MFer you explained to your children that an obese elderly man invaded your house to give them a PS5 and flew away on a magical sleigh.
Or that an independently wealthy fairy sneaks into their room while they sleep because she has a thing for teeth.
Children’s teeth. I got an $800 bill for pulling one of my adult teeth. But it was way cheaper than the $3k for a root canal.
Maybe that’s where she gets her money.
The fae don’t charge and you should not trust them on that basis
I have to wonder about the people who are fully 100% convinced that it’s just knowing about gay/trans/queer people that “turns” their children LGBTQ.
It’s like when I asked my youth leader in Bible study when he chose to be straight and he looked me dead in the eyes and answered, “when I was 12”. I wonder if he ever figured it out.
“Being gay isn’t your choice. It’s mine. You are gay now.”
might be biased due to being bi myself but imo the simpler/more likely explanation is that the “homosexuality is a choice, reject it” homophobes are mostly bi people who’ve been conditioned by their environment from an early age to reject the same sex attraction, so it literally is true for them. In private they might also prefer gay porn because they find the taboo aspect arousing (a common pattern that extends to fetishes).
On demographic surveys bi people are much more common than gay people as well, but bi erasure is a thing in both the straight and LGBT community
Oh yeah you might be right about most of the “homosexuality is a choice” guys. I wrote that article right after Nick Fuentes got caught looking at gay porn, so I was thinking about that cliche.
I really like that, and will posit the transphobic chaser (chaser is the term the trans community uses to describe people who fetishize us) as further evidence. There are plenty of cis people who are attracted to us normally, they’re a huge chunk of who I date, and they’re usually somewhere between neutral and good with our issues. Sometimes you even get someone transphobic who found themselves attracted to a person who happens to be trans.
But then there’s the chasers. Some are attracted to our bodies as novelty, but a large chunk are virulently bigoted towards us, and they follow the same pattern. They’re ashamed to be seen with us (even if we pass for cis), overly focus on our genitals, and generally treat us like we exist for their fetishization of us. And this winds up with a nasty cycle of them trying to define our existence as a fetish, them attempting to push us out of “normal” society and into a life where we hide or are relegated to sex work, and in a society where they succeed we’re deemed disgusting immoral sex objects that only sick freaks are into which creates more of the bigotry by which fetishization spreads.
I think some of that is right, and maybe all of it for a portion of people, but I also believe there are gay or bi people who hate that about themselves and that causes them to be homophobic. I don’t think that’s a large percentage of homophobic people, but I do think it’s not zero.
I don’t blame the gay community or gay people for their own oppression. I blame these bigots, as well as all of the other bigots they join. It doesn’t matter to me what you truly believe underneath or whether your actions are motivated by self hatred.
Oh yeah statistically it’s gotta be that some homophobes are queer. Queer people are 10% of the population, and homophobes are even higher. Two groups that large, there’s got to be crossover. Historically, it would have been even moreso the case.
I’m just unconvinced that queer people are the majority of homophobes because that makes no sense, and I’m unconvinced that the study randomly found mostly bi homophobes. The sheer prevalence of the gay homophobe trope is out of proportion with the conditions that would have been capable of creating homophobia in society in the first place and sustaining it.
For one thing, the study asked the men to rate themselves on the Kinsey scale. Those men fully believed they had never felt attraction to another man. And only 20% of the homophobes showed no penile reaction. Meanwhile, 66% of the gay-accepting men had no reaction.
Yeah, I think often the nuance in the criticism that’s easy to miss is that often when people automatically assume a homophobe is gay it can be used to absolve straight society of the homophobia it perpetuates by pretending homophobia is mostly an issue of self hate rather than one in which members of an oppressed class are taught to hate themselves by less focused bigots of the privileged group, and then are used to do the dirty work of homophobic violence. This is notable in conversion therapy where the people running it are “ex gay” but the people sending their loved ones or telling people to are straight.
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Homie, what?
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It’s never been about the “children”.
I was living in military housing, which were duplexes, and one guy was concerned about the lesbian couple that moved in next to them, asking how he would explain to his young children if they heard sex noises through the wall. I asked him how he would explain straight sex noises to them. He stopped voicing his concerns to me.
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“What is the sound of two clams slapping?”
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Being able to explain things in life to your child is basic parenting.
even if you can’t you can say it, like:
- I don’t know
- don’t worry about it
- I’ll explain when you’re a little older
but in reality “how will i explain to my kids” has never been a genuine question. you can say “some people do that” and that is all the explanation needed. no, this is just code for “i don’t want to see this myself, and I’m using my children as an excuse”.
I’ve found with my kids “I don’t really know, how about we look it up together” is very effective.
it is, and I’ve even learned some things because of it. I’m just saying if you’re really trying to avoid the issue you can just do it, it’s not like you’re giving a testimony.
It’s also code for “I really hate myself for who I am on the inside, and seeing other people be their authentic selves makes me sad, angry, and confused. If my kids learned that it was OK to be themselves, I would lose my shit. They must suffer as I have suffered.”
