A Controversy Brews in Philadelphia Surrounding Drag Musical Gay Mis
Did a "technical glitch" really cause the end of ticket sales to the show? Or was it transphobia? Drag queen Eric Jaffe wants answers.
Philadelphia drag queen Eric Jaffe (center) and other cast members of Gay Mis. The drag musical parody of Les Mis is running at FringeArts and is amid some controversy. (photo by Joe Mac Creative)
When Philadelphia drag queen Eric Jaffe put tickets for Gay Mis up for sale on Eventbrite on January 15th, she didn’t think much of it. Jaffe has been selling tickets to Philadelphia drag events via the California-based ticketing app and site for years without any issues. But this time around, after she started selling tickets for the queer parody of Les Mis that opened at FringeArts last week, things didn’t play out so smoothly.
Jaffe, who directs Gay Mis and features prominently in the cast, says that her company began selling tickets to Gay Mis just fine. Then, early this month, she decided to buy an Eventbrite ad to boost ticket sales. Jaffe says she’s had excellent results using Eventbrite ads in the past.
But within 24 hours of placing the ad, an ad that naturally increased the number of eyeballs on the event, sales for Gay Mis came to a crashing halt.
Philly Mag has reviewed correspondence between Jaffe’s company and Eventbrite’s customer service department, indicating that Eventbrite stopped ticket sales on Gay Mis because the event page was, for some unspecified reason, red-flagged by Eventbrite’s Trust & Safety Department.
Not only did Eventbrite suspend sales for Gay Mis; Jaffe says Eventbrite suspended her entire account, leaving nearly $10,000 of Gay Mis ticket revenue in limbo.
And the associated copy read as follows:
Join us for the remount of Gay Mis! You’ll laugh, cry, scream YAAAS, and sissy that walk to the barricade. Do YOU hear the people sing?
If you like Les Mis, then you’ll LOVE Gay Mis! Following the success of Thweeney Todd: The Flaming Barber of Fleek Street and The Lizard of oz, Jaffe St. Queer returns [to] see just how queer musical theatre can get. Come see everyone’s favorite farting fugitive, Parmesan, as he evades capture from arch-nemesis, Jabear. Joining in their adventures are all the classic characters you’ve come to know; desperate Fontina, lonely Epanini, and those beautiful young lovers, Marius and Baguette.
Action! Romance! Ham! It’s all waiting for you at Gay Mis!
Jaffe advertised the show for ages 18 and up.
Eventbrite didn’t initially respond to my requests for comment. And the company didn’t explain the suspension to Jaffe. But Jaffe suspects — and I suspect she is right — that someone out there (or more than one person) not particularly fond of drag queens or queer people and with too much time on their hands clicked on the little link that’s at the bottom of each Eventbrite listing: “Report This Event.” Users of the site can report any event for a variety of concerns, including “sexually explicit content,” “hateful content,” “violence or extremism,” “harmful content,” or “regulated content or activities,” some of those phrases obviously open to quite a bit of interpretation.
“Gay Mis is an outwardly very queer-looking event,” says Jaffe. “And this is corporate repression of being queer, based on some morality thing. There is nothing at all ‘inappropriate’ in our show description.”
Initially, the customer service department at Eventbrite was responsive to Jaffe and her team, albeit slowly, and agents told Jaffe that an internal committee would review the matter. But the days dragged on with no results, and no indication of when or if Jaffe’s company would receive payment for tickets sold. Eventually, Jaffe switched ticket sales over to Pittsburgh-based ticketing company TicketLeap.
This week, Jaffe posted a video on her Instagram page explaining the debacle. Fans and friends began tagging Eventbrite on the post. And then shortly after Philly Mag reached out to Eventbrite’s public relations department on Tuesday, Jaffe’s account was suddenly (and without explanation) removed from suspension and the ticket revenue unfrozen. And someone from Eventbrite who posted in Jaffe’s thread on Instagram suddenly came up with an explanation for the problem: a “technical glitch.”
Then on Wednesday afternoon, an Eventbrite spokesperson sent me the following statement:
Eventbrite’s safety measures protect millions of people who use Eventbrite to host and attend events, but sometimes we don’t get it right – like with these events that shouldn’t have been taken down… [W]e should have moved faster to fix this, and we are sorry.
We’re looking into exactly what went wrong here to prevent it from happening again. The LGBTQ+ community is important to us, with thousands of LGBTQ+ events thriving on Eventbrite.
Jaffe is by no means satisfied and is demanding further information from Eventbrite, calling their “technical glitch” explanation “total bullshit.” Then there’s the issue of the money the company spent on an ad that was quickly suspended. And then there’s the revenue Gay Mis missed out on, since the normally lucrative ad wasn’t running. Jaffe is also consulting with a discrimination attorney about the matter and staying as far away from Eventbrite as possible.
“We no longer trust Eventbrite and will not be selling any further tickets on their website,” Gay Mis producer Amanda Sheffern told me in an email.
Meanwhile, I hear that Gay Mis is an absolute hoot. It’s running through March 1st. And you can get tickets here.
