The Real Story Behind the Drag Queer Hour

They are called queers because they are mentally ill.
Because they are a freak of nature.

Now, whatever two or more adults voluntarily and quietly do behind closed doors is none of my business.
Each of us will answer for our own failures standing before the record of our lives on the other side of the vail.

But when they start trying to throw their perversion into others faces and groom children so they can use them for sex toys, it is damn well my and every other decent persons business.

The Ole Dog!

Aimed at children, the phenomenon is far more subversive than its defenders claim.

Drag Queen Story Hour — in which performers in drag read books to kids in libraries, schools, and bookstores — has become a cultural flashpoint. The political Right has denounced these performances as sexual transgressions against children, while the political Left has defended them as an expression of LGBTQ pride. The intellectual debate has even spilled into real-world conflict: right-wing militants affiliated with the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters have staged protests against drag events for children, while their counterparts in the left-wing Antifa movement have responded with offers to serve as a protection force for the drag queens.

Families with children find themselves caught in the middle. Drag Queen Story Hour pitches itself as a family-friendly event to promote reading, tolerance, and inclusion. “In spaces like this,” the organization’s website reads, “kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where everyone can be their authentic selves.” But many parents, even if reluctant to say it publicly, have an instinctual distrust of adult men in women’s clothing dancing and exploring sexual themes with their children.

These concerns are justified. But to mount an effective opposition, one must first understand the sexual politics behind the glitter, sequins, and heels. This requires a working knowledge of an extensive history, from the origin of the first “queen of drag” in the late nineteenth century to the development of academic queer theory, which provides the intellectual foundation for the modern drag-for-kids movement.

The drag queen might appear as a comic figure, but he carries an utterly serious message: the deconstruction of sex, the reconstruction of child sexuality, and the subversion of middle-class family life. The ideology that drives this movement was born in the sex dungeons of San Francisco and incubated in the academy. It is now being transmitted, with official state support, in a number of public libraries and schools across the United States. By excavating the foundations of this ideology and sifting through the literature of its activists, parents and citizens can finally understand the new sexual politics and formulate a strategy for resisting it.

Start with queer theory, the academic discipline born in 1984 with the publication of Gayle S. Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Beginning in the late 1970s, Rubin, a lesbian writer and activist, had immersed herself in the subcultures of leather, bondage, orgies, fisting, and sado-masochism in San Francisco, migrating through an ephemeral network of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadomasochism) clubs, literary societies, and New Age spiritualist gatherings. In “Thinking Sex,” Rubin sought to reconcile her experiences in the sexual underworld with the broader forces of American society. Following the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault, Rubin sought to expose the power dynamics that shaped and repressed human sexual experience.

“Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value,” Rubin wrote. “Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid. Clamouring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals. . . . Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.”

Rubin’s project — and, by extension, that of queer theory — was to interrogate, deconstruct, and subvert this sexual hierarchy and usher in a world beyond limits, much like the one she had experienced in San Francisco. The key mechanism for achieving this turn was the thesis of social construction. “The new scholarship on sexual behaviour has given sex a history and created a constructivist alternative to” the view that sex is a natural and pre-political phenomenon, Rubin wrote. “Underlying this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained. This does not mean the biological capacities are not prerequisites for human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not comprehensible in purely biological terms.” In other words, traditional conceptions of sex, regarding it as a natural behavior that reflects an unchanging order, are pure mythology, designed to rationalize and justify systems of oppression. For Rubin and later queer theorists, sex and gender were infinitely malleable. There was nothing permanent about human sexuality, which was, after all, “political.” Through a revolution of values, they believed, the sexual hierarchy could be torn down and rebuilt in their image.

There was some reason to believe that Rubin might be right. The sexual revolution had been conquering territory for two decades: the birth-control pill, the liberalization of laws surrounding marriage and abortion, the intellectual movements of feminism and sex liberation, the culture that had emerged around Playboy magazine. By 1984, as Rubin acknowledged, stable homosexual couples had achieved a certain amount of respectability in society. But Rubin, the queer theorists, and the fetishists of the BDSM subculture wanted more. They believed that they were on the cusp of fundamentally transforming sexual norms. “There [are] historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized,” Rubin wrote. “In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.” And, following the practice of any good negotiator, they laid out their theory of the case and their maximum demands. As Rubin explained: “A radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression. Such a theory needs refined conceptual tools which can grasp the subject and hold it in view. It must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history. It requires a convincing critical language that can convey the barbarity of sexual persecution.” Once the ground is softened and the conventions are demystified, the sexual revolutionaries could do the work of rehabilitating the figures at the bottom of the hierarchy — “transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers.”

Where does this process end? At its logical conclusion: the abolition of restrictions on the behavior at the bottom end of the moral spectrum — pedophilia. Though she uses euphemisms such as “boylovers” and “men who love underaged youth,” Rubin makes her case clearly and emphatically. In long passages throughout “Thinking Sex,” Rubin denounces fears of child sex abuse as “erotic hysteria,” rails against anti-child pornography laws, and argues for legalizing and normalizing the behavior of “those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.” These men are not deviants, but victims, in Rubin’s telling. “Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation,” she explains. “Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt.” Rubin wrote fondly of those primitive hunter-gatherer tribes in New Guinea in which “boy-love” was practiced freely.

