The Casually Regressive Message of Drag Queen Story Hour – Genspect

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Source: The Casually Regressive Message of Drag Queen Story Hour – Genspect

One thought on “The Casually Regressive Message of Drag Queen Story Hour – Genspect”

  1. Reading some stuff about the indoctrination of children by the Khmer Rouge I stumbled across this:

    “As with all major initiatives of the Khmer Rouge revolution, the first step was to eliminate all traces of Cambodia’s “imperialist” past. Once this goal was accomplished, a “pure” revolutionary consciousness could be inculcated. 5 With regard to literacy, the first step of the Plan was “to abolish, uproot, and disperse the cultural, literary, and artistic remnants of the imperialists, colonialists, and all of the other oppressor classes…”

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