
By Helen Karakoudas
Special to the Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — On weekdays, Stephen Ramberg is an administrative assistant for the Disability Support Services office at Rock Valley College, helping students with special needs prepare for the everyday challenges of college life.
On weekends, Ramberg transforms into the curvaceous and confident Auntie Heroine, a headliner at The Office Niteclub and Show Lounge, 513 E. State St. In this role and at this moment in American history, Ramberg supports another vulnerable community: drag queens.
“Hate-filled, bigoted people pour it on us. The loud hate is horrific. But there’s some positivity. Yay for the drag queens fighting back. And yay for the judge in Tennessee,” said Ramberg, a Rockford resident who performs as Auntie Heroine here and at clubs in Chicago and its suburbs, central Illinois and southern Wisconsin.
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As efforts to restrict or prohibit drag performances have spread in some parts of the country, including a felony ban recently passed in Tennessee which a federal judge ruled unconstitutional, Ramberg and other local drag performers say they have safe spaces and supportive audiences in Rockford.
In Rockford, seeing all-ages drag performances in June once meant traveling 85 to 95 miles to Chicago or Milwaukee. But now Pride Month here has opened and closed with such events, and the city has earned perfect marks year-round for inclusivity.

Opponents of drag performances say they’re too sexual in nature for children to be exposed to, or that they harm children by inspiring them to veer from gender norms. Bills against drag performances are advancing and passing in Republican-led state houses.
“A slew of anti-drag bills have been introduced since becoming the most recent tool for extremist legislators to attack our community for political gain,” the Humans Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights group, says on its website. “These state bills are encouraging people to threaten, attack and discriminate against drag artists and their patrons and, ultimately, spread dangerous misinformation and misconceptions about the entire LGBTQ+ community.”
‘State of emergency’
This month, the Human Rights Campaign declared an official state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people for the first time.
“More than 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been signed into law this year alone, more than doubling last year’s number, which was previously the worst year on record,” the advocacy group said in a news release on June 6.
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Illinois is among 20 states, plus the District of Columbia, that the Human Rights Campaign marks safe for LGBTQ+ residents and travelers.
Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2-to-1 in both houses of the Illinois General Assembly. No anti-drag nor any anti- LGBTQ+ bills are pending in Springfield.
“I’m grateful that we’re on a blue island in a red sea,” Ramberg said Sunday after the Pride Drag Brunch at The Office.
The event, a quarterly offering at The Office, which is open to children only if accompanied by a parent, featured four other drag performers, each with a different background and all with an LGBTQ+ identity.
Ramberg, whose pronouns are they/them, is transgender nonbinary.
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Adenah Killz, the drag queen who opened the show, is a gay man, former combat medic in the U.S. Army, and a full-time tech support specialist for a medical software company that powers urgent-care centers.
Ja’Nyiah Moné Diamond-Banx, the show’s director and current Miss Office Niteclub, is a transgender woman who works full-time as an activity director for a nursing and rehabilitation facility.

KhrisStyle D. Infiniti-Ross, a drag king and the current Mr. Office Niteclub, is a bisexual man who works full-time as a data analyst for a human resources technology company.
Dream D. Ross, a surprise addition to the show’s lineup, is a pansexual man who performs as a drag queen full-time.
Safe and accepted at The Office
All the drag artists who performed at the brunch call Rockford home. All say they feel safe and accepted at The Office, where tables for the brunch were packed and many people in attendance were wearing rainbow shirts and accessories. Audience members cheered and tipped at various hair flicks, shimmies, cartwheels and splits.
The event also draws people to Rockford from around the region, including Fisher Klarer, who came to the Drag Brunch from Monroe, Wisconsin.