Usually the issue is LGBTphobic parents convinced themselves anything remotely LGBTQIA is sexual in nature, and they must protect their kids, that if they actually believe it, and not just either “noble lying” (seen some christian fundamentalists admitting “it’s not actually harmful, but what if it’ll be too late for heaven?”), or just doing it for cruelty reasons (bigots, just like bullies, like to paint their targets as people deserving of the bad treatment).
And this also has a hidden assumption that talking to your kids about anything sexual isn’t good. That mindset can lead to teenage pregnancy because, like it or not, our bodies are wired to make sexuality easily discoverable, even if society wasn’t full of it (and it would still be full of it even if lgbt-ness could be dialed to 0).
On another note, wanting to suppress sexuality so that women have fewer options and might be more likely to choose those suppressing it is such a pathetic mindset.
You don’t have to explain it if you haven’t taught them to hate from an early age.
Jesus Christ… do kids really do regular active shooter drills at school now? This country is beyond fucked.
In America they’ve been doing it since I was in middle school. And for good reason, too.
I almost made it out of high school without needing to utilize what we were taught in those drills, but then towards the end of my senior year some jackass kid decided to bring a gun to class and started shooting teachers and students. America is wild.
It’s absolutely insane that mass murders at schools have just become a fact of life in the US now, where it happens on an almost monthly basis, perhaps even more frequently than that.
In the UK we’re struggling with a knife crime epidemic too. So much senseless violence taking too many lives on both sides of the Atlantic.
Craziest thing is that neither Canada nor most of western Europe is dealing with this. i.e. it’s not just senseless violence, but entirely preventable senseless violence.
Even places like Switzerland, which have a high gun ownership rate, don’t.
When my dad was young, he and his brother found one of great-grandad’s old revolvers in a storage trunk, and brought it to school. Once lunch rolled around, they took it out and showed it to the teacher, who thought it was a very cool antique, and they and the teacher spent the lunch period oohing and aaahing over it. A school shooting wasn’t even something people thought about. It just didn’t happen.
Schools here also used to have firearms clubs and drill teams; my high school actually had an all-women shooting team if I remember correctly. And it was an inner-city school.
Somewhere, something changed here in the US. I don’t know when or why. But a good deal of gun owners and 2A supporters grew up in those days and remember them well, and I think they don’t want to believe that change happened?
Maybe it was when people started fetishizing guns? I don’t know, but I wish it would stop. No other countries deal with this kind of nonsense.
where it happens on an almost monthly basis
It’s more than one a week.
The chart isn’t up to date for 2024: https://www.cnn.com/us/school-shootings-fast-facts-dg/index.html
All incidents of gun violence are included if they occurred on school property, from kindergartens through colleges/universities, and at least one person was shot, not including the shooter. School property includes but is not limited to, buildings, fields, parking lots, stadiums and buses. Accidental discharges of firearms are included, as long as at least one person is shot, but not if the sole shooter is law enforcement or school security.
That’s kind of important since that definition doesn’t line up with what most people are thinking about when they hear “school shooting”. To provide an example, let’s say a drug deal goes bad in the parking lot of a football field after hours and someone gets shot - that’s a school shooting. Not as bad as some definitions though, since a street shooting where a stray bullet happens to strike a garage building used to maintenance school buses probably doesn’t count under this definition.
Also, I find it interesting that the rates spiked way the hell up for the Biden admin, like 2021 to present is way higher than before.
Also my state has a really low rate despite having extremely lax gun laws (literally allowing open carry to everyone 18+ who can otherwise legally have a gun and concealed carry to everyone 21+ who can otherwise legally have a gun).
We do fire drills once or twice a year where I live (not the US). I’ve been around for forty years and I’ve met only two people with a firearm licence (both for shooting sport-related reasons). The European mind can understand the historical reasons beyond the 2nd Amendment, but not the fetishization of firearms.
The 2nd itself isn’t even the problem, it’s that it isn’t in any actuality followed. It explicitly says “well regulated militia”. I’m an armed leftist but nothing about US firearms is well regulated
In this context “well regulated” means like a smoothly-running clock, with the implication being that militia members will need weapons for training and practice.
As a lefty, part of me wishes we learned into the well regulated militia part and viewed firearms as a part of community defense. But, also as a lefty, there’s much more important things we could do to improve community resiliency before we finally get to firearms training.
In the context and time it was written, this means something closer to “armed citizenry trained to handle their weapons and how to respond to a threat” and not “restricting weapons to the national guard” or “restricting weapons based on the number of total rounds they can hold” or something like that.
I suspect most of the pro-gun folks wouldn’t be that angry at the idea of requiring range time and local emergency drills as opposed to the usual attempts to restrict 2A.
In the context of when it was written, the authors didn’t believe having a standing army was a good idea, machine guns either didn’t exist or would melt after any sustained use, and artillery was meant to either break walls or make infantry nervous that they might end up being one of the few hit.
The ship has sailed on all of those and many other assumptions people had in those days, which makes me think that maybe it’s time for a new constitution. And maybe codify some of the gentlemen’s agreement stuff and harden the system against those who just want to ruin it from within because it’s more profitable for some if governments don’t help people meet their needs.
