Drag Queen Storytime at my local library (photo attached)

[Carla786]

I had a lovely trip to my local library yesterday. Spent a long time there choosing books, basically the whole time there was a very noisy toddler event going on in the next room. I didn't mind, they host a lot of stuff for various people & that's good.

As I left, I looked at the posters of various things they were advertising. I saw one for 'Mama G', clearly a drag queen, which I photographed for identification purposes. I thought this nonsense of drag story hours might be quietening down, but clearly not at my library. I'd never seen them advertise anything like that before 🤦‍♀️

Checking the photo when I got home, I saw the event had taken place that day, while I was choosing my books. I wasn't listening particularly hard, but from what I heard it sounded more like a 'panto dame' style event than anything sexualised. It still seems odd and inadvisable though. If a drag Queen wants to do panto style entertainment for kids too, he should have a separate line in that, rather than mixing it up. 'Drag queen shows ' are by nature sexual and adult, so 'drag queen' shows blur boundaries whatever the content/intention.

Let's not have facts get in the way of a good witch hunt, eh?

Same way as Izzard, people have been too polite to call out the ridiculousness of men dressing up pretending to be women.

The tide does seem to have finally turned thankfully. Sadly, women have to make a noise to make common sense prevail. No doubt 'drag queens' doing kids story time won't go quietly.

Actually discrediting your source and how you came to use it is very relevant.

You screenshot the photo with the headline and added your commentary that this is what some children in Kansas are being subjected to.

Except that photo isn’t from Kansas. It’s from Long Beach, California, at an event that was widely reported and discussed in 2017 - a quick image search made that clear. The photo was, however, used by a far right Christian political lobby in Kansas who in that same article you’ve linked ask for money to support their cause. That group also campaigns for abortion to be completely outlawed and for gay marriage to be repealed. They posted that photo in 2018 with a fear mongering article about what scary thing might come to your small town next, and please send us money so we can fight to keep it away. It is careless and unhelpful to not read enough of a source to see it is exaggerated and propaganda.

If you would like to debate what’s in the photo, then by all means discuss the event calendar at Long Beach Library in 2017, if that can be relevant to the OP and what she shared, in a country that does have panto dames and does have similar characters on CBeebies, and does not look anything like the photo you posted. It doesn’t seem very relevant at all to me - it seems like stirring with the most dramatic image you could find without knowing where it came from.

I continue to maintain if you are outraged at community services like a library programme, then be the change you want to see by volunteering your own time and encouraging others to volunteer, and of course not taking your children to see things you do not want them to see.

It's not much different to watching Justin Fletcher as Aunt Polly. But I know I'm going to get flamed for posting that.
I'm not sure whether I would go I'm not a panto fan and I've never had much to do with Drag Queens apart from Lily Savage.
But it sounds entertaining and colourful.
I've never been sexually assaulted by a man in drag but I have been by men wearing men's clothes yet I wouldn't bat an eyelid at one reading a story in the library I would assume they had been checked. And I would safeguard kids anyway whoever was leading the story session.
This thread started as an innocent sounding 'oh my there was a Drag Queen reading stories I was surprised at the noise.' to someone stating that they really know a lot more about it than they first let on.

I remain gobsmacked that you are still quibbling about the location of this hideous man rather than addressing the actually relevant point that ANY children ANYWHERE has been subjected to this frankly quite terrifying man.

The many people who fixate on totally irrelevant details and gandeave away the glaring issues with these men who are nothing to do with pantomime (at a distance, with parents) or CBeebies - TV (although parents should be cautious about the offerings for children from the BBC - pushing harmful gender ideology on them) are how men get to carry on pushing boundaries I guess.

Do you have any issue that children in [let me get this right] Long Beach library were subjected to this costume in BC an attempt to get them into reading?

Do you think that man should be allowed to dress up like that and terrify any more children?

I note your suggestions re community volunteering but you have zero knowledge of who I am and the community work I do which benefits children, so kindly refrain from such patronising comments clearly designed to shut me up and deflect from the actual issue.

Having witnessed Mama G in my local library I wasn't impressed. The book they read was awful. However most of the children in the audience were under the age of 2 so I doubt it affected any of them

I broadly agree with that, my issue is that noise should be at a minimum, that is why toddler areas and adult reading areas shouldn"t be in the same space, a thing I have also noticed is that a lot of modern librarians cannot STFU, some libraries I have stopped using because the librarians are constantly talking among themselves ( about personal stuff usually) in loud voices, very performative and frankly fucking annoying, years ago the librarian would shush people that were getting too loud, now the librarians themselves are doing it, they will be on phones next when they are serving you!

Libraries have had to diversify due to chronic underfunding. Your anger is misdirected.

What was the book? Why was it awful? It must have been published so can't be that bad unless you mean Mama G has self published.

I've got news for you, some really awful books do get published and the quality of some of the ones that claim to promote diversity or LGBTQ+ inclusivity - especially gender identity - can be particularly poor. Jessica Kingsley have published some really dreadful ones and completely lost their way as publishers on this issue, as have several other imprints.

But that's your opinion isn't it. That's what books are all about. Every one is different. Each to their own.

I'm not sure I go along with the idea that drag is okay because it began with a black man who had been enslaved. Being a victim of one kind of discrimination doesn't mean you can't also be a perpetrator of another kind of discrimination.

