The story behind drag queen story hour reveals untold horrors and a history of grooming. We need to pray for protection for our children.

From City Journal. Drag Queen Story Hour—in which performers in drag read books to kids in libraries, schools, and bookstores—has become a cultural flashpoint. The political Right has denounced these performances as sexual transgressions against children, while the political Left has defended them as an expression of LGBTQ pride. The intellectual debate has even spilled into real-world conflict: right-wing militants affiliated with the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters have staged protests against drag events for children, while their counterparts in the left-wing Antifa movement have responded with offers to serve as a protection force for the drag queens.

View Comments (9)

Find out when your state prays.

Families with children find themselves caught in the middle. Drag Queen Story Hour pitches itself as a family-friendly event to promote reading, tolerance, and inclusion. “In spaces like this,” the organization’s website reads, “kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where everyone can be their authentic selves.” But many parents, even if reluctant to say it publicly, have an instinctual distrust of adult men in women’s clothing dancing and exploring sexual themes with their children.

These concerns are justified. But to mount an effective opposition, one must first understand the sexual politics behind the glitter, sequins, and heels. This requires a working knowledge of an extensive history, from the origin of the first “queen of drag” in the late nineteenth century to the development of academic queer theory, which provides the intellectual foundation for the modern drag-for-kids movement. …

Start with queer theory, the academic discipline born in 1984 with the publication of Gayle S. Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Beginning in the late 1970s, Rubin, a lesbian writer and activist, had immersed herself in the subcultures of leather, bondage, orgies, fisting, and sado-masochism in San Francisco, migrating through an ephemeral network of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadomasochism) clubs, literary societies, and New Age spiritualist gatherings. In “Thinking Sex,” Rubin sought to reconcile her experiences in the sexual underworld with the broader forces of American society. Following the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault, Rubin sought to expose the power dynamics that shaped and repressed human sexual experience.

“Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value,” Rubin wrote. “Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid. Clamouring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals. . . . Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.”

Rubin’s project—and, by extension, that of queer theory—was to interrogate, deconstruct, and subvert this sexual hierarchy and usher in a world beyond limits, much like the one she had experienced in San Francisco. … For Rubin and later queer theorists, sex and gender were infinitely malleable. There was nothing permanent about human sexuality, which was, after all, “political.” Through a revolution of values, they believed, the sexual hierarchy could be torn down and rebuilt in their image. …

Where does this process end? At its logical conclusion: the abolition of restrictions on the behavior at the bottom end of the moral spectrum—pedophilia. Though she uses euphemisms such as “boylovers” and “men who love underaged youth,” Rubin makes her case clearly and emphatically. In long passages throughout “Thinking Sex,” Rubin denounces fears of child sex abuse as “erotic hysteria,” rails against anti–child pornography laws, and argues for legalizing and normalizing the behavior of “those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.” These men are not deviants, but victims, in Rubin’s telling. …

Such positions are hardly idiosyncratic within the discipline of queer theory. The father figure of the ideology, Foucault, whom Rubin relies upon for her philosophical grounding, was a notorious sadomasochist who once joined scores of other prominent intellectuals to sign a petition to legalize adult–child sexual relationships in France. …

Rubin’s American compatriots made the same argument even more explicitly. Longtime Rubin collaborator Pat Califia, who would later become a transgender man, claimed that American society had turned pedophiles into “the new communists, the new n*****s, the new witches.” For Califia, age-of-consent laws, religious sexual mores, and families who police the sexuality of their children represented a thousand-pound bulwark against sexual freedom. …

The second prerequisite for understanding Drag Queen Story Hour is to understand the historical development of the art of drag. It begins with a freed slave named William Dorsey Swann, who dressed in elaborate silk and satin women’s costumes, called himself the “queen of drag,” and organized sexually charged soirées in his home in Washington, D.C. …

Drag became explicitly political seven decades later, during the Stonewall riots of 1969, in which patrons of a gay bar in New York City rioted against police and began a wave of gay and lesbian political activism. As writer Daniel Harris explained in the counterculture journal Salmagundi, traditional drag performances from William Dorsey Swann until the mid-1960s were sensual experiences, “an innocuous camp pastime,” but with the onset of the sexual revolution, they became forms of resistance and revolution. …

Suddenly, drag was not a private performance but a statement of public rebellion. The queens began using costume and performance to mock the fashion, manners, and mores of Middle America. In time, the need to shock required the performers to push the limits. “Men now wear such sexually explicit outfits as ball gowns with prosthetic breasts sewn on to the outside of the dresses, black nighties with gigantic strap-on dildos, and transparent vinyl mini-skirts that reveal lacy panties with strategic rips and telltale stains suggestive of deflowerment,” Harris noted. “The less drag is meant to allure, the bawdier it becomes, with men openly massaging their breasts, squeezing the bulges of their g-strings, sticking out their asses and tongues like porn stars in heat, and lying spread-eagle on their backs on parade routes with their helium heels flung into the air and their virginal prom dresses thrown over their heads.”

The next critical turn occurred in 1990, with the publication of Gender Trouble, by the queer theorist Judith Butler. … Gender Trouble’s basic argument is that Western society has created a regime of “compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism,” which has sought to enforce a singular, unitary notion of “sex” that crushes and obscures the true complexity and variation of biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and human desire. Butler argues that even the word “woman,” though it relates to a biological reality, is a social construction and cannot be defined with any stable meaning or categorization. There is nothing essential about “man,” “woman,” or “sex”: they are all created and re-created through historically contingent human culture; or, as Butler puts it, they are all defined through their performance, which can change, shift, and adapt across time and space.

