Andrew Watts
I took my son to Drag Queen Story Hour
The nice young man in the library had told us he was worried about protests when I booked tickets for Drag Queen Story Hour. We only began to hear the chants halfway through the show; they drifted up from the courtyard in front of St John’s Hall, the council building that houses Penzance library, through the window behind where my son and I were sitting. They got louder and louder – the children started looking round, puzzled, and the drag queen gesticulated at me to close the window. It took me a few moments to realise what the gestures meant – I had assumed that it was what they call ‘vogueing’ – but I eventually pushed the sash closed. But not before I heard what they were chanting: ‘Drag! Is! For! Everyone!’
It had been clear when we arrived that the counter-protestors outnumbered the protestors. There were one or two unsmiling women holding A3 placards – ‘This is not pantomime! It’s political indoctrination!’ – surrounded by a larger number of local activists. I recognised several from the Labour party stall which, every couple of weeks, displaces the street drinkers from the corner of Greenmarket outside BetFred; one was the Labour candidate in the last election. These activists took up most of the pavement, forcing my son and me on to the road until one of the bored-looking policemen told them to let us squeeze past. Some carried full-sized flags. ‘This one’s the non-binary flag,’ one of them patiently explained.
Most of the counter-protestors wore face masks. I am not sure why there is a correlation between supporting LGBT rights and Covid risk-aversity, except, perhaps, the signalling potential of both, but muffling their chants did mean we got through most of story hour without disturbance.
The fact was, the original protestors – and I am pretty sure they were not far-right, white nationalist thugs as we had been promised – were wrong. Drag Queen Story Hour was very much pantomime: the drag queen came into the room backwards, so that the children quite naturally shouted: ‘Behind you!’ Far from being hypersexualised, Aida H. Dee wore unflattering bell-bottoms, and was not even wearing women’s shoes. Can you really trust a drag queen who finds high heels uncomfortable?
If anything, there were more sexual references in the pantomime at Wimbledon Theatre last year, although it was Dick Whittington. The only indoctrination came right at the end, when we were taught how to say a drag queen ‘Goodbye-ee!’. The children, who had been excitedly roaring, karate-chopping and dabbing as instructed, did not copy this as enthusiastically as their parents.
I had gone to the Drag Queen Story Hour expecting to be underwhelmed. Its own social media gave the impression, from photographs of the drag queen with excited parents and baffled children, that this was something that was laid on to satisfy the self-congratulation of the parents. Its YouTube channel has the drag queen Tia Kofi reading a story without even doing the voices. I cannot say that self-congratulation was entirely absent from the grown-ups at the event – who, again, outnumbered the children – but Aida H. Dee was a perfectly competent children’s entertainer. One child, the moment the story started, ran away in fright to join her mother at the back of the room; but one child always does. The rest enjoyed themselves, loudly.
As the council and, in identical wording, the Drag Queen Story Hour’s own publicity materials kept reminding us, Aida H. Dee is a published children’s author. Aida H. Dee is indeed a published author: The Three Goats United, which Aida read, is published by Drag Queen Story Hour UK (founder, owner and director: Aida H. Dee). It’s not a terrible book: it tells in rhyme (or near as dammit) the story of three goats, one brown, one black (at this point the drag queen made slightly too much eye contact with the only black family in the library) and one – get this! – pink. They are threatened by a wolf (white) but manage to escape by defecating on his head. There may be some subtext in there, for anyone prepared to undertake a close reading, but I don’t see how it feeds into, as the council claims, educating and informing residents in Cornwall about the harm and damage hate incidents have on us all.
I asked my son what he had thought of the show. He liked it, he said, and the drag queen was just as good as the dame in Dick Whittington. The dame, however, had thrown sweets into the audience, which the drag queen, much to his disappointment, had failed to do. My son then reminded me of my promise of a ‘cut’ of my fee for this piece. I always respect the hustle.