Drag Queen Story Hours engage many and enrage others
For more than a year, Drag Queen Story Hour has carried on as a family-friendly offering of the King County Library System, attracting about the same amount of attention as puppet shows, Mandarin and Arabic story times, and Stay & Play.
The activity is just as it sounds: Drag queens resplendent in colorful, sparkly costumes read to kids and their parents. The point, organizers say, is imagination and play, and allowing young children to glimpse a world free of prescribed gender roles. No “boy clothes.” No “girl clothes.”
But a couple of weeks ago, ahead of a Teen Pride event at the system’s Renton branch that featured a drag performance, irate callers jammed the phone lines....