I am a 66 year old American. I have no guns. The only time I have seen or operated one was when I was in the Navy in the early 1980s. I have seen the damage that guns can do several times in the 30 years I have been working as a child protective service caseworker/supervisor.
Yes, yes they do.
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I’m nearly 30 and did them in elementary school
I’m in my 30s and we had them all throughout grade school.
I graduated in 2002. Based on the other responses, it seems like they started doing them shortly after that.
I’m 43, and we didn’t have them at all by the time I graduated in '96
Columbine was in '99, so that checks out. I think schools started doing them sometime after that tragedy.
Which was kinda weird to me. Bowling Green happened a couple years earlier, and there had been school shootings in this country ever since the mid to late 1800s. Seemed like an overreaction to me.
What are you referring to with Bowling Green?
Apparently it was Paducah, not Bowling Green, I conflated two different stories
https://www.ksba.org/protected/ArticleView.aspx?iid=6GAU2A2&dasi=3G32
I’m pretty sure active shooter drills have been ongoing for over a decade at some schools at this point. There was a whole thing a few years ago about schools “putting litter boxes in classrooms for kids that identify as cats” that conservatives were freaking out about where it turned out that the schools had cat litter in classroom survival kits. They sell Kevlar backpacks for kids.
This country has been screwed for decades now.
yup
I’m teaching Highschool in Germany. We do fire drills once a year and involuntarily every time something goes wrong in chemistry class. We also do what we call amok drills every other year.
Likely monthly or every two-three months, if my memory serves and they haven’t increased the rates any. I think really after Sandy Hook they doubled in intensity, I remember doing active shooter drills with regularity after that moment.
It should be broadly easier to explain that than to explain how every summer is hotter than the last which is why their chances of dying of old age is quite slim.
I have the greatest friend whom I ADORE who is a gay guy whose family is religious. I asked him how he got along with his mom, and he said he loves her very much and they have great laughs together, but she also tells him that gay people are going to hell on a routine basis. He and I agreed that I would be his adopted mom going forward and that he didn’t need to ever feel like she was right for one moment.
Imagine saying something like this to your own kid. Imagine letting your religion be more important than your relationship with your kid. Whatever you might feel about your faith, you should have the brains God gave you that tell you you can’t change anybody and that you should love them as is, and keep your damn delusions to yourself at very least. Why would you ruin your relationship with your beloved child over them loving someone?
I grew up with a gay sibling in totally the opposite environment yet in the end just as toxic; we were raised to be extremely progressive, accept LGBT people as is and love them (and I am 50 so the fact we even discussed trans people back then is nothing short of miraculous because it was so taboo), and despite being Catholic we were also super pro choice. Yet my mother literally became psychotic because of my brother being gay, despite family members kindly and gently telling her all along to accept it, when it came to HER child it was unacceptable because she thought it reflected badly on her, and she was so obsessed with us being perfect that she did everything she could to force him to conceal it, including making him bring a beard to my wedding. Finally he grew a bit of a spine and got into a relationship with a guy, and despite her histrionics has continued. Now she’s obsessed with trying to make them get married, because she wants her friends to give them gifts to pay her back for all the wedding gifts she has given.
Not to trauma dump, but just wanted to point out that it can be difficult even for supposedly accepting families to really honestly support their LGBT children.
Anyway, do your part for LGBT folks. I myself just joined Stand In Pride, which is an organization where allies befriend LGBT people whose family has rejected them, and are available to be chosen family for weddings or whatever. Go to Pride, give out free mom hugs, step in as chosen family for them, whatever you can do. This world is really terrible to gay people no matter what progress we’ve made.
If, according to their own rules, that god created everything, it created LGTB+ people too. Are they saying their perfect imaginary being made a mistake? And if “it’s the devil’s work”, is it so weak that it can’t prevent it?
It’s so stupid. A local church which was kind of a hip young church recently announced they were not LGBT affirming and were really nasty about it, and like two thirds of their congregation left as a result. Even modern Christians don’t approve of this anymore.
Ehhh, that greatly depends on the church. There are still a lot of churches out there that are totally on board with hating anyone who isn’t perfectly straight. You know, that kind of hate that Jesus preached about all the time! People wouldn’t have as many issues with Christians if they actually followed Jesus’s teachings, but here we are.
Well some of them definitely aren’t. My friend I mentioned and I go to a very affirming church and he is beloved as well as our other gay and trans congregation. Nobody would dream of being anything else.
Are they saying their perfect imaginary being made a mistake? And if “it’s the devil’s work”, is it so weak that it can’t prevent it?
The usual answer to this is that God gave man free will, and he can use that free will to act against God (or else the garden of Eden myth would be impossible) and if you choose to be gay, that’s on you. That being LGBTQ+ is a choice is pretty fundamental to it, and also why they tend to believe in things like conversion therapy - if it’s a choice, you can be taught to choose differently.
things like conversion therapy - if it’s a choice, you can be taught to choose differently.
Oh, fuck!
I mixed that term up with “gender-affirming care”.That explains the negativity around “conversion therapy” xD
“When did you choose to be heterosexual? And can you be gay for a week?” 🤷♂️
Also, according to their rules, “love one another” is the single most important one. “Don’t be gay” is in an ancient book that also includes “woman in their period must sleep in a separate tent”, but we don’t see them applying that one, do we?