Such positions are hardly idiosyncratic within the discipline of queer theory. The father figure of the ideology, Foucault, whom Rubin relies upon for her philosophical grounding, was a notorious sadomasochist who once joined scores of other prominent intellectuals to sign a petition to legalize adult-child sexual relationships in France. Like Rubin, Foucault haunted the underground sex scene in the Western capitals and reveled in transgressive sexuality. “It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves,” Foucault once told an interviewer on the question of sex between adults and minors. “And to assume that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”

Rubin’s American compatriots made the same argument even more explicitly. Longtime Rubin collaborator Pat Califia, who would later become a transgender man, claimed that American society had turned pedophiles into “the new communists, the new niggers, the new witches.” For Califia, age-of-consent laws, religious sexual mores, and families who police the sexuality of their children represented a thousand-pound bulwark against sexual freedom. “You can’t liberate children and adolescents without disrupting the entire hierarchy of adult power and coercion and challenging the hegemony of antisex fundamentalist religious values,” she lamented. All of it — the family, the law, the religion, the culture — was a vector of oppression, and all of it had to go.

The second prerequisite for understanding Drag Queen Story Hour is to understand the historical development of the art of drag. It begins with a freed slave named William Dorsey Swann, who dressed in elaborate silk and satin women’s costumes, called himself the “queen of drag,” and organized sexually charged soirées in his home in Washington, D.C. Over the course of his life, Swann was convicted of petty larceny — he had stolen books from a library and dinnerware from a private residence — and then, in 1896, was charged with “keeping a disorderly house,” a euphemism for running a brothel, and sentenced to 300 days in jail. From the viewpoint of modern sexual politics, the story has all the elements of the perfect left-wing archetype: Swann was a man who liberated himself from chattel slavery and then from a repressive sexual culture, despite the best efforts of the oppressors, the puritans, and the police.

Drag became explicitly political seven decades later, during the Stonewall riots of 1969, in which patrons of a gay bar in New York City rioted against police and began a wave of gay and lesbian political activism. As writer Daniel Harris explained in the counterculture journal Salmagundi, traditional drag performances from William Dorsey Swann until the mid-1960s were sensual experiences, “an innocuous camp pastime,” but with the onset of the sexual revolution, they became forms of resistance and revolution. “After the 1960s,” Harris wrote, “ideology [tightened] its grip on the aesthetic of drag when gay men began to use their costumes to reevaluate the whole concept of normality and thus carry out a crucial part of the cross-dresser’s agenda: revenge.” Drag performers increasingly saw their vocation as political and started street organizations such as Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in order to join the wave of activism rising through their communities in New York, San Francisco, and other hubs.

Suddenly, drag was not a private performance but a statement of public rebellion. The queens began using costume and performance to mock the fashion, manners, and mores of Middle America. In time, the need to shock required the performers to push the limits. “Men now wear such sexually explicit outfits as ball gowns with prosthetic breasts sewn on to the outside of the dresses, black nighties with gigantic strap-on dildos, and transparent vinyl mini-skirts that reveal lacy panties with strategic rips and telltale stains suggestive of deflowerment,” Harris noted. “The less drag is meant to allure, the bawdier it becomes, with men openly massaging their breasts, squeezing the bulges of their g-strings, sticking out their asses and tongues like porn stars in heat, and lying spread-eagle on their backs on parade routes with their helium heels flung into the air and their virginal prom dresses thrown over their heads.”

The next critical turn occurred in 1990, with the publication of Gender Trouble, by the queer theorist Judith Butler. Gender Trouble was a bombshell: it elevated the discourse around queer sexuality from the blunt rhetoric of Gayle Rubin to a realm of highly abstract, and sometimes impenetrable, intellectualism. Butler’s essential contribution was twofold: first, she saturated queer theory with postmodernism; second, she provided a theory of social change, based on the concept of “performativity,” which offered a more sophisticated conceptual ground than simple carnal transgression. Gender Trouble’s basic argument is that Western society has created a regime of “compulsory heterosexuality and phallogocentrism,” which has sought to enforce a singular, unitary notion of “sex” that crushes and obscures the true complexity and variation of biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and human desire. Butler argues that even the word “woman,” though it relates to a biological reality, is a social construction and cannot be defined with any stable meaning or categorization. There is nothing essential about “man,” “woman,” or “sex”: they are all created and re-created through historically contingent human culture; or, as Butler puts it, they are all defined through their performance, which can change, shift, and adapt across time and space.

Butler’s theory of social change is that once the premise is established that gender is malleable and used as an instrument of power, currently in favor of “heterosexual normativity,” then the work of social reconstruction can begin. And the drag queen embodies Butler’s theory of gender deconstruction. “The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance,” Butler writes. “When such categories come into question, the reality of gender is also put into crisis: it becomes unclear how to distinguish the real from the unreal. And this is the occasion in which we come to understand that what we take to be ‘real,’ what we invoke as the naturalized knowledge of gender is, in fact, a changeable and revisable reality. Call it subversive or call it something else. Although this insight does not in itself constitute a political revolution, no political revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real.”

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