Michelle Tea still remembers hanging out in the early 2000s with fellow writer Tara Jepsen, who was a nanny for a young boy at the time. Every time the trio would walk by Gypsy Rosalie’s Wigs and Vintage in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, the boy became totally transfixed by the wigs in the window. Jepsen told his mother, and she suggested they invite a drag queen to the kid’s birthday party. It was then that Tea, author, literary-arts organizer, and publisher, thought, Drag queens and kids—there’s something there.
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Years later, when Tea, author of Valencia, Black Wave, and other acclaimed books, had her first child, she attended countless story hours and found them “very straight.” She wondered how to bring queerness to story hour; she flashed back to the young boy and the wigs, and it dawned on her: bring drag queens into libraries.
In 2015, Tea launched the Drag Story Hour series (then called Drag Queen Story Hour) at the Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial branch of the San Francisco Public Library. (In 2013, Books Inc., which had a store in the Castro neighborhood, hosted a similar event.) Tea, in collaboration with Julián Delgado Lopera and Virgie Tovar of the literary nonprofit Radar Productions, where Tea served as founder and executive director, chose libraries in part because “librarians have always been cool. They’ve always been pro-queer, pro-liberation, pro-freedom. Of course they’re going to love a drag queen reading to kids.”
It’s a radical idea to bring performers who normally shimmy on stages at night out into the daytime spaces of government-funded institutions to read children’s books aloud. Then again, drag has always been about creating a story and inviting viewers in to imagine along, much like reading aloud to children.
Early events featured Honey Mahogany of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame, and while the series got some attention, Tea had no inkling of what it would become. Tea traveled to New York and hosted a Drag Story Hour in Brooklyn with drag queen Lil Miss Hot Mess, which was covered in the New Yorker. From there, it just caught fire. “I didn’t know it would become what it’s become, but I knew it was a really good idea when I had it,” Tea says. For the young mother, it was a way for queer families to share their full selves and for straight families to introduce their kids to queer culture.
When someone forwarded Tea a conservative review of Drag Story Hour, she was more shocked that her friend was reading conservative websites than that the right was coming out against what she was doing. But the Trump era—as well as social media—brought any and all disagreements to a new level. “All of these people got super-empowered; [they] crawled out from under the rocks,” Tea says. “These are the same people who perpetrate the idea of queer people being pedophiles. They’re on the losing end of our so-called culture wars.”
In June 2022, a group of men believed to be affiliated with the Proud Boys interrupted a Drag Story Hour at San Lorenzo Library in Alameda County, creating a threatening presence and shouting accusations of grooming and pedophilia at Bay Area drag queen Panda Dulce. A year later, police officers lined the same library’s entrance for safety. These threats are more than just name-calling: they carry with them the possibility of violence. A Tempe, Arizona, coffee shop temporarily shut down story hour when it received a bomb threat. However, drag queens are a tough bunch. While Panda Dulce was shaken by the event, fearing for the safety of herself and the children around her, she continued reading.
“A lot of these Proud Boys are attacking queer representation in schools, anything from a book to a Pride flag in June. The hypocrisy is so clear; they don’t care about the well-being of children in any way. They’re coming in with violent, aggressive energy; they’re the ones introducing trauma to kids,” says Tea.
For many parents, how their children learn about the adult world, including sexuality, is a source of anxiety. In recent years, some “culture warriors” on the right have exploited that fear with bad-faith arguments portraying drag as an arena for “sex acts” and drag performances as a form of “grooming.” This strategy has paid political dividends: animating parents’ rights organizations, stacking school boards, and boosting the careers of lawmakers who promote anti-drag bills and other anti-LGBTQ legislation.
While Tea is horrified by the threats to actual queer lives, she finds them all too familiar. “We know who’s out there and who’s against us, but we’ve always made our lives and our art and validated our existence in spite of these horrible forces that would truly enact a queer genocide if they could,” she says.
Tea stays focused on how much the events have blossomed around the world and brought magic into families’ lives. “Witnessing kids witness drag queens is delightful,” Tea says. “There’s really basically no difference than a kid seeing whoever’s cosplaying Cinderella at Disney and seeing a drag queen in a library. They’re larger-than-life, glamorous, and beautiful. They wreak magic.”
These events are meaningful not only for kids and families but also for the drag queens who perform. “One of the lies that homophobes have put out into the world is that queer people aren’t suitable for kids. So it’s really healing for many drag queens to bring their art to kids,” says Tea.
“I was once a queer kid who, through lack of positive representation, was taught that who I was was illegible and unacceptable,” Panda Dulce explains. “I will never forget the librarians and storytellers of my childhood, who, for an hour of story time a week, taught me that creativity, wonder, and stage presence were, in fact, assets. It is really full circle to give back in the same way they enriched my life as a kid. It makes me feel whole.”
For Tea, the controversies of the present matter less than what she knows will be a positive future. “I know this is going to have a lasting impact,” Tea says. “I hope I’m still alive when these kids are adults and can talk about the way that Drag Story Hour really changed their life, because I know that it’s changing lives.”
I asked Tea what it would have been like had she grown up with Drag Story Hour. “Oh my god, it would have been absolutely incredible to have an affirming message about being able to be who you are. As a kid who really loved huge representations of flamboyant femininity, I would have gone crazy for drag queens. I would have absolutely been their number-one biggest fan.”•
