about goals.

How do you feel about anti-drag laws popping up across the nation?

It’s a really serious issue because this is the infringement of our First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of self-expression. Drag is art. Also drag is historical — it is not new. People, as queer historians write about, were playing with the idea of gender and being genderfluid before we had our contemporary understanding of transness, or identifying as a drag queen. A lot of the lawmakers who are enacting these laws would lump together everything I just said as woke and dangerous and a threat to children, while at the same time working so hard to uphold the Second Amendment. It’s such a blatant act of hypocrisy.

Then it’s the erasure of gay and queer people, LGBTQIA+ people. Obviously, queer people are not a monolith, so there are levels to this because race, gender, and class come into play. But on the whole, if you look at people who are experiencing homelessness, an outsize proportion of them are queer. [Banning drag] is yet another way that governments are trying to further curtail queer people’s access to money, to safety, to creating a life for themselves. There’s a huge economy at play here, and to put it under this guise of protecting children is a really old trope that has been used for decades to scare people into thinking that there’s a threat when there’s not.

What would you say to the lawmakers who are opposing the art of drag?

There are some legislators who are well-intentioned, who are voting “yes” on these bills who actually do think there’s a threat to children. They have been given misinformation, and they have taken that as truth. Now they are taking their faith, their religion, and this misinformation, and they’re legislating with it. We need to make sure we aren’t cutting off people who don’t think like us, like Republicans, that we’re not making ourselves so isolated from them that we aren’t doing anything to counter this misinformation. Because drag is not a threat to kids.

If you are going to start to split hairs, we see little kids at Hooters all the time, or if you look at Toddlers & Tiaras. You see little kids at basketball games, Mardi Gras, places that have questionable appropriateness levels in cishet spaces all the time, but we trust parents to make the decisions that are best for their kids when they’re cishet. But when it’s queer, it’s this threat to the public. So we just need to look at the nuances and make sure that we’re not cutting ourselves off from people who are in power and their constituents. Not all of them have a bad heart. Some of them really think that they’re protecting kids, and we need to be more effective in disarming the misinformation that is making them think that way.

Who are your favorite drag queens and why?

Oh, I knew you were gonna ask me that. It’s too hard. It really depends on what season of my life I’m in. I just love all of them. There’s very few queens that I don’t like.

What is the most memorable drag show you’ve ever attended?

I saw Aquaria at a Drag Race viewing party in Manhattan in the summer of 2019. That was pretty iconic. But some of my favorite drag shows that I ever saw were in Tucson, in the early 2000s. Not sneaking into bars underage, but some of my favorite ones had been in college, and small places in East LA, Silver Lake, or Los Feliz. But I also like some amazing Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn performers. I’ve seen a lot of amazing people perform.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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