A high school teacher turned ‘orgasmic drag king’ is on a local media tour, trying to drum up sympathy for his poor life choices – and there is no shortage of so-called news outlets who are eager to give him a platform.
Last month, unDivided featured a segment on a Peninsula High School teacher named Kelsey Wayne. Several parents alerted us after their children discovered that Wayne was moonlighting as a drag king with quite the stage name: Jack King Goff.
For those who are pure of heart – that’s a play on jacking off. Get it? Jack King Goff.
Moving on.
As I stated several times during the segment, I don’t have a problem with public school teachers who want to do drag shows in their spare time. I’ve been to many a drag show. Some are tame – focusing more on singing or dancing than anything outwardly vulgar. I don’t see much of a difference between those drag performers and a traditional stage performer. Certainly, society wouldn’t look down on a teacher who appeared in theatrical productions. Drag isn’t much different.
Suffice it to say, we wouldn’t dedicate a segment of our show to exposing a teacher just for doing drag. That would be a full-time job in Seattle.
Kelsey Wayne is different for two reasons.
First, the vulgar nature of his public-facing persona and social media posts.
Second, the fact that Wayne was unable – or uninterested – in taking reasonable steps to make sure the vulgar nature of his drag life stayed private.
On social media accounts that have since been made private, Wayne referred to himself as the “Orgasmic Drag King Jack King Goff” with a little squirting emoji.
Again, for the pure of heart, that would represent the “orgasmic” part.
When students found out about the persona, rumor spread quickly – as it often does in a high school setting. After it got to us, Wayne told multiple local news outlets that he felt forced to quit his teaching job because of the negative attention and what he characterized as “bullying.”
Rather than accept any responsibility for having such poor judgment, Wayne played the victim and reached out to local news outlets for help.
The Stranger, The Tacoma News Tribune, Real Change News, and KIRO 7 News have all reached out to unDivided in recent days asking us to explain ourselves.
What is there to explain?
In each case, the outlets were clearly intent on painting Wayne as the victim of a right-wing, anti-LGBTQ+ smear campaign – and, in the process, letting Wayne completely off the hook for his personal decision making.
Shockingly, The Stranger had what I thought was the least terrible coverage of the ordeal. In part because they didn’t skirt around the key reason we did a segment on Wayne in the first place: the sexual nature of his profiles.
Still, The Stranger excused it as a non-issue, writing “a masturbation pun is not exactly out of orbit for teenagers.”
Yeah ... for teenagers. Not their teacher.
Undermining their own efforts to blame me for Wayne's unemployment, The Stranger went on to admit that even before our coverage, blowback against Wayne was so bad that he hadn’t returned to school in several days.
Note: The Stranger uses Wayne’s preferred pronouns of they/them.
…Wayne learned the Instagram account @phs_crazy, an anonymous, student-run page that bullied queer and minority students at Peninsula High School about their looks and 'cringe' behavior, had discovered that on nights and weekends Wayne performed as the drag king, Jack King Goff.
The district didn’t fire Wayne. They took leave voluntarily after their union advised them to stay home for safety reasons, and they stayed home when the commotion didn’t stop. After a few days passed, when it still seemed plausible they might return to work, conservative commentator Brandi Kruse obliterated any chance of that with a segment on her show, [un]Divided with Brandi Kruse.
'[The district was] already having a hard time with the community because of the initial Instagram posts, and then the Brandi thing threw kerosene on the fire,' they said. 'I literally can’t do my job because the kids are only going to think about one thing; then they’re not going to be able to focus … And therefore, I’m no longer going to be a competent employee. I hate to say that.'
So, whose fault is that?
Wayne has a public job, where he is paid with taxpayer funds to educate other people’s children. Along with that comes a responsibility to conduct yourself accordingly – both in and out of the classroom.
This is a classic case of someone being mad they got caught. By his own admission, Wayne knew the persona would be a problem if it were uncovered. Yet he chose to maintain it anyway – only making his accounts private once they were discovered.
While The Stranger’s assessment took great pains to paint Wayne as an innocent, wholesome teacher targeted by hate – the real troublesome coverage of Wayne’s self-inflicted ordeal came from the Tacoma News Tribune and KIRO 7 News.
In a lengthy article, the TNT failed to make clear that my key criticism of Wayne was the sexual nature of his posts (only underscoring that point after I sent the author an email). A casual reader would have come away from the article believing I simply hate drag performers and targeted Wayne for that reason.