So going by what’s actually in the bible, hating gays is a bigger sin than being gay. Who’s going to hell now?
Your mom sounds like something the experts refer to as a “Cunt”
i wonder how much of the pro-LGBT stuff was just badges she could pin on her chest for clout, instead of actual belief.
She has BPD so yes. And no I think she genuinely believes it, I really do, just not for her child. She’s not one to fake that to her small credit
I noticed something similar with my in-laws, as far as ruining your family relationship by not accepting people. The grandma goes on rants to her daughter about anti-trans and the pronoun (they/them). She has so much energy for this hate she preaches to her daughters (she has 2) all the time they talk. Always grabbing those talking points.
One daughter has 4 kids and they are all under 18. Some of them experimented with gender fluid stuff. I’m not well versed enough to explain. I know one goes by they/them and the grandmother won’t make an effort, or when she messes up the gender she makes a big scene of “I’m old, it wasn’t like this. Blah blah.”
The really weird thing is after all this hate and after the grandma started putting up walls to her grandchildren (because of the hate she preaches about their siblings). Now she complains that no one wants to talk to her or hang out with her when she visits. Does she not know she was talking about her family during those rants?
She got hooked on some alt right news bs. Started saying she was a tradwife, making butter, and looking for raw milk. Idk what happened, especially since I saw her when she was “strong woman” and gay friendly when she was raising her kids.
That’s so sad. Facebook and the like are the devil for creating those echo chambers.
Imagine hurting someone for living their life. How do they lives with themselves?
I don’t know the Lemmy equivalent, but /r/raisedbynarcissists…
BPD actually. They’re just as difficult.
How to explain drag to a child: “Some men like to dress up like pretty ladies and perform songs.”
Gosh, that was so hard.
But but but I need them to understand why it makes me feel strange things and that’s why they’re going to HELL
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If you don’t teach your children that there are only two genders and that only heterosexuality is ok then you don’t have to explain it to them at all. Our children were exposed to our lesbian friends including a lesbian couple and our gay friends including a gay couple from the days they were born. They met one of my trans friends when they were very young. If you don’t teach children to hate then they won’t hate. If you struggle with how to speak to your children about these things then you’ve already failed them and the future.
There have always been gays and trans people. There will always be gays and trans people. Get the fuck over youselves.
Interestingly how my dad taught me was by not talking about it. He didn’t talk about race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, nothing. I watched him interact with all walks of life and watched him treat everyone with the same basic level of respect. Now that I’m older I treat it just like my dad taught it, everyone is a person and unless shown otherwise deserves basic respect.
Exactly. We did the same thing with our kids. They saw us interacting with a wide range of people. When our son came home from a friend’s house and said, “Mommy, what she’s the word n----r mean? What does the word f----t mean?” we had a conversation about loaded words and how we don’t use them. I’ve been working to eliminate gendered insults like b**ch and p—y from my speech. My son called a friend a b–ch while gaming today and I told him not to use gendered insults and explained why. We teach our kids how to deal with people. If you teach them right they will be good human beings.
“Call him a fucking Asshat if you must.”
Sorry, I know you didn’t mean it like that, but I had to chuckle because the “No gendered insults” kinda sounds like everything else is fair play.
That’s basically what I said.
Even better!
to be fair, some people deserve to be called assholes
That’s how it was explained to me as a kid. But it was also made clear how it plays a pivotal role in aviation. Unfortunately it did have lifelong damage done to my sister, she grew up to be an aerospace engineer
I dream of a drag free* future for aviation! My rocket planes are very good at doing up and almost always come back down. I’m pretty much done, the problem area is just such a short moment in time between getting down all the way and coming to a safe stop. And the ones that don’t come back down.
- The drag is still there a lot of the time, but the aviation no longer depends on it.
“It’s like Halloween for grownups.”
“Probably involves more sugar too when you look at the drinks on offer at a lot of places…”
I was first introduced to drag in my childhood through cpl Klinger on MASH. I never really had a conversation about it with my family, but Klinger was always one of my favorite characters on the show and imo had the strongest character arc of all of the cast that lasted the entire run.
Just say its the force of air hitting the object as it moves, and since it hits in the opposite direction, it slows down the object. What RU talking abt in the second paragraph it has norelation to drag
I have a stupid question: why does drag reading hour even exist? Drag people are not all encompassing of trans or LGBT+ identities. If we want kids to be empathetic towards people different from them and teach them that it’s okay to question your gender, then let’s have trans reading hour. To me drag queens are performers, so having them be a role model for kids is the same as having Kim Kardashian or other reality performers be a role model for kids.
Anyone who knows how I post knows I am not anti-trans or a transphobe. I just question anything that doesn’t make sense to me.
They don’t need to be all encompassing for anything. A brightly dressed adult is just interesting to children, and people in general like reading to children because it’s fun and it promotes literacy. People use puppets to read to kids after all.
It’s also not about promoting being trans, it’s about making the kids aware that people are all different, live different lives and do different things. It’s why you get school visits from firefighters, various cultural presentations, science presentations etc.
