Storytime with a performer (who happens to be a drag artist)

The world doesn’t hang about for nuance, does it? It makes up its mind really quickly and then starts shouting from a place of emotion and sometimes, sadly, hate. Social media and the media seem to encourage this. I feel they bring out the worst aspects of human nature and appear to revel in them as - after all – contention does keep people hooked doesn’t it? 

So the latest shouting match appears to be around the protests aimed at drag artists who read stories to children. One such act read one of my books recently and made 

it far more entertaining than I ever could. It was totally child-friendly, really funny and extremely engaging. So what is all the fuss? Well I have been watching closely…. 

Drag has its history in a gay culture that was mostly pushed underground and 

‘outside’ mainstream – thus not in common consciousness, so many people are not used to it (other than a handful of ‘distanced’ TV celebrities). It also has history in 

the fact women were not allowed to play parts in theatre. Pantomime shows remnants of this. But to me, a man in an outlandish outfit is just that – a man in an outlandish outfit. It’s funny, garish and over-the top and I absolutely love it. 

But what I am picking up is that a man in a dress is too unusual for a small, but noisily aggressive, number of people. And for those people, what seems to happen is that anything that diverges from ‘what most people are used to’ is lumped together on some sort of unrealistic scale that they assume always slides to an unrelated and harmful extreme. Through this process, some adults appear to manage to link drag to paedophilia. This is outrageous and highly offensive. The reality is there will always be dangerous adults who cause harm to children and I will make the fair assumption that most of these are straight males. To claim (consciously or even subconsciously) that a man is more likely to be a paedophile because he is a drag artist, is bizarre, hateful and totally illogical. To claim with such certainty that such a performer is going to harm a child says more about the ignorant minds of those saying such things than anything else. This is the realm of simplistic prejudice. 

There is also an idea that watching a drag act read a story is somehow sexualising children. This is absurd. I would love to hear a full and logical reasoning that explains this. This sexual connection really does need challenging because as I learnt when I worked in the field of relationships and sex education: anything that can be linked to sex – however incorrectly, can whip up strong emotional responses. We often have programming about sex that comes directly from the adults in our childhood. The significant others of our childhoods might have been prudish, they might never have made reference to sex, they might have giggled about it, they might have exposed us to things that made us uncomfortable, or in the worst cases, abused us. None of those approaches would give us a balanced, logical and non-emotional attitude toward sex. I think a drag act reading a story to children being automatically linked to sex has menacing origins. Women are sexualised, gay people are sexualised, trans women are sexualised and drag artists are sexualised. Sexualising these groups seems to be a method the establishment/right uses to demonise that which does not sit within it. There’s a lot of that about. It’s really time to broaden horizons for those that sexualise these minority groups. How about a more everyday and actually relevant focus, like some gay people like gardening, some trans people love to cook and all drag artists are extremely entertaining? 

Then there’s the whole, ‘you’re going to make children trans’ thing I keep hearing. To that I would firstly have the knee-jerk reaction of ‘so what?’ I welcome any challenge to gender constructs and identity. They are so restrictive and often damaging. If a child grows up to question or change their identity in any way – that’s great in my book. Nobody does this lightly even though the media will imply that there are people going around forcing conversion of vulnerable young people. (It’s good to remind yourself that the media always has the agenda of bringing you the most shocking stories, whipping you up, unsettling you and is certainly not impartial. It can also give you a distorted and exaggerated view of the prevalence of what they report: making generalisations from one off incidents). But my main point is, seeing a drag artist read a story is extremely unlikely to make a child go, ’you know what, I have had enough of identifying with the gender I was assigned at birth’ if that’s your misplaced fear. I mean get real people! It’s clear that understanding trans issues is considerably outside the mainstream awareness, therefore most people are ignorant about them, and yet still happy to judge, often quite forcefully and angrily, from that place of ignorance. Same thing happened historically with race. It’s a low-level thinking response, not a high level one. 

The children I witnessed watching a story read by a drag act loved it. What’s more, I like to think their minds have been expanded to challenge a narrow idea of what is ‘normal’: that idea, the one that leads people to become prejudiced, able to target minority groups, never bother to develop their understanding to tackle their ignorance and to be comfortable to hate. Surely everyone understands finding excuses to hate is simply wrong and we must all know that kindness is the ultimate aspiration? I for one, enjoy, revel in, am interested by and celebrate difference of any kind. It definitely makes the world so much richer.