Drag Story Time

It’s just what it sounds like! Storytellers using the art of drag to read books to kids in libraries, schools, and bookstores. Drag Story Hour celebrates reading through the glamorous art of drag. Our chapter network creates diverse, accessible, and culturally-inclusive family programming where kids can express their authentic selves and become bright lights of change in their communities. “Drag Queen Story Hour” (DQSH) became a regular event at North American libraries, schools, and bookstores beginning in 2015. The drag queens all men dressed up as clownish versions of “women” read stories to children under the guise of normalizing “gender uidity” and giving kids “glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.”

DQSH has chapters in 29 states, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark. Drag story time events have become incredibly popularized, expanding beyond DQSH — a library in Saint John, New Brunswick held its own version of drag story time earlier this month, and the Toronto Public Library hosted a “Drag Queen Family Storytime” on June 18. Even small coastal towns like Sechelt, B.C. have caught on, where a Drag Queen Storytime took place over the weekend. Calls to “protect the children” from drag performers and trans people assume children are, in fact, in need of safeguarding. Such messaging is rooted in a tendency for Western societies to reduce childhood to an idyllic innocence, which positions children as “in need of protection” and ampli es their constant vulnerability.

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