You wouldn’t say a native american speaker was promoting being native american.
First of all, you don’t need to be LGBTA to be Queer, secondly, when it comes to normalising acceptance drag queens are brilliant. When I was a kid Olivia Jones (or Lilo Wanders?) was in like every second talk show round, having funny wholesome meta-takes.
Or, differently put: Imagine a 2.10m unit moderating a presidential debate in full drag. Heck, imagine a native american doing it in full regalia. As long as that’s not possible in the US because the adults would freak out you have to start with the kids so that they won’t freak out when they’re older.
then let’s have trans reading hour. To me drag queens are performers,
Judith Butler aside, trans folks generally don’t want to be performers. They tend to want to be who they are and be accepted as such, blend in as their gender, not stand out as breaking norms.
Yes absolutely. I think you meant to reply to the other poster though.
If it’s not about creating empathy for trans people, then I am against trans reading hour. Sorry, but I don’t care if kids like brightly colored stuff or someone would like to read to them.
My own preference is that role models should give you a goal or aspiration. I don’t think becoming a drag queen should be an aspiration, the same way I don’t think becoming a reality tv star should be an aspiration. Do I care if my own kid would want to be a drag queen? No. If we’re talking about creating goals for children’s future, then performance arts (while interesting) are not the goal that I would choose. That’s just my STEM bias, I guess.
If someone is both a scientist and drag queen, that’s awesome and I think we should celebrate that person. For most people, the barrier to entry to become a drag queen is zero and should not be a goal for future generations. Even reality tv stardom seems to require more skill and talent then, apparently.
Edit: I am not for giving kids role models for things which apparently don’t require skill or talent. Come to think of it, a lot of performance arts require skill and talent. Does being a drag queen require any skill or talent? If I am wrong, let me know
It is about creating empathy for trans people, like I said awareness about differences etc. And like I said, not really a role model because they don’t promote becoming trans or being a drag performer to the kids.
Drag performances definitely requires talent.
Bully for you, not doing things because they are fun and excluding activities that don’t serve a utilitarian purpose. This is reading hour for kids, not a presentation at Harvard. Last I checked, things need to be fun to get children engaged.
Why are you thinking it has to be a role model situation?
That’s a good question, I am getting it from here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_Queen_Story_Hour
The program strives to “capture the imagination and play of gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models”.[8]
Preferably, kids should have high talent and high skill queer role models, simply because the world is tough and I don’t want progressive kids to end up shark chum.
To clarify where I am coming from: I am an advocate for queer rights, and that includes anyone who does drag. So if we’re bringing in drag queens for story hour, maybe a compromise is that the performer should be something else too, like a ballerina or firefighter (as mentioned my preference is STEM). I don’t care, but simply being a drag queen is not enough. I am sorry
Why isn’t it enough? And the next paragraph after your snippet says exactly what behavior they are modeling for the children.
Nina West argues drag lets children be “creative” and “think outside the boxes us silly adults have crafted for them.”
Creativity and individualism.
Why can’t we find outlets for creativity which require skill or talent?
But we did. Drag requires skill.
Some drag queens do make a career out of it. And have fun doing it, I might add.
Or people just take it on as a fun hobby. Do you also have a list of approved hobbies kids can learn about?
And you do realize that it’s not a zero-sum game, right? You can introduce kids to drag queens and firefighters and doctors and astronauts; there’s no rule where you’re required to just pick one.
And, y’know, oh no, Heaven forbid kids don’t get read to by one of your ‘approved’ roll models once or twice in their lives. By that ‘logic’ should regular librarians be banned from reading books too? And maybe most parents, if they’re not in STEM?
You may need to take a step back and look, really look, at your beliefs here. Because you’re veering very close to the helicopter parent attitude of controlling every single hobby, habit, and interaction of your kid to force them into your mental ideal, and that is way, way more unhealthy for kids than a one-time Drag Queen Reading Hour.
Issue with that is that trans people are not performers. On the whole we do not want people to gawk at us like we’re unique little curiosities wheeled out specifically for inclusion hour to socialize a bunch of kids who are likely to hammer on our triggers. We usually have to do this for a lot of our one on one interactions with adults and random peoples kids and it’s mentally exhausting. Trans people do not want attention showered upon their gender. We usually want it to be the least interesting thing about us. If your librarian reading to your kids is trans and you bill it as “trans reading hour” that is flying damn close to workplace harassment.
The LGBTQIA however as a whole has a historic unique culture that isn’t passed down via being born into it. It has it’s own orthodoxy and history. It has experienced changes over time but Drag is a queer rooted performance art that has a history of criminalization and individual performers have lineages some of the more storied go back around 80 years. It’s definitely older than that but pre WWII stuff is murky and we lost some rather specifics due to it being an underground culture where written records purposefully don’t exist but it is essentially a cultural darling. It’s not that Drag Queens and Kings are full representations of an entire community - that’s not their job. But they are a performance art built around music, dance, comedy, improv and they love attention and treat what they do as a craft. Voguing is another LGBTQIA art form, ball culture is a historic queer social cultural event. The community is a culture and the art form that struck poses leaving the building as Stonewall burned aren’t gunna be plussed about some innocently ignorant comments from kids.