Rockford is one of three cities in Illinois, including Chicago and Champaign, to score 100/100 in the Human Rights Campaign’s most recent Municipal Equality Index, a benchmark for how inclusive a city’s laws, policies and services are of LGBTQ+ people who live and work there. A participant since 2018, Rockford’s score has steadily gone up. Factors leading to higher marks include the city’s recognition since 2019 of June as Pride Month and the creation in April 2022 of LGBTQIA+ liaisons for both the city and the Rockford Police Department.
Since 2019, the first Saturday of June has meant a Pride Alley Party hosted by The Office. Entertainment for the event includes bands, a drag show and drag queen bingo.
“To celebrate Pride, local folks used to travel to the big cities because there wasn’t anything happening at all in Rockford. We wanted to give our patrons a reason to stay and celebrate locally with just a handful of food trucks and vendors in the alley,” said Brian Finn, a co-owner of The Office. “But the community responded positively and showed up en masse. It just kept growing from there.”
Finn estimated that more than 1,500 people attended this year’s Pride Alley Party.
The event is free and open to all ages. Auntie Heroine hosted this year.
“Our public drag shows are designed to be kid and family friendly. Every year, entire families come. We’ve had no issues since the start,” Finn said. “It helps that the city of Rockford is open and supportive of it.”
Finding acceptance in Rockford
In addition to Auntie Heroine, speakers at the 2023 Pride Alley Party included Rockford Mayor Tom McNamara and Ja’Nyiah Moné Diamond-Banx.
“Growing up here, I’d always heard about drag as the punchline to movies and daytime TV. I don’t think I really started to pay attention to drag until I was in college,” said Ramberg, who went to Illinois State University and was on the planning committee for a conference for LGBTQ+ students.
“Our entertainment for the event was going to be the famous drag queen Bianca Del Rio, who had just won ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race‘. I was going to be working directly with her, but I had no idea who she was at the time. So, I decided to watch ‘Drag Race’ and it really spoke to me,” Ramberg said, referring to life eight years ago. “Around the same time that I started doing drag, I also came out as nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns. I didn’t know a single person that understood or identified with that in Rockford.”
“It was a very lonely and dark time for me,” Ramberg said, noting frequent suicidal thoughts then and the decision to move to Chicago to be around likeminded people. “After living there for four years, I came back to Rockford. To my excitement and surprise, everywhere I turned I met people that were nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and transgender. It is so much better here than it was even a few years ago. You will always come across ignorant individuals wherever you go, but Rockford is a much more accepting place than it was.”
Korii Jade Kimble, who performs as Ja’Nyiah Moné Diamond-Banx, also grew up in Rockford. Black and an openly trans woman, Kimble finds acceptance locally, but through a narrower lens.
“We don’t have a lot of avenues for trans people and drag queens here. As far as going out and being accepted and feeling comfortable, The Office is the only place. It’s our one safe space in Rockford,” she said. For Kimble, it’s a particular point of pride that Ja’Nyiah Moné Diamond-Banx was crowned Miss Office Niteclub 2023. A pageant that’s an April tradition at The Office, Ja’Nyiah Moné Diamond-Banx is the first trans person to wear the impressive crown.

She succeeds Miss Office Niteclub 2022, Adenah Killz, a drag queen who also finds acceptance in the Rockford area, but like Ja’Nyiah Moné Diamond-Banx, is no stranger to side-eye.
Karl Erickson performs as Adenah Killz. Born and raised in the DeKalb County village of Kirkland, Erickson joined the U.S. Army at age 17. He was deployed to Afghanistan as a 19-year-old, where for another two years, he served as a combat medic. Telling people, offstage, that he’s a military veteran gets a range of reactions.
“Sometimes, a lot of times, I mention it and I get a second glance. Or there’s a comment like, ‘There’s no way you did that!” Erickson said, shaking his head.
The sting of anti-drag rhetoric
Erickson shook his head— and had no words —that on the eve of Pride Month this year, the Pentagon canceled a drag show at a military base. The show, scheduled for June 1 to usher in Pride Month at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, had been previously approved by base commanders and legal officers and, per several news reports, was to be privately funded.
In the announcement, a Pentagon spokesperson explained the crackdown: “As Secretary Austin has said, the DoD will not host drag events at U.S. military installations or facilities. Hosting these types of events in federally funded facilities is inconsistent with regulations regarding the use of DoD resources.”
Lorenzo Christopher, the drag king who performs as KhrisStyle D. Infiniti-Ross, takes offense to the suggestion that drag performers abuse or indoctrinate children.
“I’m a licensed foster parent. For two years, I fostered three children,” Christopher said, referring to how he learned to support a former partner who was an adoptee and felt strongly about providing safe havens for children in crisis. “I wouldn’t harm children.”
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Roscoe Presswood, a 23-year-old originally from Milwaukee, started performing drag full- time a year and a half ago as Dream D. Ross.
“The haters don’t bother me,” Presswood said. “I just want to remind them to stay quiet, because if you say you hate drag and then get to a show and find you out like it, you’ve got a whole lot of walking back to do.”

