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Notes -
To be fair, I don't think this is an accurate summary of what's usually going on with all these events. The Boise 2022 Pride Guide doesn't have much information on what Drag Kids was actually going to revolve around, but a follow-up "Drag Story Hour" references Kenni The Doll, which... I'm not a fan of the makeup and not going to try to figure out what's going on under any clothing, but it's not looking like leather thongs or most adult entertainer 'wear' (there are two other entertainers, but I can't find any clear images or references to them).
I'm not saying that leather thongs (or too-sheer, or too-short, or otherwise too-revealing clothes) never happen! But whether or not it's a central case for drag as a class, I think a categorical opposition to the topic needs to handle cases like Eddie Izzard, who isn't appropriate for kids, but in a British comedic swearing sense, rather than anyone getting aroused by it, or find a meaningful way to separate them.
And I'm not sure the latter option is solvable, exactly. "I don't want to know, and don't want to need to know, about your underwear" is absolutely a reasonable norm, and one I share and support, and I think you can get a very wide section of the American populace behind. As the discussion becomes more about "this style of dress is inappropriate" or "this style of dance is inappropriate", though, I think that level of agreement gets a lot harder.
For a less culture-war-centric example, the furry fandom gets a lot of askance looks for people who fursuit in public, especially where kids might see. After all, people have sex in (something that kinda looks like) those! Well, ok, bringing a murrsuit body anywhere near public is one of the ways to reliably get nuked by everyone else in the fandom, but just because people haven't had sex in that particular suit doesn't make it less sexualized. For example, there are some (very nice!) fursuits with very thick thighs and incredibly fluffy tails and highly pronounced toe beans. Which absolutely can be fetishized in actually-sexual ways, but are also things people just think are cool.
((Though to extend the metaphor, this doesn't make it ethically mandatory to permit: both for practical reasons and for credit card processor ones, there's a lot of restrictions on under-18 fursuiting, many not explicitly written down.))
The fandom's largely managed to set and evolve some norms around here (don't use murrsuit bodies for anything public or mixed-use private, full suits should cover as much skin as viable, partial suits that don't cover all skin should be worn with fairly concealing clothing, UncleKage will
murderban you if you turn into a PR debacle), but note that this is the fandom. Normies who run into the issue don't just come up with a different answer; normies come up with different answers from each other.And I don't think we have enough culture-wide communication to really build or even discuss normie-wide norms, anymore.
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