Drag Pedagogy: Grooming by Any Other Name
Dear readers,
I recently remembered an article I wrote for Gays Against Groomers nearly two years ago about drag pedagogy, which I think is as relevant today as it was then. When I went looking for it, however, I had a hard time finding it because I think Google does not index the site it is on (of course). So, I thought I would reshare it here to make it easier to find and draw a bit of renewed attention to it.
In the piece, I discuss the origins of Drag Queen Story Hour and how the drag pedagogy that underpins it really is grooming by going through the “manifesto” that sparked this weird cultural obsession with drag queens reading to children:
Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is one of the most contentious issues in the current debate surrounding gender ideology. Many throw accusations of “grooming” at these events, which involve drag queens reading children’s books to kids at libraries, schools, and other venues. Others brush it off as harmless entertainment and the accusations of grooming as far-right hysteria—even “stochastic terrorism.”
The truth is that DQSH is not harmless, and it is, in fact, steeped in a political and ideological agenda that targets children. Drag itself is adult entertainment full of sexually charged themes meant to be performed at nightclubs. It did not lose these elements when children became the audience.
This is all spelled out in a paper called “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood,” which Christopher Rufo called the “manifesto” of DQSH in his investigation into the movement.
The paper was co-written by Harper Keenan, an assistant professor who heads the SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) program at the University of British Columbia and Harris Kornstein, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, a founder of DQSH, and a drag queen who goes by the stage name Lil Miss Hot Mess.
You can read the rest of the piece over on the Gays Against Groomers RADAR site.
My take on drag as a gay man in my late 60s is that it is a vestige of pre-Stonewall gay bar culture that long ago outlived its usefulness.
It may be difficult even for middle aged people to grasp that as recently as the early 1960s gay men were marginalized second class citizens. Most had a choice between being closeted and enjoying the same rights and opportunities as their straight peers, especially if they were married to a woman, or being out and leading a demimondaine existence. Vocational choices were severely limited: florist, hairdresser, decorator, artist or entertainer was about it.
As oppressed minorities generally do, gay men developed a subculture that provided a sense of identity, belonging and shelter from a hostile world. Camp was part of that identity, a tacit way to signal one's sexual orientation to others. And drag queens had a key role in gay nightlife.
That was then, this is now, when gayness is so mainstream that the phrase "cisgendered gay white professional male" is one of the worst insults a queer can level at a gay man.
As far as I am concerned, drag queens are as archaic and gauche as those gay guys who have been referring to each other as "she/her" since before gender identity metastasized throughout society.
Though I have known a buttoned-down gay banker who did drag, my impression is that most drag queens are party boys and bad boys, maybe even bad party boys. Booze and drugs usually abound in venues where gay men congregate to recreate. Forget about calling most drag queens artists. An artist will leave a piece of their soul behind with the audience. The typical drag queen is a histrionic personality whose act screeches: "Look at me - aren't I fabulous?"
But Drag Queen Story Hour? The optics are terrible. A drag queen is not a variation on Snow White or Cinderella; he's an adult entertainer whose queerness is and should remain far beyond a child's capacity to understand.
That said, drag queens show no signs of going the way of Vaudeville. It is the queers' way of owning the TERFs.
The main performative objective of dragmen is blatantly obvious; that is, to mock, degrade and defame women - or those they refer to as "bleeders, breeders and b * tches." When impersonating women they usually refer to themselves as "b* tches also in case anyone hasn't grasped the fact that they consider women subhuman, animals i.e. dogs. Dragmen's speech is usually littered with misogynistic sexual innuendo, pandering to an appreciative audience who the dragmen try to sexually arouse with their autogynophilic antics. Their autogynophilic intentions have been explicitly explained by autogynophiles like Nina Arsenault and Andrea Long Chu.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/05/19/a-pornified-view-of-womanhood/
While it's women who are the objects of ridicule in drag, it's men who use themselves to embody the crudeness, venality, enviousness, hypersexuality and stupidity they portray as being the characteristics of women. Drag minstrels have been around for probably hundreds of years, while racial minstrals were more varied and of shorter duration because of loss of public support for demeaning characterizations of racial and ethnic groups - but not for women. If you don't believe: Just observe.