-My name is Asa.
I am six years old,
and I do drag.
[ Cheering ]
-Asa is a baby drag queen.
He performs at drag shows
as Lulu Lovely Twirls.
-Lulu Lovely Twirls.
-Lulu Lovely Twirls!
-He started doing this four, five, now six years old.
He is by far the youngest performer we've seen.
-There's even adult performers
that sometimes he can outperform.
-I wouldn't be surprised if this is the next RuPaul.
At first I was terrified.
You never really know what people's reactions are gonna be.
-Well, I think there's a few people
who don't like what we believe, can sometimes be violent.
People want to cause harm to our family, like legit harm.
-We're getting death threats. -Horrible things being said.
-That there was a child stripping.
-And dancing... -Provocatively.
Calling us groomers, pedophiles.
-Child Protective Services was called on us.
-And then the anti-drag bill.
-This is an activity that is exploiting children.
-We had a child that would be directly affected by this law.
Asa whispered in my ear, "Can I testify?"
I still wasn't sure where I was at
with him performing drag at that point.
I said, "Are you sure you want to speak?"
-It's like he was born to do this.
-Lulu! Lulu! Lulu!
♪♪
-Yeah.
A tour of my room.
I made this at somebody's birthday party.
It's a Popsicle. He's saying my name.
11.
And it looks like she has makeup on.
Here's my Barbie house.
Here's Townsville.
"Powerpuff Girls."
The mayor's tower, which has the pride flag.
My dad.
-I would consider our family to be a traditional family.
-Can we go "traditional"? -"Traditional" family.
-I look bad with that coat.
-Do you remember that picture?
-Was it when I became the drag queen?
-They all do different sports.
They all have their activities that they do.
But we have a child that's interested in something
that's maybe not as traditional.
-Asa refers to himself as a drag queen.
He does it very proudly.
He performs at drag shows as Lulu Lovely Twirls.
He puts together and produces his own numbers for drag shows.
-What do you like about drag?
-Getting to meet the drag queens and performing.
Dancing, dancing, dancing.
-Do you want to practice? -Yes.
-So, Asa, this is gonna be the front.
-If I walk right here, I'm off the stage, right?
-Pretend this is where people are sitting.
-First, I find a song, and I'm like,
"Oh, I could dance to this."
I'm like, "I'm gonna do this at this part, that at that part,
that at that part."
-I'm in awe constantly with the fact
that he can just maneuver and work the stage on a dime.
♪♪
It's something innate within him.
♪♪
[ Applause ] -Okay.
-I actually like holding splits.
-All right. Good job. You feel good about it?
Anything else you're concerned about that you wanna talk about?
-No. -One of Asa's
favorite pastimes since he was a toddler was dancing.
-He'd watch a lot of KIDZ BOP videos.
And then we noticed that he's trying to do the dances
that they're doing in the music videos.
-I would say the real conversation about drag
started the first time that he went to Pride with us.
-The first time that we took any of our kids to Pride,
Asa was four.
We thought it would be a good way to bring our kids in
and let them see the diversity of the world around us.
The music came on for the main stage.
Asa was like, "What's that music? I want to know."
And grabbed me by the hand,
and there was a drag performance going on.
He just sat there, kind of watching in awe,
and he turned to me and said, "Could I do that?"
I was still kind of new to the concept of the LGBTQ community.
I'd never really been exposed to it.
I'd never been around it.
I kind of grew up where everybody would say,
"Oh, that's gay, that's gay,"
referring to something they didn't like.
For me, it was at that point still pretty uncomfortable
to think about, talk about.
I am all about our family being allies.
But it never occurred to me that we'd be a part
of that community at this point in our lives.
-Following that, for the next year,
Asa was just obsessed with drag.
And so the conversations led to,
would Asa ever want to wear a dress?
The first dress he owned would have been the Barbie nightgown.
He said to me one day, "I am going to go put on my dress
and I am going to sing, and you're going to video me
and put me on Facebook so everybody can give me likes."
And I said, "Okay." [ Chuckles ]
And that's the video that really kind of
spurred this journey then, because I shared that video,
and that's how we got invited to the first brunch.
That just led us to subsequent invitations.
After that first time, he fell in love with it.
There's no turning back.
Now we almost have one performance a month
that Lulu gets to do.
-My drag name is Lulu Lovely Twirls.
When we were in the car, we were trying to think of a name.
I said, "Twirls". Mom said "Lulu".
And then I said, "Lulu Lovely Twirls."
No, they're pretty much the same person.
-Would you consider yourself a boy or a girl
or what right now? -Boy.
