THE South Dakota city of Watertown is conservative. Heads turned when former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants Shangela, Eureka, and Bob the Drag Queen arrived in Mount Rushmore’s state last year to tape their HBO Max show We’re Here. The episode featured the queens getting to know a group of LGBTQ+ Watertown residents and their allies and culminated in a well-attended (and partially protested) drag show. Fred Deutsch, a Republican state representative from Watertown, called the drag performance “highly sexualized” and “not to be shown to our children,” echoing the sentiment of some who picketed the event. But it wasn’t drag or any other manifestation of LGBTQ+ culture that drove a nonbinary teen to suicide there in 2019. It was loneliness. Shortly after, to commemorate the teen’s life, Amy Rambow and her 14-year-old transgender son, Alex, founded Watertown Love, an LGBTQ+ support group that held the town’s first Pride festival and was featured on We’re Here.
Alex Rambow, now a 17-year-old high school senior, and his town are in the news again. Earlier this year, a teacher at Rambow’s school wrote an anti-trans-letter to a group of 14- and 15-year-olds.
“When you asked me to call your friends by masculine names, and I started trying to do that, I was wrong. It was a lie,” the teacher
