The San Francisco Public Library held the primary drag queen story hour in December 2015, and it may have been the final. As a substitute, a cultural phenomenon was born.
Since then, cross-dressing males in exaggerated make-up and costumes have made a whole lot of appearances in public libraries nationwide, opening up one other entrance within the pitched battle over exposing kids to sexually charged ideas within the title of range and inclusion.
Why drag queens?
“Drag itself may be very mesmerizing. It’s excessive. It’s outrageous. It steps outdoors boundaries and social norms and gender norms that individuals usually wouldn’t cross, and that’s fascinating to individuals,” mentioned Jonathan Hamilt, government director of the nationwide nonprofit Drag Story Hour.
“In case you meet that with story hour, it’s a good way to point out youngsters that creativity is boundless,” he informed The Washington Instances. “You’ll be able to discover alternative ways of pondering and creativity and artistry.”
Critics are more and more pushing again. In the previous few months, protesters have greeted drag queen story hours in California, Maryland and New York. A drag-queen studying at a college in Columbus, Ohio, was canceled in December over safety issues a few deliberate rally by the Proud Boys militia.
The place there are Proud Boys, Antifa can’t be far behind. Black-clad Antifa activists carrying Pleasure flags and realistic-looking rifles turned up in November at a bookstore in Denton, Texas, claiming to supply safety for a Transgender Story Time that includes a person dressed as a lady.
At a Drag Queen Story Hour in New York Metropolis, YouTube persona Alex Stein led demonstrators outdoors in chants of “Antifa go house” and “go away the children alone!”
“Letting kids have drag queens learn to them – that’s disgusting! You guys must be disgusted with yourselves! That’s sexual indoctrination! Why would a child must know something about intercourse?” requested Mr. Stein, as proven in a Dec. 10 video outdoors the New York Public Library.
Even so, the demand for drag queens is rising, spreading from public libraries to Ok-12 faculties and universities.
“Final June, we had virtually an occasion a day throughout Pleasure Month,” Mr. Hamilt mentioned. “We’re in public faculties, non-public faculties after which faculty libraries inside these faculties, and within the public libraries.”
Drag Story Hour, which dropped the phrase “queen” to incorporate feminine “drag kings” who impersonate males, lists 32 chapters in 20 states and the District of Columbia, in addition to abroad in Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Japan.
Studying, singing songs and doing crafts with 3- to 8-year-olds in libraries isn’t all of the drag queens do.
“We’re increasing,” Mr. Hamilt mentioned. “We work with youngsters with autism and different particular wants. We do bilingual readings. We work with senior residents. We work with center schoolers and excessive schoolers. We communicate at a number of universities and conferences in increased schooling. We now have plenty of numerous programming we do all all through our group. It’s not simply studying storybooks to kids.”
Supporters embrace Democrats reminiscent of Michigan Lawyer Common Dana Nessel, who mentioned in a speech that there must be “a drag queen for each faculty.”
“Not solely are they not hurting our youngsters, drag queens make all the pieces higher. Drag queens are enjoyable. Drag queens are leisure,” Ms. Nessel mentioned in a video posted by the Michigan Freedom Fund.
‘Queer position fashions’
Drag queens have been round since a minimum of the 1800s, however they confined their performances primarily to specialised bars, nightclubs and competitions. Then the truth present “RuPaul’s Drag Race” debuted in 2009, taking the phenomenon mainstream.
The 2015 San Francisco studying was the brainchild of Michelle Tea, former government director of Radar Productions, primarily based on her “private need to attach her toddler with queer tradition,” in line with the 2020 Curriculum Inquiry paper “Drag pedagogy: The playful follow of queer creativeness in early childhood” by College of British Columbia professor Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Sizzling Mess, the drag title of Harris Kornstein.
Mr. Hamilt has been concerned virtually for the reason that starting. In 2016, he turned the primary drag queen to host a kids’s story hour at a public library in New York Metropolis after being impressed by the San Francisco studying, which was held at a library within the metropolis’s predominantly homosexual Castro District.