Drag Queen story hour is an opportunity to introduce kids to a unique culture’s history and performance that has value in it’s own right.
Hey I just want to thank you for this comment. I’ve been trying to better understand non-white/non-cis culture lately and it can feel a bit daunting.
Honestly idk what I’m trying to say, but your comment meant a lot to me. Somebody has to educate the straights and I appreciate you taking the time to politely answer this persons question despite them coming off a bit argumentative.
I am glad you enjoyed it! I have made it something of a personal hobby mission to lower barriers to understanding history, culture and theory of the community to outsiders. A lot of folks in the queer community don’t really want to teach because it means dealing with a lot of… Ignorance? Sometimes well intentioned or just neutral ignorance but like it’s not their fault? But since a lot of regressives co-opts that ignorance into hateful purpose it’s something a lot of the folks I know just can’t interface with.
I always try and just address these things with the most benefit of the doubt I can manage and make things as transparent as I can. If folks have questions about queer stuff I love it when folks have a genuine interest to learn something new! I am trans myself so trans stuff is kind of a personal base of knowledge.
Issue with that is that trans people are not performers. On the whole we do not want people to gawk at us like we’re unique little curiosities wheeled out specifically for inclusion hour to socialize a bunch of kids who are likely to hammer on our triggers.
But is reading about performance only? Firefighters are not performers and they read to kids. Let it be a trans firefighter then if they want
the community is a culture and the art form that struck poses leaving the building as Stonewall burned aren’t gunna be plussed about some innocently ignorant comments from kids.
Drag Queen story hour is an opportunity to introduce kids to a unique culture’s history and performance that has value in its own right.
These are great points, but unless the drag queen is also an activist it seems irrelevant
Edit to say not all drag queens are trans, and not all trans are drag queens. It seems unnecessary to enjoin drag queens to trans identity
Let me ask you this. Would it be appropriate to have a “Black Person Storytime”?
Kids like firefighters because it’s a hero job. They see the cool suit and know enough about the job to make it seem really neat and firefighters love a bit of admiration to offset some of the horrible stuff they see. The thing that unites firefighters and Drag Queens is that they are both things you do not things that you are. End of the day those are things that you roles take off and put away. You have on hours and off. But the thing about being trans, just like being black, it’s not something that you walk stop being when you don’t feel like dealing with it. Identities aren’t performed for someone else’s benefit and it is generally rude to ask that of someone because it is a very othering experience to have that levied at you. So some things are not appropriate to ask people because doing so implies that you do not respect their identity and only want to use their lives experience to further your own or others self improvement and ego .
You seem to have a hangup about authenticity here so I would like to ask another question of you. What if the point is not always to teach a lesson? What if your conception of a library’s mission statement isn’t on point?
Think about Sesame Street. What do muppets have to do with learning numeracy? My sibling is a librarian here in Canada and they will do anything to get kids in the door. They have a repitoire of childrens songs they learn and perform to engage babies. They use puppets and feltboards and dance in addition to reading. They host first Nations dancers and model train enthusiasts and did a teenage program where they looted a bunch of rejected stuffed animals from second hand shops and let the teens rip them apart and sew them up into insane shapes… Because it is a function of the library to engage people with fun things that get them interested in new skills and hobbies and connect with their neighbors and other cultural groups. They do birdwatching kits and ukulele programs and make marshmallow catapults. They do Lunar new years celebrations and dwali and Easter programs. You as an adult at any point can go and book a room for your special interest group (provided no safety or damage concerns) even if it is against the librarians wishes because that is a community service and is servicing other communities. They want people to know are a service you can go to perpetuate culture, get help with social safety nets and engage your mind beyond simply being a dry educational environment.
Libraries represent a public investment in culture, perspective and community. Education is only one of their many aims. So why does a Drag queen need to be an activist? They are reading to an engaged group of children and performing a pre vetted child friendly version of a cultural art that exists as entirely unique to their country. Even if the kids just liked the bearded sparkly princess and sat down and socialized with other children and were read a book there is value to giving a child a fun day at a library where they were given an opportunity to connect with people they might not have otherwise and maybe be inspired to read a little and learn about another cultural practice in a way that is fun. Fun fosters curiosity and passion to do self directed learning. Kids don’t need to be preached inclusion to like adults. If you treat something as fun and normal they learn the lesson on their own.
program where they looted a bunch of rejected stuffed animals from second hand shops and let the teens rip them apart and sew them up into insane shapes…
That is fucking awesome
Oh hells yeah. Teens are kind of difficult to engage for libraries but they ended up maxing out the program. A lot of the kids didn’t even know how to thread a needle but they ended up just proud of the weird shit they came up with.
Kind of epic aftermath as well. A quarter of the library was coated in frankenstuffie fluff.
Exactly, drag is a thing people do for personal expression in queer culture (unlike being a different race), but just because it’s related to queer culture doesn’t automatically make a drag queen okay to present at a story hour unless they’ve also done something else. So it’s like goth story hour. Or Juggalo story hour. Also, firefighting requires skill and training. Literally anyone can go do drag.