An English teacher resigned from their teaching job last week through a mutual agreement with the Peninsula School District, after online trolls began attacking their after-hours profession as a drag king on social media and the information was amplified by a local conservative commentator.
But much like The Stranger, TNT was seemingly oblivious to the fact that Wayne’s own statements only serve to prove the point of my criticism.
If students knew they were a drag king, that could be a distraction in the classroom and make it difficult to teach, according to Wayne.
You think?
Wayne started getting a flood of notifications beginning Sept. 6 and into the weekend of the Gig Harbor High vs. Peninsula High Fish Bowl football game, Sept. 7-8. 'All these people are following me and commenting on posts,' Wayne said.
'And I’m like, ‘What’s going on? It’s not like I’ve made a reel or something and it’s gone viral, something’s happened.’ And then I realized it’s a bunch of my former and current students.'
They immediately set the account to private and began blocking and deleting followers that they could tell were their students, former or current. By then, it was too late. Images from their drag king Instagram account spread to Facebook and started getting comments by parents and leaders in the community — some in support of Wayne, others not, according to Wayne.
Again, whose fault is that? It’s easy to blame the scary “conservative commentator.” But did the TNT, which is supposed to be straight-forward news site, ever think to press Wayne on whether he had some responsibility for the series of events?
Of course not.
In fact, the TNT went to extraordinary lengths to explain away what I saw as Wayne’s most problematic post: a picture of him dressed in drag, reading “Lock up your daughters. Jack Goff is here.”
As I pointed out on the show, can you imagine if a straight male teacher called himself “Jack Goff” and posted things like “lock up your daughters"? If I were a parent, I’d have half a mind to call the police.
But according to the TNT, anyone bothered by that post missed an obvious and totally not obscure explanation.
Kruse didn’t mention that Wayne had been dressed up as a hair metal (a subgenre of heavy metal) musician at the time and the line, 'Lock up your daughters,' was a reference to the 1981 song of the same name by the English rock band, Slade. It also appears in the song lyrics to a 1976 song by AC/DC called 'T.N.T.' It’s an allusion to a reoccurring trope in heavy metal and fit the version of the early 'Jack Goff' character Wayne was performing at the time, playing off of stereotypes of rock stars, they said.
Ah yes, because any rational parent would have seen that post and thought, "oh, he must be referring to that 1981 song by English rock band Slade! Nothing to see here folks!”
Good god, we’re doomed.
As for KIRO 7’s story, which aired Monday afternoon, it was about as vapid and shallow as one would expect from a local TV news story.
KIRO 7 TV Reporter Deborah Horne reached out to me for comment just two hours before her story was scheduled to air. She seemed more interested in getting permission to use my videos than she did asking for my side of the story.
Perhaps not shockingly, KIRO 7 glossed over the sexual nature of Wayne’s persona – and didn’t even tell viewers his drag name in broadcast or print, leaving out the most critical part of the story. It sure says something that the name was too inappropriate for TV, yet apparently fine for a high school teacher's public profile.
Again, it was painted as nothing more than an attack on a schoolteacher for the crime of doing drag.
The English teacher quit their job at Peninsula High School on September 30th. And it happened after a local commentator posted videos revealing the teacher’s side job as a drag performer.
The teacher says they gave up their profession because of this.
Not only is that a complete misrepresentation, but it only furthers divisions – leading viewers to believe that conservatives are ganging up on LGBTQ+ teachers for no good reason.
Most bizarrely, Horne refused to identify me by name in her story – despite my segment being the entire basis for it. She referred to me only as a “local online conservative commentator.” Weirdly, she included a quote I gave her on the record, but didn’t attribute it to me in her print story. That’s a first in all my years in the media.
KIRO 7 heard back from the commentator Wayne accuses of costing them their job. The commentator says no one forced them to quit.
How weird is that?
The more I read, the more confident I am that we did the right thing in exposing Wayne's poor judgment. He is hardly an outlier in the state's public school system, which seems to have increasingly low standards for the conduct of teachers (See: Operation Indoctrination).
Any who, the lesson is this: If you’re a public teacher and lose your job for doing something dumb, go spin your sob story to the local media – you’ll find a handful of willing, and completely uncritical, supporters. But if you want them to take the bait, just make sure you blame a conservative for your mistreatment. It'll work every time.
