Drag Queen Story Hour in Laguna?
The Laguna Art Museum wants your very young children to attend Drag Queen Story Hour—on Father’s day weekend, no less. On their website, the museum Director and Board promise an in-person visit by a “glamorous, positive and unabashedly queer” role model: a drag queen in full costume to help defy “rigid gender restrictions.”
Drag queen storyteller “Pickle” plans to read titles like The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish written by “Lil Miss Hot Mess.” The book, available on Amazon, is advertised for kids from age 2-7. According to Amazon, the book offers a “quirky twist on a classic nursery rhyme by illustrating all the ways to ‘work it.’” A companion book by the same author is If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It. Again, according to Amazon, it encourages kids to: “Strike a pose. Blow a kiss. If you’re a drag queen and you know it… let it show by ‘shaking your bum.’”
If this was just about “art” – grown men wearing outrageously extreme feminine clothing, wigs and makeup – why read books celebrating being queer? Why not If You Give a Mouse a Cookie? Do you want your 4-year-old to be a “little hot mess” shaking his booty and working it? What message is this sending our children?
This issue goes far beyond the scheduling decisions of the Laguna Art Museum—which is, incidentally, partially funded with our taxpayer dollars. More importantly, this goes to the heart of maintaining innocence, which speaks to the larger, recent trend of sexualizing children. They are exposed at ever younger ages to things and ideas far beyond their ability to process and understand, including print and images on the internet that are pornographic.
As a society we used to shelter our kids from overt sexual matters until they were mature enough to make up their own minds about them. It’s worth emphasizing that the book which Pickle the drag queen proposes to read is for children ages 2 -7. This is sexualization of children at an extremely early age, pure and simple. Should kids be forced to question whether they are a boy or a girl at an age when they should be learning their colors and letters, and how to safely cross a street? Children used to wonder what they would be when they grew up. An astronaut? An engineer? A builder? A fireman? Now they are taught to wonder in kindergarten if they were born in the right body or if they should be drag queens.
Drag shows can be entertaining for a consenting adult, but inappropriate and confusing for a kid. Let our children have their childhoods. There are many more appropriate ways to promote the acceptance of other lifestyles than to expose toddlers to such presentations.
It's time for our community to rally. The very youngest among us need protecting and nurturing.
OUR KIDS DO NOT NEED READINGS BY FULLY-COSTUMED DRAG QUEENS.
What is the Laguna Art Museum thinking?
— Jennifer Zeiter and the GLBGOP Board —
*** NOTE: SINCE WE POSTED THIS BLOG, THE ART MUSEUM ALTERED THEIR DESCRIPTION OF THIS EVENT. CLICK BELOW TO SEE THESE CHANGES AND PICTURES OF THE PROTEST AT THE MUSEUM ***