The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a challenge to Tennessee’s Adult Entertainment Act (AEA), which Republicans passed in 2023 to restrict drag performance in the state.

In a brief, unsigned order, the justices denied a Tennessee theater company’s request to intervene in its challenge to the law.

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The lawmaker stoked outrage from the Proud Boys and Westboro Baptist Church, claiming he was “APPALLED at the possibility of a drag queen show.”

In July, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the theater company lacked standing to challenge it.

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Whether or not the law chilled free speech with its effective ban on drag was not addressed in either action. With the high court’s refusal, the law remains in effect.

The AEA was signed into law in March 2023 by Republican Gov. Bill Lee (R), making Tennessee the first state in the nation to ban drag performances. Its passage galvanized the drag community and ignited a wave of protests by celebrity allies.

The measure defined “adult cabaret entertainment” as “adult-oriented performances that are harmful to minors” and feature topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, “male or female impersonators,” and similar entertainers.

Performances “harmful to minors” are defined as both lacking “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific values” and appealing “to the prurient, shameful or morbid interests.” 

The law was challenged soon after it took effect in 2023, and a federal judge overturned it. U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker said the law violated the separation-of-powers principle and free speech protections granted by the First Amendment, ruling it unconstitutional.

Parker wrote that while the state has an interest in protecting minors, drag was the target.

The Republican-dominated legislature’s “predominant concerns involved the suppression of unpopular views of those who wish to impersonate a gender that is different from the one with which they were born,” he wrote.

He called the law overbroad and said it could apply to almost any public space while noting the state’s lawyers altered language in the bill circumscribing entertainment deemed “harmful to minors” to entertainment damaging to “a reasonable 17-year-old” in a bid to salvage it.

Last July, the appeals court determined that the theater company, Friends of George’s, failed to meet its burden that the ban would put the group in danger of prosecution and sent the case back to the lower court with orders to dismiss it.

A decision on whether or not the law is constitutional will have to wait for a prosecution brought by the state against a group or individual that authorities claim has violated it.

The law’s passage can be traced back to complaints about an annual Pride parade in Jackson, Tennessee, that ignited local opposition to public drag performances.   

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