Drag Queen Storytime and church opposition?

[GiggleOfGirls]

Quick version: does anyone here have a good resource or understanding of when, why, and/or how opposition to drag performances for children became a "church issue"? 
 

I've searched back here and the first FJ mentions of drag queen story hour seem to be from mid-2019. Which tracks for me because anti-drag sentiment was not a thing I noticed until the last few years. My Baptist pastor father watched Some Like it Hot with me when I was in middle school! My peers watched Mrs Doubtfire! I learned (very neutrally) about the history of only male performers being allowed in the past and so needing to dress as women, etc. 

Long version: I host a drag storytime (not affiliated with the Drag Story Hour organization and not called drag storytime because I'm in a somewhat conservative area) at my bookstore once a month. This week we discovered that one of our vendors is a bigot and we will no longer be working with them. Which is fine. I'm mostly annoyed that we didn't find out their stance sooner. We've been hosting this for over half a year, not secretly at all, and they only just now claim to have noticed 🙄
 

Their issue is with this one hour a month when a local drag queen comes in (perfectly child-appropriate) costume and reads picture books to children about acceptance and whatever other books the children choose from the shelves after the first 2-3.

This vendor claims that they oppose drag story time because that's what "the church teaches" but since when??? And why? And how did this shift even happen? I had thought it was mostly political, not being preached from pulpits. No doubt using the verse about not dressing in another gender's clothing, but then why was drag seemingly ignored for so long? 
 

I absolutely have occasionally looked into the issue before, I didn't come to host this event completely naively, but now I feel a pressing need to really dig into what happened and I'm coming up with almost nothing explaining this phenomenon in a cohesive way. 
 

The only thing I can figure after having read here for so many years is that there was some sort of convergence. Something between folks my age (born in the 1980s) becoming parents and the fact that they seem to have often been raised with the culture warrior sort of ideas, which were abhorrent to my father (he's always been a huge proponent of the separation of church and state because he's studied history). Add in the Trumpian open bigotry to that and maybe this is what we get?

Surely someone has already researched, analyzed, and written about this? 
 

Thank you for reading if you got through most or all of that! I appreciate greatly any insight y'all might have. I'm also autistic so sometimes obvious things to others aren't obvious to me until someone states them clearly, so even if the answers seem obvious, I still would appreciate them ❤️

[Alisamer]

I don't have any answer or know of any research about that. I can only say what my gut feelings are about possibilities as to why this has happened.

I think part of it is the fundamentalist obssesion with and fear of sex. A significant portion of what fundamentalists pride themselves on is based around a focus on sex. Modesty, courtship instead of dating, restricting media to only "christian" (and approved Christian at that) sources, separating boys and girls and the activities they are allowed or encouraged to participate in. Those things all come down to preventing sex outside marriage, really. They are desperately afraid of (and probably in some cases jealous of) people having sex without the fear of hell hanging over them. They are afraid of merely THINKING about sex.

They translate this fear and obsession about sex onto people who are not heterosexual and/or don't follow their strict norms about preventing any thoughts of sex. Meaning, that if a couple is the same gender, fundies automatically think of how they might have sex, and that made them think of sex, and that's horrible and sinful. 

And naturally, if THEY think of sex when they see people who aren't straight, obviously that means those thoughts were forced upon them by the non-straight people! And how dare they force sexual thoughts onto them! And wow that must mean any children who happen to be in their presence are ALSO forced to think sexual thoughts! Horrors!

And I think this stuff spreads around from fundies into fundie lite and traditional churches in some areas and among some groups. Especially now that certain political parties are courting evangelicals and fundamentalists and making things like this political talking points. 

Some Christians are obsessed with sex and don't realize not everyone in the world sees sex everywhere they look, and want to "protect" children from being exposed to sexual things where they don't actually exist. 

And since drag is associated with the LGBTQ+ community, it's scary and sexual to them. Even when it's not.

And on the political aspect, drag storytime is a very convenient way to rile up the masses. Since Roe V Wade is no longer a useful carrot to dangle in front of evangelicals to get them to hold their noses and vote for vile corrupt people they'd condemn otherwise, they've got to find other things to keep people mad about so they show up and vote. 

[noseybutt]

On 4/19/2024 at 10:15 PM, GiggleOfGirls said:

Quick version: does anyone here have a good resource or understanding of when, why, and/or how opposition to drag performances for children became a "church issue"? 
 

I've searched back here and the first FJ mentions of drag queen story hour seem to be from mid-2019. Which tracks for me because anti-drag sentiment was not a thing I noticed until the last few years. My Baptist pastor father watched Some Like it Hot with me when I was in middle school! My peers watched Mrs Doubtfire! I learned (very neutrally) about the history of only male performers being allowed in the past and so needing to dress as women, etc. 