“I used to be like, ‘Oh, that is wonderful,’” mentioned Mr. Hamilt, whose drag title is Ona Louise. “I’ve executed charity bingos round New York Metropolis, I’ve raised some huge cash for various nonprofits, and I used to be like, ‘Oh, that is even higher. I may learn to youngsters and unfold literacy and discuss range.’”
Having a drag storyteller learn to youngsters is “a good way for them to expertise range and otherness at a younger age,” he mentioned.
“Whenever you develop as much as be an grownup in the actual world, you’re going to have coworkers and neighbors and members of the family who look and act completely different from you,” Mr. Hamilt mentioned, “and we would like them to not be bigoted or racist or homophobic.”
No one disagrees with selling literacy or combating bigotry, however critics fear that the story hours transcend that by advancing a radical agenda that features undermining the normal household.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo mentioned exposing kids to pull queens is a part of an effort to “subvert the system of heteronormativity, which incorporates childhood innocence, and reengineer childhood sexuality from the bottom up.”
“The drag queen may seem as a comic book determine, however he carries an totally critical message: the deconstruction of intercourse, the reconstruction of kid sexuality and the subversion of middle-class household life,” Mr. Rufo mentioned in an Autumn 2022 Metropolis Journal article, “The Actual Story Behind Drag Queen Story Hour.”
The Each day Citizen, a publication of the conservative Give attention to the Household, referred to as it “a concerted effort to return after your kids and grandchildren in order that they take part in and undertake sexual and gender radicalness.”
This system took successful in 2019 when a Houston Public Library drag storyteller was discovered to be a registered intercourse offender. The library apologized, saying it had failed to finish a background examine and put the occasion on hiatus.
Whereas some storytellers learn from basic kids’s books, others choose gender-bending youngsters’ titles reminiscent of “Cinderelliot,” “If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It,” “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish,” “The Gender Wheel,” “Bye, Bye Binary,” and a e book about pronouns referred to as “They, She, He, straightforward as ABC.”
Drag Story Hour NYC developed and sells “The Dragtivity Guide,” a coloring e book designed “for classroom use” that features actions reminiscent of “discover your personal drag title” and “circle your pronouns.”
The “Drag pedagogy” paper fueled the backlash with statements reminiscent of “DQSH gives a queer relationality with kids that breaks from the reproductive futurity of the normative classroom and nuclear household.”
Even the Drag Story Hour web site means that there’s extra occurring than combating hate, saying that the occasion “captures the creativeness and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and offers youngsters glamorous, optimistic and unabashedly queer position fashions.”
“In areas like this, youngsters are capable of see individuals who defy inflexible gender restrictions and picture a world the place everybody could be their genuine selves!” the web site states.
Not all of the opposition comes from the precise. Gays In opposition to Groomers was launched to oppose “the sexualization and indoctrination of youngsters,” together with drag queen story hours and drag reveals involving kids.
Mr. Hamilt chalked up the pushback to “homophobia and transphobia.”
“We’re studying kids’s books, we’re singing kids’s songs,” he mentioned. “If we have been doing something apart from that, we wouldn’t be round for seven years. No place would permit any sort of grownup leisure if that have been occurring.”
Regardless of the issues, public libraries are standing behind the story hours.
After a Dec. 17 protest outdoors a library in New York Metropolis’s Chelsea neighborhood, the New York Public Library defended the programming, citing the “rise of hate and violence concentrating on LGBTQ+ communities.”
“A gaggle of protesters tried to disrupt a Drag Story Hour for neurodiverse kids,” the library system mentioned in a assertion. “The story hour went on as deliberate, together with readings, coloring actions and a ‘dance get together’ on the finish. Our patrons take pleasure in Drag Story Hour, and the Library will proceed to supply applications that help a various array of voices.”
