Parents are right to be angry about Drag Queen Story Hour

Germany is being dragged kicking and screaming into the culture war. Over the past week, local politicians in Munich have been embroiled in an explosive row over a planned performance of Drag Queen Story Hour in a city library.

The Drag Queen Story Hour movement began in the US in 2015, but has since spread across the world. The Munich event, scheduled to take place next month, will include stories read aloud by a nonbinary ‘drag king’, with the charming name of Eric Big Clit, and a 13-year-old trans child, who has previously written a book about his ‘journey from boy to girl’. The event is aimed specifically at young children and is described as suitable for children as young as four.

Some politicians have, understandably, expressed concerns. The general-secretary of the centre-right Christian Social Union (CSU) – one half of Bavaria’s coalition government – is worried that toddlers are being ‘indoctrinated into… early sexualisation’. Hubert Aiwanger, leader of the conservative Free Voters (Bavaria’s other governing party), has described the event as a possible ‘danger to child welfare’. Meanwhile, Munich’s Social Democratic mayor, Dieter Reiter, has dismissed these complaints, branding them ‘excessive’.

The event’s organiser, a drag queen called Vicky Voyage, has also hit back at the criticism. Voyage claims that Drag Queen Story Hour is actually suitable for kids ‘from the age of zero’, and that the purpose of these shows is to encourage children to read and to present them with ‘different lifestyles and points of view’.

Quite why a scantily clad drag act with a sexually explicit name is needed to help children read is never spelled out. And while this talk of exploring ‘different lifestyles’ might sound innocent enough, the Drag Queen Story Hour movement explicitly promotes gender-identity ideology – including the belief that we can be born in the wrong body. Many parents are understandably wary of exposing their kids to this.

While this is new territory for Germany, in Britain we have seen a proliferation of drag events aimed at children in recent years. Many of these acts, as well as promoting trans ideology, draw on explicitly sexual themes. Take, for instance, the infamous case of a drag queen called ‘Flowjob’, who visited a Scottish primary school in 2020. He then read to children aged between four and 11, much to the dismay of parents. Worse still, in 2021, a performer who was memorably dubbed the ‘rainbow dildo butt monkey’ appeared at a library in Redbridge for an LGBT arts initiative. This event was supposed to be aimed at children as young as four.

Perhaps most disturbing of all was the case of the ‘Caba Baba Rave’ in March this year. Drag queens in fetish get-up put on a burlesque show in London aimed at mothers and babies, aged between zero and two. Time and again, children have been exposed to what everyone can surely recognise are adult performances.

The sexual nature of these kinds of events is almost always obscured in their marketing. This allows organisers and their defenders to dismiss parents’ complaints as bigoted and ill-informed. The Munich story hour, for example, claims that it will teach children in attendance about ‘boys in dresses, princesses with free will, the colours blue and pink… and the discovery of their own freedom’. On the surface, this sounds relatively harmless. But given the past form of these events, will it really just teach kids about their freedom to dress as they please?

When libraries and schools invite adult performers with overtly sexual public personas to interact with children, parents have a right to demand answers. It should be common sense that no four-year-old needs a drag act to teach him how to read – least of all a drag act called ‘Eric Big Clit’.

Lauren Smith is an editorial assistant at spiked.