-Do you like being a boy all the time
or some of the time? -Some of the time.
-What about when you're Lulu?
What are your pronouns? -She and they.
-Do you want to give them a tour of your closet?
-Yes. This is where all of my dresses go.
Wigs, stuff to get ready.
-His very first ever one was this one when he was like,
"Nope, I want to do it again and drag is gonna be a thing."
That's when I started getting the costumes.
-These are the fish tights and I'm wearing.
-What do we have up here? -My wiggies.
-Yep, all your little wiggies for all your different outfits.
The wigs in general are for adults.
We generally, when we have those, need some help with that.
-If my hair gets in my face, I won't see.
I might step on my dress and fall.
They cut my hair.
-Asa's the absolute youngest that I've ever heard of
or, like, anything like that before.
So, at first I was terrified.
Because we do live in the Midwest.
You never really know what people's reactions are gonna be.
But after working with Asa,
getting to know Asa a little bit better,
Asa was worth fighting for.
-Why is the green strap very longer than this strap?
-Is it so longer for you? -Yes.
-Yeah, thank you for telling me.
You know, they always say never work with drag queens.
[ Laughter ]
-It was a year after their first performance.
I took him to go perform.
It was an amazing performance. [ Cheering ]
-And then just a couple days later...
-I opened up a link and it was a post
from Libs of TikTok of Asa's performance
that they had screengrabbed from somebody else.
Libs of TikTok is conservative.
I just go, "Oh, fuck, Aaron.
I don't know what we're gonna do."
-By the time we had seen it,
it hadn't even been up for 24 hours yet
and it had 500,000 views.
-It eventually went viral.
-Comments on it were just crazy.
There are plenty of people out there
calling us groomers, pedophiles.
-Horrible things being said about us.
They were adding the governor, adding the FBI.
-We were getting death threats.
-Initially we tried to be very secretive
because we knew living where we live
that there could be controversy.
-Let's go check on the chickens. -Yes.
There's two eggs. Chicken eggs.
-We are smack-dab in the middle of the United States
in Omaha, Nebraska.
-It's chicken food, guys.
-Which is a red state.
But being here in Omaha, we are the blue dot.
-[ Chuckles ] This is fun.
Ow! He nipped me.
-We have to warn him that there might be people here
that are saying mean things and just to ignore them.
-Do you ever get nervous about what people might say
when you're dressed as Lulu?
Yeah? Would you ever wanna wear a dress to school?
-No. -No? Why not?
-I just don't want to.
My playhouse.
My stage where I can --
where we do skits and we have drag queen story hour
so we can perform on this.
-We have some neighbors that can easily see over our fence
and that aren't necessarily supportive.
-Drag.
-And so we are concerned about anything nefarious
they might try to do with being able to see into our yard,
our minor child doing something he loves.
We're gonna put a big greenhouse here eventually.
-So they can't see over the fence.
-Yeah. -Start from the playhouse
all the way. -Okay, okay, right there, ready?
-If he was a girl
doing these exact same things,
no one would be saying anything.
But because he's a boy,
people want to cause harm to our family, like legit harm.
-Was that fun? -Fun!
-CPS was called on us. -Child Protective Services.
-Someone called and thought he should be taken away from us.
-Because we were letting him do drag.
-Mm-hmm.
-♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
-Yeah, they came on his birthday, but at the same time,
we were like, you know, "Let them come,"
'cause they're not gonna find anything wrong.
-And that's when I finally got to the point where I'm like,
if this is happening when we try to be covert about it,
what's the point?
I don't care about the threats.
We're gonna work with the police.
We're gonna make it safe, and we're gonna do it anyway
because they can't keep doing this to us.
-We were like, we can't hide this anymore.
We need to be out, and we need to really show support
for the community as a whole
because they've been so supportive of us and our family
trying to give us spaces to perform.
They keep inviting us back
even though their shows keep getting canceled
because we're involved with it.
This past legislative session, LB371 was introduced,
and it is the anti-drag bill.
-Looking to ban youth at drag shows,
which would be like drag queen story hour...
-"Get in the car."
-It was very loosely worded so that it could be anything.
-We had a child that was performing
that would be directly affected by this law, too.
-We decided that we would go ahead
and testify against the bill.
-They introduced the bill.
The Senator required to explain the bill.
-Bring this bill, after seeing a clip of two drag shows
that took place in Nebraska.
-And as he's explaining it,
I hear him reference a video that he saw on Libs of TikTok.
And I look over and I'm like, "That's us."
-Lies about my baby.
