The Bimbo Next Door

Why South Dakotans Aren't Upset about Bryon Noem's Kink

“In South Dakota, Neighbors Feel Sorry for Kristi Noem’s Husband.” So ran a New York Times headline last week, following the publication, the day before, of photos in Britain’s Daily Mail of a pouting Bryon Noem wearing huge inflatable breasts and hot pink shorts. Like many of you, I learned the term “bimbofication” as a result of this scandal involving the husband of South Dakota’s ex-governor, who is also, more recently, the country’s ex-secretary of Homeland Security. The term refers to at least two distinct practices: an intentional aesthetic among cis women who argue that “reclaiming” the bimbo identity is a form of feminism (as explained in “Bimbofication is a revolutionary act” in the Michigan Daily in 2022) and a variety of kink that can be engaged in by all genders, including Bryon Noem’s.

Since then, news outlets have reported on leaked text messages that Bryon Noem exchanged with OnlyFans content creators who also perform an exaggerated, hyper-sexualized version of femaleness. Among them is Nicole Raccagno, the “Bimbo Bride,” who says that Bryon Noem paid her $50,000 for sexually explicit videos and chats, which helped her finance multiple breast enlargement surgeries and other cosmetic procedures. Coming as it did on the heels of reports about Kristi Noem’s alleged affair with her deputy, Corey Lewandowski, the photos renewed lurid speculation about the Noems’ marriage, the reasons that Kristi Noem lost her job at DHS (if surely not the administration’s intolerance for abject cruelty, then perhaps its fears that her husband’s behavior left her vulnerable to blackmail), and the seeming hypocrisy of a prominent midwestern power couple who champion “traditional” Christian values but appear to violate both biblical laws against adultery and contemporary religious conservatives’ anti-LGBTQ animus. (As governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem signed the 2021 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which permits discrimination against LGBTQ people by individuals or organizations who claim a religious basis for doing so. She also cut a government contract with the Transformation Project, a nonprofit that works to provide healthcare services to transgender South Dakotans.)

While the Daily Mail story inspired an outpouring of schadenfreude from the left (“Go Ahead and Laugh at Kristi Noem’s Cross-Dressing Husband” in Slate) and anti-gay kink shaming from Fox News, the article in the Times appeared to offer a gracious counterpoint: locals who know the Noem family wish everyone would leave poor Bryon alone.

Rural and small-town South Dakotans’ toleration for a cross-dressing insurance salesman seemed to charm the Times reporter, but it did not surprise me. Rural America has long been one of the least judgmental spaces for gender nonconformists—under certain circumstances. As Emily Skidmore shows in True Sex, her history of midwestern transmen from the turn of the twentieth century, revelations about the “true” identities of transmen typically elicited sympathy, not outrage, from small-town locals who knew them. As has been the case in this country for hundreds of years, gender nonconforming and queer people who otherwise upheld their communities’ expectations—who were publicly well-mannered, gainfully employed, and generally agreeable—were very seldom ostracized, let alone punished for being atypically gendered. Jen Manion’s research on the “Female Husbands” in Britain and the United States from 1750 to 1850, and Rachel Hope Cleves’s study of a lesbian couple in rural Vermont in the early nineteenth century likewise reveal far-reaching toleration of alternative expressions of gender—including acceptance of marriage-like arrangements involving queer and/or transgender people.

Bryon Noem’s sexualized cross-dressing also reminded me of the drag shows that were popular in rural America in the mid-twentieth century. We learn from historian Brock Thompson’s book about Arkansas and queer identity, The Un-Natural State, that these performances featured white civic leaders—the mayor, Rotarians, and police officers—who put on blackface, fishnets, and heels at fundraisers and holiday parties. In a series of photos from a show in the 1940s, a tall white man wearing a black bustier, lace stockings, and a sheer black skirt, gathered at the waist with a silk ribbon, grins beside two other white men who wear grotesque blackface makeup and costumes. Thompson argues that while these parodies mocked Black people, poor people, and women, they also afforded opportunities for queer expression and inspired more overtly queer southern drag pageants. It’s not quite bimbofication, but I thought of those photos when I saw the Daily Mail’s image of Bryon with his inflatable boobs. I can imagine him, a well-respected leader in his community, cheered by attendees as he takes the stage at a fundraiser for, say, the local fire department, his parodic feminine attire eliciting affirmative whoops and cat-calls. In reality, his failed attempt at a private expression of those affinities ironically exposed him to a world of public shaming.

One of the more fascinating insights from Skidmore’s book is the way that hostility toward trans people increased with social distance from them; discoveries of “true” identities reported with amusement or sympathy in a local paper were retold in the national press with far less kindness. So, too, South Dakotans—and even the Noems themselves—seem to distinguish the kink next door from what they see as the LGBTQ threat at large.