Here's how I tried to improve things:
Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), Drag Queen Storytime, and Drag Story Time are children’s events first started in 2015 by author and activist Michelle Tea in San Francisco with the goals to “inspire a love of reading, while teaching deeper lessons on diversity, self-love and an appreciation of others. The events, have been widely criticised by groups as varied as concerned parents, feminists, teachers and members of the gay community. Critics say that children's entertainers often dress up as characters and those may include characters of the opposite sex but that's not the same as the grotesque, exaggerated & sexualized parody of womanhood found in drag.
Many welcome initiatives to encourage a love of reading and greater use of libraries. However, there are so many professionals who work with children - writers, actors, professional story tellers, retired nursery teachers, and librarians - have the background and knowledge and experience to make it more of an educational experience for all children, including all those with learning difficulties, developmental delays, social needs and are for more suited to host story time sessions than members of the adult entertainment community. Professional librarians, teachers and storytellers know that the reader should not be the focus; the story is the focus; the experience of being read to is the focus. Someone reading to children with this much distraction doesn’t understand or respect the point of reading to children. Rachel Rooney, author, poet, teacher, (My body is me) has said, The story teller who tells the story should be the frame. The story is the photo. So a storyteller’s role is to bring the book to life, not get in the way of the text and the illustrations. Not that might involve a prop bag, I’ve use props with young children or possibly a little bit of dressing up. But it does not involve a sexualised hyperbolic parody of a woman.”
Lack of Diversity
An argument often put forward in favour of DQST is that it encourages inclusion and greater diversity; in fact the opposite is true. One example is the incident when the Velindre Trust in Wales hosted Drag Queen Story Hour in August 2020 where Aida H Dee read the story Charlotte the Scientist Finds a Cure which is about promoting girls and women in science. What a lost opportunity! This would have been a great opportunity for a woman scientist to read a book, encouraging girls to become interested in STEM. The event was held as part of NHS Wales Virtual Pride which is presumably why a drag artist was invited in rather than a woman. If the intention is to provide children with positive homosexual role models, wouldn’t hearing from a gay architect or a lesbian scientist be better than a man pretending to be a woman with bouffant hair, clownish makeup, false breasts and a plunging neckline? How is that a positive homosexual role model? Instead, a man who parodies womanhood for a living was chosen to read from a book intended to empower young girls.
Safeguarding Concerns
Many safeguarding concerns have been raised since the advent of DQSH; these concern both the concept and individual incidents. Drag artists have been performing for many years, but until recently they have been seen as providing late night adult entertainment, performing in adult-only venues such as pubs and clubs. Few would object to this. It is only more recently, that trans-activists have tried to persuade people that they are appropriate adults to be performing for children. Drag can be a somewhat contentious matter in feminist and gay circles. Many feminists feel that it is a demeaning parody of womanhood whereas its defenders see it as an important part of gay culture. Both sides can agree, however, that it is not a suitable form of entertainment for children. It wouldn't be considered appropriate for female strippers or burlesque artists to read stories to young children in libraries, yet some people are trying to convince us that drag queens are perfectly suitable.
Time and time again, draq queens have proved themselves to be unfit to work with children.
Aida H Dee (see above) locked their twitter account after sharing the 'Love has no age' slogan.
In February 2020, a drag queen withthe stage name of Flow Job, led a story session for Primary 1 children (aged 4 or 5) at Glencoats Primary school, Paisley, Scotland. He had to be introduced to the children as "Flow" as his oral sex based name was inappropriate for a primary school. Even without safeguarding training, it is common sense that if you cannot introduce the visitor by the name they are generally known by, and have to shorten it, because that name is sexually explicit, then they are not suitable for a school visit and that if you cannot tag your school visitor in your tweet about their visit because their twitter handle is sexually explicit and leads to their twitter page which is also sexually explicit, then they are not suitable for a school visit. A Renfrewshire Council spokeswoman later admitted had it known about Flojob's stage persona it would not have allowed a visit to be arranged.[1] [2]
In March 2021, Brett Blomme, a Milwaukee County Children’s Court judge and former president and CEO of the Cream City Foundation, which runs the city’s drag queen story hour program, was been arrested on seven counts of child pornography. [3]
Houston public libraries have twice allowed child sex offenders to host DQSH events because they failed to carry out proper safeguarding checks. [4]
Misogyny
“Men who dress up as women and adopt stereotyped feminine behaviours are comical because of their stereotyped behaviour. The inference the audience is encouraged to draw is not that stereotypes are comical, but that women are.” Is Drag Sexist, Kelly Kleinman, 2011 [5]
The social media accounts of drag queens involved in DQSH reveal deep rooted misogyny; they seem to have a hatred for women despite choosing to dress as a parody of womanhood.
Somebody with the twitterhandle Tambleweed shared the following offensive "joke": A transphobe, a racist, a homophobe and an anti-semite walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Hey, aren't you the lady who wrote Harry Potter?" On 18th August 2020, Aida H Dee retweeted this with the comment, "Hehehe this is funny." [6]
Encouragement of homophobia
Gay people had fought for years to have their sexuality recognised as just like everyone else's - that it's not a kink, it doesn't require a costume, it's not pretending to be something else, it's just that they happen to be attracted to the same sex as themselves. The vast, vast majority of homosexual people look like normal everyday people, have normal everyday jobs and fairly mundane lives, just like the majority of heterosexual people. This idea that all gay men love to wear make up, and act like bitchy women is such a damaging stereotype. Why perpetuate it? Many gay people have expressed concerns that the rise of DQSH, and the publicity given to failures concerning safeguarding, will give oxygen to the genuine homophobes. Gay men have been fighting for years against nasty stereotypes about being sexual deviants or preying on children.
Gay men have said that they find the equivalence between homosexuality and dressing up as a pantomime dame to be homophobic and offensive. So much for teaching children that ordinary people can be homosexual and that's fine. Others have said that when they were at school, what they desperately needed were gay and lesbian role models who looked and sounded like normal, everyday people. As teenagers, they didn't know any gay or lesbian people so their heads were full of damaging stereotypes. The idea that a gay drag queen by the name of "Flow Job" would have reduced homophobia at their school is absolutely ludicrous. It would have made it ten times worse for boys struggling with their sexuality.
External links
Drag Queen Story Time: Child Grooming In Plain Sight?
Woke Culture's war on Childhood Innocence grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/woke-cultures-war-on-childhood-innocence