The Only Problem with Drag Queen Story Hour is the Protesting
Really, though, what a drag.
Iam still not quite over the fact that I came second — second! — in a recent competition to draw a drag queen at Dalston Superstore. Honestly, it was a total stitch-up: if my drawing had been just a little bit bigger, even it did not reach the giant proportions of the monstrosity of an ‘artwork’ that took first place, I would have won — and my friends agree, which means I am right. Still, I had a fab time, snacking at an avocado on toast and drinking seemingly bottomless Aperol Spritzes while the queens did their thing. I could not believe how mobile one of them was, running up and down the tables in a set of four-inch ankle-breakers, her perfectly groomed eyebrows matching the colour of her moustache.
It is curious that Drag Queen Story Hour events — events where drag queens read to children, typically in public libraries — continue to be disrupted by protestors. Thankfully these demonstrators, unlike their counterparts across the Pond, stop short of pulling guns, preferring to wave placards about and hurl insults like ‘groomer!’ — the latest slur dreamt up by the rude and the easily upset. On at least one occasion, a couple of protestors went undercover, as it were, dressing like the presumably deranged sort of parent who takes their child to see a drag queen read. They leapt to their feet midway through the event to accuse the queen in question — one Aida H Dee — of being a paedophile. (Aida, to her eternal credit, has refused to be cowed by this or any of the grief she has received. At a reading in Leeds where a protestor set off the fire alarm, Aida kicked off an impromptu Pride-style rave. This is the kind of ingenuity we need more of.)
You must have to be very distressed indeed to spend your Saturdays hassling a drag queen at an underused public library for the grave sin of reading to kids.
Now, it is sometimes suggested to us that assorted marginalised groups are the ones who need to get over their bruised feelings and pull themselves together, and yet it seems — oh, cruel irony — that the most easily offended may be the very ones keen to promote this idea. Neo-Nazis, including a group who call themselves Patriotic Alternative, have ‘passionately opposed’ all this awful reading to children business, and clearly they and others are not joking when they say they are very upset by it. After all, you must have to be very distressed indeed to spend your Saturday hassling a drag queen at an underused public library for telling stories. It is quite the commitment. And to resolve that frightening the children you purport to be saving is acceptable collateral damage for being able to call someone a sex offender must take some effort.
I’m afraid to tell you that ‘gender ideology’ is meaningless. No, really: it has no coherent definition; it simply consists of a series of disparate ideas hastily bundled together.
Ah, you may say, but these drag queens are not harmless. They are not just reading. They are spreading gender ideology. Well, quite apart from the fact that you are entirely free not to take little Tommy and little Tammy (and how they’ve grown!) to any DQSH events, it is perhaps worth bearing in mind that the concept of ‘gender ideology’ is, well, meaningless. No coherent definition has yet been offered; it seems to consist instead of a series of disparate ideas plucked from their context like the under-arch of a drag queen’s eyebrows and hastily bundled together for the purposes of getting people riled up. In fact a report by the European Parliament linked the rise of this idea of gender ideology and the ‘anti-gender movement in Europe’ more broadly to disinformation campaigns sponsored in large part by Russia. Alas, what is easily packaged is easily contested, and so this example of what the linguists among us call a ‘floating signifier’ continues to hover over DQSH like a storm cloud.
But, I mean, really. The idea that drag queens are trying to brainwash the nation’s children must have required quite some mental strain to come up with. Does it not at least seem slightly implausible that a coterie of drag queens (what is the collective noun for ‘drag queen’, by the way? A ‘fierceness’ of drag queens?) have got together in some rainbow den of deviancy in Soho and chosen to launch a coordinated cerebral attack on children, disguised as a couple of hours reading in a library on the weekend? Here is a more likely suggestion: that they, like just about everyone, want the best for children, and hope to nurture their empathy and creativity and tolerance by reading to them, in drag, which is just so much more fun than a t-shirt and jeans.