Bound soon for a national drag queen pageant in Dallas, Presswood says he’s not concerned about traveling to Texas where anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including an anti-drag bill, are pending in the state legislature.
“I’m just focusing on how I can present at the pageant. Drag has opened so many doors for me. Even when I’m down, drag reminds me I’m creative. I won’t let creativity go to waste,” Presswood said.
Protests at library drag events
Since early 2022, there have been 161 protests and threats against drag performers across the United States, according to GLAAD, a national advocacy group for LGBTQ+ people.
While drag queens at libraries have been a hot topic in cities across the U.S. for several years, Rockford was among the cities that made national news. The protest was in June 2019 for a Drag Queen Story Hour at the East Branch of the Rockford Public Library. More than 100 protesters gathered outside during the reading by a Madison, Wisconsin, drag queen who is transgender. The event didn’t spiral to violence, but library staff haven’t scheduled another such event since then.
“We typically bring different performers/speakers each year to celebrate our entire community,” Anne O’Keefe, Rockford Public Library’s assistant director for community engagement, said about the library’s annual Pride celebrations. This year, the library, in collaboration with The Liam Foundation, is sponsoring a movie series for teens at the Nordlof Center. The next two movies in the series are on Thursday and June 29.
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Rockford, however, has since had a drag queen story time — at a church, and with a local drag queen. On October 5, 2022, The Unitarian Universalist Church, 4848 Turner St., hosted Anchantris Diamond, the drag persona of a 25-year-old Auburn High School graduate named Malachai Nichols, another regular performer at The Office.
According to the Rev. Dr. Matthew Johnson, senior minister at The Unitarian Universalist Church, there were no complaints nor protests before or during the drag queen story time. The event didn’t make local news coverage. But a post about it got 58 likes and 36 loves on the church’s Facebook page.
“Everyone had a wonderful time. From toddlers to teenagers and adults too,” Johnson said, estimating the turnout at 30. “We chose stories that celebrated the beautiful diversity of ways to dress, love, and be in the world. Freedom and diversity are gifts to enjoy. And our Drag Queen did a great job reading them and interacting with the kids.”

Miki Lewers, a Rockford mother who brought her 4- and 5-year-old children, echoes the review.
“It was a wonderful experience. There is so much research about the benefits of reading to your kids that this was an easy decision to make. The stories that were read were about inclusivity, self-acceptance, and the true meaning of love. My kids got to experience the joy that stories bring in the presence of someone sharing their art of drag performance with them,” Lewers said.
What would she tell lawmakers pushing to ban drag performances in the presence of children?
“Stop! The art of drag performance is innocuous. Drag story times are a simple, positive way to teach acceptance. I would encourage families to go to a drag story time and see for themselves what it is really about,” said Lewers, who also takes her children to the Annual Pride .1K Run, where drag performers are present before, during and after. “The .1K is fun for my kids. They talk about the rainbow race year-round.”
Hope from a Rockford drag queen of the past

For at least six decades, drag has been performed in Rockford at adult-only events at The Office. But briefly in 2017, two years before the all-ages Pride Alley Party and five years before the .1K fun run, there was an all-ages play at a local church — an event people still talk about because of the touching story.
The play, called “Blunderland,” was the story of the late Bill Carlson, who grew up in the Boone County town of Garden Prairie in the 1930s and 1940s, got bullied at Belvidere High School for being gay, arrived in Rockford after serving in the U.S. Army, got a job at OSF Healthcare, and struggled to find acceptance at any church. Casting as Glinda, the good witch, in a theater troupe production of “The Wizard of Oz,” got him interested in drag. In the 1960s and 1970s, he entertained at The Office as Miss Seaway Rose.
After a heart attack, when his doctor told him he couldn’t do drag anymore because it would be too exhausting, Carlson became ordained as an Episcopal Church minister. He served at St. Chad’s Episcopal Church, which had been at 6245 N Second St. in Loves Park. The site is now a car wash. There, one of his parishioners was Rufus Cadigan, a retired Rockford University theater professor and playwright.

