In the first paper, Ian M. Clark demonstrates that not only have children enjoyed drag long before the advent of queer theory proper, but that drag has been a staple element of children’s popular and educational entertainment. He historicizes the contemporary inflammatory rhetoric against Drag Story Hour by examining nineteenth-century drag performances in London’s East-End music halls, particularly within working class neighborhoods, as well as the still-popular tradition of pantomime. Using historical evidence of drag’s popularity with audience members of all ages, Clark asserts that present inflammatory claims misrepresent Drag Queen Story Hour as a malicious and lascivious queer agenda and fail to acknowledge it as the latest iteration in a long and celebrated history of drag performances enjoyed by children. Moreover, drag’s historical popularity with working class audiences contests its present mischaracterization as an ivory-tower threat against “real” Americans, who are frequently imagined as working class by right-wing media and politicians.
Next, Isabel Millán considers the book bans and challenges imposed on queer of color children’s literature since the 1990s. Millán centers Asha’s Mums, a book featuring an African-Canadian girl that was the center of controversy when its co-author, Rosamund Elwin, sued the school district of Surrey, British Columbia along with James Chamberlain, an openly gay kindergarten teacher who had been prohibited from incorporating LGBTQ-themed children’s picture books (including Asha’s Mums) into his curriculum. The Supreme Court of Canada eventually heard the case in 2002, ruling in favor of Elwin and Chamberlain. And yet, the district still caved to pressure to remove the book. Millán explores how the racial politics at play in 1990s censorship cases like this one compare with the protests against Drag Story Hour today, revealing how ongoing anxieties over children’s gender and sexuality are situated within North American racial logics.
Mary Zaborskis, in the third paper, shifts to the present to assert the ways that Drag Story Hour is needed for queer children today. Unlike many contemporary responses to the attacks on Drag Story Hour which have taken an assimilatory approach—drag queens are “just like us” and part of a multicultural world that children should encounter to be better citizens of tomorrow—Zaborskis argues that children might benefit from and perhaps even derive pleasure from seeing drag because it opens up possibilities for gender and sexual futures and presents. Assimilatory defenses of Drag Story Hour deny the gender play, queer history, and queer subcultures with which drag is affiliated, framing it instead as an ahistorical activity that has no bearing on a child’s gender, sexuality, or expression. This strategy, however, does not help children or drag queens, inadvertently constructing queerness as something to be avoided or to be experienced only at a deferred future time, creating dissonant experiences for the children who know they are queer today.
In the final paper, Gabrielle Owen builds on the present context analyzed in Zaborskis’ paper, countering the accusations made in right-wing attacks with a theorization of the gender and sexuality ethics implicit in the practice of Drag Story Hour. Situating today’s debates within a larger historical context of anxieties around childhood and sexuality, Owen contrasts early-twentieth century sex education pamphlets steeped in eugenicist logics to more recent children’s sex education books like Sex is a Funny Word that aim for more inclusive queer representation. The dynamics analyzed in these different educational texts mirror the starkly different conceptualizations of adult-child hierarchy in debates around Drag Story Hour. Owen flips the narrative in right-wing attacks, showing how arguments for the suppression of Drag Story Hour are themselves indicative of a harmful adult-child relationality based in logics of control. In contrast, Drag Story Hour aims to practice a more ethical relationality allowing for the possibility of child agency, self-naming, and self-knowing.