-"There was a child at a brewery
that was stripping."
-"Removing clothing and dancing provocatively."
-That is our kid.
And the video just happens to be where he is doing his reveal
and ripping the cape off.
Now we know that we have to speak
because it is directly addressing our family.
On that day, it was just gonna be the two of us speaking.
He did want to come, and he did want to wear his fancy new dress
that he had just gotten.
Jenn got her turn to speak.
-My son has a love
for all things glitter, sparkle, and sass.
They are -- They literally make
his beautiful blue eyes light up.
-I got my turn to speak.
-We allow my youngest son to perform and dance.
Asa turned to me and whispered in my ear,
"Can I sit in the chair and speak, too?"
And I said, "Yes, you can. We can do it.
But you need to be 100% sure." He's in a room full of people
and talking to people that he's never met before.
And he said, "Yeah, I do want to speak,
but can you sit next to me?"
And I said, "That's not a problem.
I'm sure they will allow that."
I have no idea what he's gonna say.
I don't even know if he knew
what he was gonna say at that point.
I knew that I had to give him some questions.
I said, "How does drag make you feel?"
He went to that mic and he said...
When he said "powerful" to me, that was like, "Ooh."
The weight of that word just hit me so hard
'cause I still wasn't sure where I was at
with performing drag at that point.
Is it worth the fear that comes along with it?
And he says, "powerful".
And I'm like, "Dude, I'm here with you all the way now.
I am here with you and we are going to fight
tooth and nail to let you do this,
because I want you to always feel powerful.
That should not be taken away from you."
-Asa is having the opportunity
to perform Omaha's Heartland Pride.
Asa's the only youth performing.
-This is the CHI Health Center.
It's a big arena. 18,000 seats.
Ready? Let's go peek at the stage.
-I think there's a few misconceptions that happen
with Asa doing drag.
I think that one of the biggest ones
is that he's forced to do this.
-Whoa. Look, there's even seats all the way up top.
I know.
-Really, it's just a passion of his.
And it's the same thing we would do
with any passion any of our children have.
-All right, shall we go back
to the dressing room and get your face on?
When all the big stars come and do their concerts
here in Omaha, this is the stage they perform on.
And we weren't planning on this at all.
This was like a spur-of-the-moment thing today.
They said, "There's a spot open. Do you guys want it?"
And we were like, "yes," and jumped right over it.
-So we're lucky. -We are lucky.
This is by far the biggest venue that Lulu's ever performed in.
How do you feel right now? You're about to go out
on the biggest stage you've ever been on.
Are you falling asleep?
We are just stunned by these kind of moments
and he doesn't seem to be fazed.
Lulu is just like, "I'm gonna go have fun."
-It's like he was born to do this.
[ Chuckling ] He's snoring.
Asa?
Tickle, tickle, tickle. Go, go, go, go, go.
-Oh! -Oh. [ Chuckles ]
-It's almost time.
-The other misconception is that it is
something nefarious and dirty.
It really is no different
than anything that happens at a dance recital.
-Daddy, this is green apple.
-Green apple flavored? -Mm-hmm.
-I think that people have a hard time understanding drag
if they've never been around it.
-You wanna shake it and see if it moves it?
-All right, shake it. There is indecent drag,
but it doesn't happen in front of children.
-It's not like, "Surprise!
There's kids in the front row now."
I think you're next. So let's go.
This kid's just having fun.
-It's genuine. -It's pure joy.
-Scream and shout and let it all out for Lulu Lovely Twirls!
[ Cheers and applause ]
-And does what he wants to do, which is to twirl,
just to have fun and create his art.
Is he the best performer out there?
No, he's he's still learning. He's still working.
He's gonna evolve. -He's a kid.
We get told a lot from performers
and people in the community that people do kind of see Lulu
as hope of what's to come for the future in the community.
-The children are our future!
-If he would continue down this path in his life,
there's always gonna be hate and hurt,
whether it started now or later.
What we're doing now is teaching him to stand in his own light
and know that he's loved and supported unconditionally,
and hope that that gives him the foundation
to overcome the hate.
People will ask us, "What if at some point he's done
and over with all this?"
People have been like, "And then what?"
Hello, Princess.
"You've set him up to have this haunt him
for the rest of his life."
We've talked about it, and at the end of the day,
we've raised a good ally and he's done nothing wrong.
How would you feel if we told you
that you couldn't be Lulu anymore?
-Mad.
Well, sad and mad
because I really like drag and they don't want to stop.
-It's just about living in the moment
and what's exciting for right now.
And I think wherever that takes us is where we go.