As Carlson’s health was declining, he asked Cadigan to turn his story into a play. The resulting production was a one-person, audience-participation comedy, which in March 2017 had a more than weeklong run at Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Rockford.
Carlson had died half a decade before, in 2012. But his experiences and observations, especially during the AIDS era, lived on in Rockford and beyond. Cadigan also produced the show in Columbus, Ohio, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
“This woman came to the show one of the days, and then on one of the evenings, she came with her son,” Cadigan recalled. “He was going to be having gender surgery. She wanted to bring him there, so he would know this kind of past history—and the warmth of that.”
Community support
The Office has not in recent years – nor ever in its decades-long history as a gay bar – had to cancel a drag event because of a threat of violence, according to Finn, one of four business partners who bought The Office in 2018.
To the best of Finn’s knowledge, the business that started out as The Office Tavern in the 1940s has been a gay bar since the 1960s.
“Drag has remained a staple offering at the bar. The public has not wavered in their support of drag and the drag shows. In fact, we have offered more of it,” Finn said.

The Rockford area’s only other LGBTQ+ entertainment venue, True Colors Bar and Grill in Loves Park, is now in its eighth month of being open at 7784 Forest Hills Road after having been at 211 Elm St. in downtown Rockford for a little more than a year. True Colors’ first drag show in Loves Park was June 2.
As extensive renovations continue to the space that had housed Gia’s Live Music Club, more drag shows are planned, including one on Thursday.
“In this market, drag shows are well accepted. For straight people, it’s entertainment. For drag people, it’s community support,” said John Slater, a co-owner of True Colors.
Both Finn and Slater acknowledge there’s a segment of the local population that’s still vehemently against drag. Each says the pushback is mostly online and only from a few people.
‘The scariest thing’
Ramberg’s concern is what’s happening beyond the Rockford region.
“November 2016 opened the door for people to be out and loud about their bigotry and their hate,” Ramberg said, referring to the election of Donald J. Trump as president with longtime LGBTQ+ opponent Mike Pence as his vice president. Two hours after the 45th president’s inauguration, the LGBTQ+ section of the White House website was taken down, as was the Advancing LGBTQ Workplace Rights page from the Department of Labor website.
“The loud hate is horrific. But the scariest thing is the silence: People dying when their family doesn’t support them, their friends don’t support them, their community doesn’t support them, and now their legislators and their country doesn’t support them,” Ramberg said.
One Rockfordian dedicated to countering such silence is Phyllis Gallisath, co-founder of the Rockford chapter of PFLAG, a national organization whose acronym once stood for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays and has grown to include all LGBTQ+ people.
“Much like the ways history has been told to benefit certain groups and oppress others, there’s a lot of misunderstanding and wrong information in our society overall when it comes to sex and gender. Until we can have honest conversations and learning opportunities around sex and gender, there will continue to be harmful misinformation,” Gallisath said.
Her advocacy began in 2015 after her late son, Liam Burdick, came out as transgender. It’s continued after her son’s death in 2018. Gallisath is also a co-founder of The Liam Foundation, a nonprofit providing LGBTQIA+ educational resources to schools, businesses and other community organizations. She is credited with the City of Rockford’s official proclamation in 2019 of June as Pride Month.
Ramberg is cheering on drag queens in Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky and other states who are fighting back to save their art. Auntie Heroine’s own drag activism surfaces in more than the neon-pink AHN microphone she held during their opening number at the brunch.
Their very name challenges the culture war.
“Auntie Heroine is a play on ‘Anti-Hero’ in that a feminine-presenting individual in our country, no matter how heroic their actions may be, will always face opposition from our society,” Ramberg said. “The Anti-Heroine is a symbol of courage and hope to any femme-presenting or queer-bodied person in America.”
This article is by freelance journalist Helen Karakoudas. Email feedback to news@rockrivercurrent.com.