You seem to have missed my point. Libraries are a cultural trust. Anyone can perform a play but there’s a big difference between someone who does it professionally versus someone who performed it on an amatur basis. Drag is not just a fashion subculture… It’s a legitimate performance art. It might not be the sort one makes a living from on it’s own but there are people who actually fly across the country to perform in other cities … and there is such thing as bad drag.
What puzzles me is you seem very keen on devaluing Drag particularly? How is it different than say other cultural presentations like lion dancing or Rakugo story telling or traditional clowning? What makes it not culturally valuable and yet those other things acceptable?
Did you know that the Santa Claus at your library is a professional Santa? Anyone can wear the costume sure… but they specifically pick people who have reputable backgrounds as performers because you are dealing with a vulnerable population you have to make sure you are picking someone who has skin in the game . You could have a Goth performer if they were willing to find a way to make it more accessible as it is primarily a music forward subculture that is likely to go over the heads of the kids… But if they were like a goth comedian or magician or something there would probably be something to get a kick out of. I don’t know about Juggolos because that’s a pretty limited sub culture and might not translate to child friendly well… But showing that these people aren’t actually scary they just like to look scary and are real people under the facade has it’s own potential for kids to get some benefit from it. You wouldn’t want to just grab a random goth off the street and hand them a book, you want someone with a reputation because losing a reputation is something of a guarantee of good behaviour. Also… First time library drag queens go through a vetting process. They are assessed by people with at minimum a Masters degree who go over the set to make sure it’s in keeping with the library’s mission and certain performers get reputations for excellence between the community of library branches.
Also straight up. Kids love the Queens.
Also - the majority of the benefits of these things don’t come from the direct interactions between the performer and the kids but between kids and their parents. The take away is usually a demonstration to kids that their parents are accepting of some forms of non-conformity. A lot of the reason Drag as an art exists is because queer people created sanctuary communities after facing rejection from their families and created a form of comedy unique to queer culture to heal from those traumas. It’s why drag lineages have “mothers” and “daughters” or “brothers”. It’s a reclamation of family. Queer communities would carve out physical spaces to accept people who were refugees from their original communities. When kids see how their parents react to a drag queen they know much better than if they are simply told that they are safe to be weird. That their parents will still love them even if they like dresses or are flamboyant. That’s often at the core of what motivates a lot of drag queens to do story hour… Because being a library drag queen is dangerous. Those who do it don’t take it lightly and believe in what they are doing. A lot of them do so because they might not have had that acceptance from their parents or lived in fear of discovery growing up or they know someone who was rejected. You do not become a deag queen by being faint of heart. You have to be willing to brave some lunatics who actually want to hurt you . Even where I am in one of the most queer accepting places in the world it’s policy for library staff to walk drag queens to their cars to keep them safe. You don’t do that unless you believe in what you do.
Once you’ve seen a legit queen perform for kids you will get it. That polish and confidence isn’t something you get without experience.
What puzzles me is you seem very keen on devaluing Drag particularly? How is it different than say other cultural presentations like lion dancing or Rakugo story telling or traditional clowning? What makes it not culturally valuable and yet those other things acceptable?
Because it’s something anyone can get up and do one day. There’s no barrier to entry. The rest of the things you described require training and skill development. Even clowns have schools, but perhaps it’s the same as goth or Juggalo or drag.
I dont care if an architect who is also a drag queen does a reading hour, that would be awesome actually. So please stop straw manning me. I don’t hate drag queens, I hate leftists who try to legitimize sustaining one’s dignity and respect as a person on the empathy and kindness of others.
Also, just because someone belongs to queer culture (or any minority or embattled culture) does not automatically give that person some status such that we need to listen to or pay attention to that person
Edit to explain what I meant by kindness remark (bc apparently have to break down simple ideas lest they’re misconstrued): no, I am not saying don’t be kind or empathetic. I am saying a culture that teaches its members to expect that to sustain itself is in for a world of hurt because the whole world is not composed of just your members
You believe there is no barrier to entry? I invite you to go try it. Not just walking around in make up and a wig and bouncing around in front of your friends mind you. Go in front of an audience that payed a cover and entertain them for half an hour. Charm a room full of patrons who showed up with expectations. Deal with hecklers and queerphobia in a way that makes an audience laugh.
What you seem to require to recognize the value of a performer is being legitimized by a school that is validated by historical structures that determine art. Queer culture is generally not legitimized outside our own internal structures. We were frozen out of legitimacy and devalued by those structures. We had to create our own and because of criminalization our culture was atomized and localized. There is no acreditiation process for drag queens yes…Think for a minute why that is. I realize you are not intending to be discriminatory or cruel but regardless you are upholding a culture of discrimination that refuses to treat these historical arts as being valid unless someone in your wider dominant heterosexual culture rubber stamps it in a ritual of wide cultural accreditation. As a community that has been constantly under political fire and faced routine attempts at exterminaton for centuries yeah you can’t go to a university for a drag queen program. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to be instantly accepted as a queen if you tried to take a spot.