Butler’s theory of social change is that once the premise is established that gender is malleable and used as an instrument of power, currently in favor of “heterosexual normativity,” then the work of social reconstruction can begin. And the drag queen embodies Butler’s theory of gender deconstruction. …

By the 2000s, the performance of drag had absorbed all these elements—the social-justice origin story of William Dorsey Swann, the carnal shock-and-awe of Gayle Rubin, the ethereal postmodernism of Judith Butler—and brought them together onto the stage. … Hankins describes three genres of drag—straight-ahead, burlesque, and genderf**k—that range from stripteases and lap dances to simulations of necrophilia, bestiality, and race fetishism. Hankins describes the world of drag as a “sociosexual economy,” in which the members of “queerdom” can titillate, gratify, and reward one another with cash tips and money exchanges. …

The goal of drag, following the themes of Butler and Rubin, is to obliterate stable conceptions of gender through performativity and to rehabilitate the bottom of the sexual hierarchy through the elevation of the marginal. …

The final turn in the story of drag is, in some ways, the most surprising. As the dark side of drag pushed transgression to the limits, another faction began moving from the margins to the mainstream. Some drag queens—most notably, the drag performer RuPaul—toned down the routines, pushed the ideology deep into the background, and presented drag as good old-fashioned, glamorous American fun. Television producers packaged this new form of drag as reality programming, softening the image of the drag queen and assimilating the genre into mass media and consumer culture.

This provided an opportunity. As the queer theorists’ vanguard intellectual project was running aground on incest and bestiality fantasies, the most enterprising among them took a different tack: using the commercialization of drag and the goodwill associated with the gay and lesbian rights movement as a means of transforming drag performances into “family-friendly” events that could transmit a simplified version of queer theory to children. The key figure in this transition was a “genderqueer” college professor and drag queen named Harris Kornstein—stage name Lil Miss Hot Mess—who hosted some of the original readings in public libraries and wrote the children’s book The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish. …

Kornstein also published the manifesto for the movement, “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood,” with coauthor Harper Keenan, a female-to-male transgender queer theorist. …

[The] authors propose a new teaching method, “drag pedagogy,” as a way of stimulating the “queer imagination,” teaching kids “how to live queerly,” and “bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children.” As Kornstein and Keenan explain, this is an intellectual and political project that requires drag queens and activists to work toward undermining traditional notions of sexuality, replacing the biological family with the ideological family, and arousing transgressive sexual desires in young children. …

For the drag pedagogists, the traditional life path—growing up, getting married, working 40 hours a week, and raising a family—is an oppressive bourgeois norm that must be deconstructed and subverted. As the drag queens take the stage in their sexually suggestive costumes, Kornstein and Keenan argue, their task is to disrupt the “binary between womanhood and manhood,” seed the room with “gender-transgressive themes,” and break the “reproductive futurity” of the “nuclear family” and the “sexually monogamous marriage”—all of which are considered mechanisms of heterosexual, capitalist oppression. … Though Drag Queen Story Hour events are often billed as “family-friendly,” Kornstein and Keenan explain that this is a form of code: “It may be that DQSH is ‘family friendly,’ in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is ‘family friendly’ in the sense of ‘family’ as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.” That is, the goal is not to reinforce the biological family but to facilitate the child’s transition into the ideological family. …

The purpose, then, is to subvert the system of heteronormativity, which includes childhood innocence, and reengineer childhood sexuality from the ground up. And drag performances provide a visual, symbolic, and erotic method for achieving this. Kornstein and Keenan’s language of the discipline—“pleasure,” “desire,” “bodies,” “girls,” “boys,” “glitter,” “sequins,” “wigs,” and “heels”—gives it away.

Of course, the organizers of Drag Queen Story Hour understand that they must manage their public image to continue enjoying access to public libraries and public schools. They have learned how to speak in code to NGOs and to appease the anxieties of parents, while subtly promoting the ideology of queer theory to children. While many of Drag Queen Story Hour’s defenders claim that these programs are designed to foster LGBTQ “acceptance” and “inclusion,” Kornstein and Keenan explicitly dismiss those objectives as mere “marketing language” that provides cover for their real agenda. … Drag Queen Story Hour has learned the dance of operating a cash-flow-positive activist organization, winning government contracts, and securing access to audiences, while providing a plausible rhetorical defense against parents who might question the wisdom of adult men creating “site[s] of queer pleasure” with their children. …

Though the spread of sexually charged drag performances has an aura of inevitability, one should keep in mind that transgressive ideologies always contain the seeds of their own destruction.

As the movement behind drag shows for children has gained notoriety and expanded its reach, some drag performers have let the mask slip: in Minneapolis, a drag queen in heels and a pink miniskirt spread his legs open in front of children; in Portland, a large male transvestite allowed toddlers to climb on top of him, grab at his fake breasts, and press themselves against his body; and in England, a drag queen taught a group of preschoolers how to perform a sexually suggestive dance.

Scenes from drag events hosted across the United States in bars, clubs, and outdoor festivals have been even more shocking and disturbing: in Miami, a man with enormous fake breasts and dollar bills stuffed into his G-string grabs the hand of a preschool-aged girl and struts her in front of the crowd; in Washington, D.C., a drag queen wearing leather and chains teaches a young child how to dance for cash tips; in Dallas, hulking male figures with makeup smeared across their faces strip down to undergarments, simulate a female orgasm, and perform lap dances on members of a roaring audience of adults and children. …

When parents, voters, and political leaders understand the true nature of Drag Queen Story Hour and the ideology that drives it, they will work quickly to restore the limits that have been temporarily—and recklessly—abandoned. They will draw a bright line between adult sexuality and childhood innocence, and send the perversions of “genderf**k,” “primitivism,” and “degeneracy” back to the margins, where they belong.

How are you praying against drag queen story hour? Share this article to keep people informed.

(Excerpt from City Journal. Photo Credit: Bret Kavanaugh on Unsplash)