Most drag queens are gay men, most of whom have been victims of homophobia but that doesn't mean they are not misogynistic. On the contrary, gay men are every bit as misogynistic as straight men, some more so because of jealousy of women's ability to attract a larger dating pool.

It's also telling that despite the history of slavery in the USA, black men obtained the right to vote there before women of any colour, so I would argue that discrimination against women is far more engrained in society than racism and is endemic in every society irrespective of colour or creed.

Regardless of what reasons can be put forward to justify the existence and history of drag, it is inherently misogynistic.

White men putting on black face was only considered funny when black people were considered inferior to white people. It stopped being funny when black people gained equality.

Drag is only considered funny because women are still viewed as less than by many in society, despite all the advances of the past few decades (and these have been turned on their head in the past 15 years just to appease a tiny minority of men with a cross-dressing / woman fetish).

Men parodying women in drag is often blatantly misogynistic and denigrates female body functions for laughs, such as the repulsive man with milk surging out of his fake breasts on Ru Paul's show.

Also, men who dress up as women are dressing themselves in accordance with a male fantasy of what a woman should look like. There is nothing natural about any of it. Women are groomed en-masse to spend enormous amounts of time, money and energy on our appearance to please men / just to be deemed acceptable to be seen in public. The bar for men is far far lower.
Also, most of the big fashion designers are men, often gay, despite being in a female dominated business.

I'm quite tired, so need to flesh out these points tomorrow, but I wanted to reply with some ideas I have now :

The grotesque misogynistic 'shock humour' stuff, like mocking breastfeeding/birth/mastectomies /who knows what else, as pps have cited, isn’t really representative of ballroom or historical drag, which was much more about glamour, pageantry and emulation of movie-star femininity. Accounts of the original 1870s drag balls in US, the 1920s Harlem Renaissance stuff, up to the 1980s-90s stuff shown in documentaries like Paris Is Burning, shows gay men emulating glamorous female icons of the day (Betty Grable, Lena Horne, Las Vegas showgirls, models etc) in a way that seems mimicking/admiring rather than mocking. Certainly none of these seem to have featured mocking of female body functions etc. As I said in earlier post, a lot of the men in those scenes appear to have been similar to ladyboys in that many wanted to pass as women in real life. The emphasis seems mainly to have been on emulating an exaggerated glamorous female ideal rather than mocking/denigrating women. Humour was certainly cutting and unpleasant bug was focused more on other men not looking convincingly feminine enough, rather than mocking women's bodily functions

Clichéd as it may be, I think a lot of the change is to do with TV, reality TV and then SM. You see similar changes in several other forms. I was doing some research on the Notting Hill Carnival recently & Carribean music & dance more generally. Lyrics & dancing have become noticeably more sexualised and aggressive towards women since late 90s-2000s. See also the popularisation of twerking by Miley, Minaj etc

The increased misogyny of various forms of media over recent decades is depressing and worrying, but it shouldn't be assumed that any entertainment form, including drag, was always like that.

It’s true that Black men legally gained the vote before women of any race, but Black women were largely excluded in practice even after female suffrage was legalised due to Jim Crow and other barriers. Legal voting order doesn’t tell the full story.

It IS true that misogyny hits harder than racism in some ways in US, though. Voting, as you said. Another example would be voting in a biracial president in 2008 but no woman of any race has ever yet been US President, and sex is still considered an issue by some voters...🙄

Your argument in favour of drag is akin to Al Jolson arguing in favour of blackface.

Al Jolson was a Lithuanian Jew who had experienced racism in his own lifetime.
Despite this, he became THE best paid entertainer in America throughout the 1920s and 30s by exploiting a group of men who suffered even more discrimination than him at the time. He was the first bona fide superstar of the 20th century, similar to Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson in their day.

It's known that his intent was not malicious - he just wanted to be a successful, famous & wealthy performer like everyone else in the entertainment business and this is how he achieved his goal. It's known that he championed black performers in the entertainment business at the time, but none of that makes what he did any less wrong.

Being a "nice guy" doesn't change the reality that he was using his relative privilege to make a lot of money out of exploiting the general public's attitude towards black men in society at the time.

Ditto for drag queens today.
Just because some of them have female best friends doesn't mean that what they're doing is not misogynistic.

Wow, some very interesting posts there, didn"t know half that stuff before reading.

Not too familiar with AJ"s career, but there are obvious problems for a more modern audience! Harry Lauder was one of the first music hall type acts to attain global fame and one of the first to do global tours I believe, not sure about the timeline though - did he start out pre WW1? No idea how he is considered now either regarding race, attitudes to women etc.?

I think the problem with HL was more about the Scottish caricature he created, supposedly audiences in America, Australia and Canada and many other places lapped this up.

Thought of this thread today as I sit here watching Lily Savage host Blankety Blank

Skirt barely below her arse, over the knee pink boots, making jokes about "Stuart Dick the screw from Bangor" and sneaking into the docks at night (with the implications)

And no one batted an eyelid.

Sounds great, which library?

Not another one!

That’s unsurprising. So this event was completely pointless, costing money (they are not particularly cheap as I remember) and using up space that could have been used by children who wanted to read their own books but had that racket going on in the way.

I remain amazed at how many are determined this should happen - who is it benefiting? Certainly not the children.

Blankety Blank was not a show aimed at young children. HTH.

I think she's referring to the sexist and classist stereotyping element of drag rather than the drag queens who target children.

Excellent post.

Could you give some title examples -are these picture books or for older children/teens? I'm interested in the effects on children's publishing.