But moreover hackles down. You want to believe that I am condemning your soul as being evil that isn’t the case. You are ignorant. That is okay. There isn’t shame in being ignorant but if you dig in your heels and feel attacked because you are being challenged you will make this all about soothing your need to feel like you are a good person…and you can be a good person and still be doing harm by perpetuating something unthinkingly. This isn’t about you being a good person, it’s about the idea you are hauling along with you that holds a seed of subjugation of a community you do not understand.
Um… none of the things they listed have barriers to entry. You can take classes for them, and for something athletic like Lion Dancing it’s recommended to at least have some gymnastics training so you don’t get hurt, but you aren’t required to in order to perform.
Same with things like painting or playing instruments. Do you think Yo Yo Ma has a license to play his cello or something? Or Van Gogh had a painter’s license? He didn’t even have much formal training, for heaven’s sake. Do you also think their works are ‘low skill’? Would you object to Yo Yo Ma reading to kids?
Pretty much all art has no barrier to entry. What matters is how hard you work at it and how skilled you can become. And drag, as a performance art, is work.
Anyways, where did you get this weird idea that only things with a proper ‘barrier to entry’ (which, historically, has been expensive schooling that denies minorities proper access, btw—see what’s going on with PoC and trying to work exclusively with braiding textured hair, for example) is the only way to judge quality or worth? Why can’t art especially be judged on its own merits?
…And, um, did I read that right? You don’t like it when people empathize with others? Or are kind to others?
Why does anything exist? Why does firefighter reading exist? Can’t it just be, “normal person whose profession is irrelvant” reading hour?
It feels like you’re coming at this with the assumption that drag reading hour needs a special purpose otherwise it’s weird or something. Why does drag reading hour have to convince you it should exist?
I have a stupid question: why does drag reading hour even exist?
Because otherwise the top Google results for “rainbow dildo butt monkey” would be something much more horrifying. And if you do search for that, that story is what every right winger out there is thinking of when you mention drag reading hour.
That is a comedy of errors.
With the care that I’ve seen other people put into understanding the impact of their work, I can absolutely see the booking company staff being unaware of what they were booking, not communicating the purpose of the event to the staff, and not providing the library with photo stock of the costumed performers.
I hope whatever brain-dead peon that did this has woken up.
To me, the issue is that library reading hour is a precious commodity and libraries are tax payer funded. I don’t want my taxes going towards teaching kids to do low skill and low talent things.
I don’t hate drag queens, I enjoy their work and I don’t think kids are “too young” to learn about them. I just don’t think they represent good role models for kids. Again, to me they’re like reality tv stars
“low skill and low talent things” buddy wtf are you on about. All they’re doing is reading to the kids, something kids enjoy and is good for them. You sound like a brainrotted linkedin guru who wants everyone to be “on that money grindset” 24/7.
All I see are people who decide on things along tribal ideologies, we can do better. No one camp or tribe always has the best ideas
All I am saying is that kids need better role models than drag queens
Dude, this isn’t tribal. This is everyone saying that drag queens reading to kids is fine, and you hating on it for no good reason. Seriously, ‘I demand reading hour be only conducted by top STEM doctors’ is not a good reason.
I am not hating it on it for “no reason” and lol I didn’t say only stem people. I hate that I am being thought of as some bigot or close minded person, so I feel like it’s not worth going on about this 🤷♀️
Because you are, darling.
Drag queen reading hour is fun for kids and drag queens, and teaches kids tolerance.
You are the one fighting against it, because, and I quote, ‘I don’t want my taxpayer money going towards teaching kids to do low skill and low talent things’.
So that shows:
- You think being a drag queen requires neither skill nor talent
- You seem to think reading hour involves teaching kids about jobs they should have in the future instead of, you know, just reading to kids
- You want reading hour to be the exclusive provence of top experts in ‘high skill’ fields
Since those three points are quite nonsensical, it would seem you are either a very silly person, or a bigot trying to skate around your bigotry. Possibly because you don’t even know it’s there.
To be fair there might be a bit of techbro style ‘my child is only allowed to see things related to ‘high skill’ jobs and training for those jobs because little 5-year-old Timmy isn’t too young to be thinking about colleges and internships!’ nonsense too, I suppose, but that’s just as bad in a different way.
You don’t seem to like them or respect them—or actually know how much goes into being a drag queen, for that matter—if you think they’re ’low skill and low talent’.
Showing kids you can dress up like that and it’s okay is a very good thing, actually. When I was in grade school there was a kid who liked wearing dresses and stuff. And most of the kids mocked him relentlessly, to the point he had to switch schools, because for us a guy in a dress was ‘weird’. Maybe if we’d had a drag queen reading hour, we would have been more understanding.
Ultimately it comes down to, some drag queens decided to do this and they are. Trans people haven’t, at least not to this level of visibility. Maybe some trans people participate in drag reading hour. I dunno, I’ve never really engaged with it.
But that pretty much applies to any time the question is “why is group a doing something instead of group b?” It’s because group a decided to do it and group b didn’t, or because they both did but group a was more successful/visible than group b.
Edit: also, while the answer might seem obvious when put that way, I don’t think it’s a stupid question. IMO it’s better to ask a question if you’re not sure. If the answer is obvious, then you’ll know one more obvious thing than you did previously. A desire to learn and grow isn’t stupid.
