The Casually Regressive Message of Drag Queen Story Hour

By Jo Bartosch

No tanks rolled in, and no shots were fired, but that there has been an invasion is indisputable. The signs are everywhere: the “progress pride” flags of the victors are hung from government buildings, and people have learned that if they say the “wrong thing” they risk arrest or losing their jobs. Nonetheless, resistance is growing.

And it is apt that today it is libraries which should find themselves in the frontline of the culture war. The public didn’t flinch when the corporate world fell, when banks and supermarkets began to routinely spew out asinine messages about inclusion and to cover themselves in rainbows. But the targeting of children in what were once bastions of learning has sent ordinary people rushing to the barricades. 

Drag queens have been lifted from niche gay clubs and repurposed as symbols of inclusion. Accordingly, they’ve been welcomed into libraries as children’s entertainers. But it should be remembered drag queens are no more representative of “gay culture” than strippers are of the heterosexual mainstream.

The summer of 2022 was punctuated by footage of protesters and counter protesters screaming at events which were, nominally at least, supposed to be for the benefit of pre-school toddlers and early-years primary pupils. Yet most of the parents who take along their tots, and indeed the public servants who give tax-payers’ money to adult entertainers, are ignorant of the ideological underpinnings of these performances.

Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH also referred to as ‘Drag Queen Story Time’) was always an overtly ideological project. Founded in 2015 by queer activist Michelle Tea, DQSH was developed as a response to the “heteronormative” activities at her local library in San Francisco. 

Speaking to a magazine in 2019, Tea dismissed her feminist critics as being “…on the wrong side of history” adding “they’re dying off, literally.” Underlying her hopes for DQSH she explained, “The next generations [are] going to inherit our trans positive, gender spectrum world, not their world.” Tea’s aim could not be clearer: it is not simply to show that same-sex couples can make loving parents but rather to offer ideologically infused messages about identity. For such queer activists, political power can be redistributed by the act of “queering”, that’s to say subverting, words and actions.

The DQSH website claims to give kids “unabashedly queer role models” and to offer a space where “kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where everyone can be their authentic selves!”

But such nonsensical gushing can’t wash away the facts. Drag queens are routinely introduced to their young audiences with female pronouns, as if they were literally women. This is an attempt to “queer” the sex binary. When I discussed this with a performer last month for a BBC radio programme, he enthusiastically said that when approached by a small girl and asked whether he was male or female he told her, “Right now I’m a girl”.

This is grotesque sequin-clad sexism; hammering home the message that woman is a costume rather than the sex which gives birth to every human on the planet. Nor is it progressive that what might be a child’s first interaction with a gay man is with a figure of fun. The implicit message is that biology can be changed with clothes; that to be homosexual is to be freakish; to perform a comedic parody of womanhood.

But strip away DQSH’s casually regressive message and an even darker motivation can be glimpsed. Children are destabilised, taught not to trust their instincts, that an outlandish male they might otherwise be wary of is in fact a funny, different type of woman. This is not to rehash tired stereotypes about gay men, but rather to point to the fact that regardless of their orientation, men are more likely to abuse children than women. And when considered as part of the wider queer theory movement, the attempt to obscure basic sexed biology is profoundly unsettling. 

One of themes that unites the opaque writings of queer theorists is that boundaries are limiting, and that they must be broken down. This extends beyond eroding women and men as distinct categories, to include what queer theorist Gayle Rubin referred to as “intergenerational relationships”. Queer theorist Pat Califia, a contemporary of Rubin, bemoaned the prohibition on such “relationships”, complaining that American society had become “rabidly phobic about any sexual contact between adults and minors”. 

It would be wrong and deeply unfair to suggest that the average drag queen has nefarious, or even solidly thought through, intentions. But whether by sinister design or well-intentioned ignorance, it is wrong and harmful to tell children that putting on a dress turns a ‘he’ into a ‘she’. Not only does it suggest that a child should ignore their own judgment, but it grooms them to accept the central tenets of queer theory: that boundaries are discriminatory and identities fluid. Were this confined to the wokerati in San Francisco it would be easy to dismiss, but today drag queens have sashayed through the corridors of power at some of the world’s most august institutions, from the British Library to the Smithsonian.

This long queer march through these institutions has happened because of shame about historic injustice. Today, drag queens are venerated by a heterosexual mainstream who feel collective guilt for the wrongs perpetrated against gay men and lesbians in the previous decades. This presents an opportunity for politicians on the reactionary left to smugly position themselves in opposition to the motley groups of protesters, which include feminists, otherwise non-political parents and some on the far right.

Ironically, the main performance of DQSH is not the one undertaken by the queens, it’s a penance performed by the adults in the audience. They are struggling to atone for the sins of an earlier generation, bringing their children with the hope that they might all be absolved.

But, just as fifty years ago the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) hijacked the campaign for gay rights, today there are less-than-wholesome ideas pulling on drag queen’s skirts. It seems likely that the mania for all things drag will go out of fashion, and in a decade people may well look back and wonder why it was considered beneficial to lie to children. But as ever in any war, cultural or otherwise, the price will be paid by those who are most vulnerable.