Long version: I host a drag storytime (not affiliated with the Drag Story Hour organization and not called drag storytime because I'm in a somewhat conservative area) at my bookstore once a month. This week we discovered that one of our vendors is a bigot and we will no longer be working with them. Which is fine. I'm mostly annoyed that we didn't find out their stance sooner. We've been hosting this for over half a year, not secretly at all, and they only just now claim to have noticed 🙄
 

Their issue is with this one hour a month when a local drag queen comes in (perfectly child-appropriate) costume and reads picture books to children about acceptance and whatever other books the children choose from the shelves after the first 2-3.

This vendor claims that they oppose drag story time because that's what "the church teaches" but since when??? And why? And how did this shift even happen? I had thought it was mostly political, not being preached from pulpits. No doubt using the verse about not dressing in another gender's clothing, but then why was drag seemingly ignored for so long? 
 

I absolutely have occasionally looked into the issue before, I didn't come to host this event completely naively, but now I feel a pressing need to really dig into what happened and I'm coming up with almost nothing explaining this phenomenon in a cohesive way. 
 

The only thing I can figure after having read here for so many years is that there was some sort of convergence. Something between folks my age (born in the 1980s) becoming parents and the fact that they seem to have often been raised with the culture warrior sort of ideas, which were abhorrent to my father (he's always been a huge proponent of the separation of church and state because he's studied history). Add in the Trumpian open bigotry to that and maybe this is what we get?

Surely someone has already researched, analyzed, and written about this? 
 

Thank you for reading if you got through most or all of that! I appreciate greatly any insight y'all might have. I'm also autistic so sometimes obvious things to others aren't obvious to me until someone states them clearly, so even if the answers seem obvious, I still would appreciate them ❤️

Really interesting questions.

I suspect that the recent drag panic has ties to Q-Anon and Q-Anon-adjacent conspiracy theories. With Q-Anon, the focus is on a the deep state, which are nefarious political officials and others in power that are secretly child molesters or somehow assisting in the harm of children. Many versions of Q-Anon believe that Trump was elected in order to fight this cabal of deep state operators and that there is coming a future time (storm) when Trump will prevail and lock up the deep state actors in Guantanamo Bay.

Or something like that.

There are lots of ties between Q-Anon believers and conservative evangelical Christians, and also trad Catholics and conservative Mormons. (Basically any deeply religious group that trends more fundamentalist even if they don't meet the technical definition of fundamentalist.)

I found an interesting VICE article from 2022 that ties drag panic in England to various COVID conspiracy theories: https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3p38b/drag-queen-story-hour-covid

Maybe these different beliefs are sort of overlapping Venn diagrams?

Given general anti-LGBTQ sentiment in the US that seems to be on a steep rise, it would make sense that children's drag story hours would sort of be the canary in the coal mine because it has elements that are easily muddled within conspiracy-prone minds. Children! Drag queens! Books! Sex! Pedophilia! Burn!

 

 

[Alisamer]

17 hours ago, noseybutt said:

Really interesting questions.

I suspect that the recent drag panic has ties to Q-Anon and Q-Anon-adjacent conspiracy theories.

There is also a Q-adjacent group who literally think ALL celebrities (except the ones they like, until they stop liking them) are trans individuals. All of them. 

Literally. They will post a photo of a celebrity couple and point out random meaningless physical features "proving" that the woman was born a man and vice versa. Because... I have no idea. Apparently to become famous at all you have to switch gender? But since all those people have video and photos of them as a child as their assigned gender (because they are cis, not trans) the theory expands to them having been "chosen" (by whatever bogeyman they're on about currently - deep state or illuminati are common ones) and their parents forced to raise them as the opposite gender, or something. 

I think this part is a combo of jealousy, misogyny, and a heavy helping of racism. They're jealous of celebrities, so have to find a reason they are not normal people who are talented and hard working enough to be successful. Misogyny, because any female celebrity who doesn't 100% fit their narrow physical preferences is first on the list to be "outed" as trans. And racism because a lot of them think Jews are behind the whole deep state thing, and also of course women of color are very often targets of their ire (Venus and Serena Williams, for example, get this a lot).

I know that bit is a little off topic of drag storytime, but the fact it exists at all I think is a symptom of the sort of fear and disdain for trans individuals that gets transferred over to drag as well. And that there are a number of people around who are... I don't know. I want to say emotionally stunted, or just angry, or maybe stupid, or misled, or probably ALL those things while also being hateful and glad that these days they don't have to hide their bigotry and hate so much anymore. And of course those people are going to be against drag storytime because of COURSE they are.

Literally anything that is not explicitly white, male centered, performatively heterosexual, and the "right" kind of Christian for whatever person we're dealing with is going to piss some people off.