Late final month, I used to be stunned to get up to a flurry of textual content messages: “Lady, you’re throughout Congress!” As I opened hyperlink after hyperlink, I used to be met with a surreal array of images exhibiting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene leading a DOGE subcommittee hearing, and to my shock, behind her was an outsized portrait of me. I rolled my eyes and dreamed about going again to mattress.
As a drag queen who reads and writes youngsters’s books, this was actually not the primary time I’ve confronted assaults, by politicians and in any other case. My books have been challenged and banned, occasions have been protested, and my name and likeness have been utilized in myriad disingenuous attempts to stoke fear about LGBTQ+ people, together with by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Nonetheless, it was the primary time that I had been immediately referenced within the halls of Congress.
My first thought to myself was: A minimum of she selected a beautiful picture. Paradoxically, it was one in every of my very own headshots depicting a pleasant smile and crimson, white and blue sequin stars — a stark distinction to Greene’s personal scowling face that dominated press images of her testimony. My second: It’s humorous that Greene and different MAGA Republicans have but to study that it’s a foul concept to choose a battle with a drag queen.
Nonetheless, Greene’s feedback have been no laughing matter: Given her lengthy monitor file as a conspiracy theorist and anti-LGBTQ+ crusader, Greene unsurprisingly unfold not solely slanderous hate but in addition defamatory disinformation. She cited me as a purpose to eradicate federal funding for PBS and NPR, contending that NPR and PBS “push among the most radical left positions, like that includes a drag queen on the present Let’s Study.”
She continued: “[A]s a mom who raised three youngsters, I felt assured that I might depart the room whereas my very own youngsters have been watching youngsters’s programming on PBS. However … if I had walked in my lounge or one in every of my youngsters’s bedrooms and seen this baby predator and this monster concentrating on my youngsters, I might turn into unglued.”
Evidently, her already extremely unglued name-calling insinuates claims about me which might be patently false. She is appropriate that I as soon as appeared on the general public tv program “Let’s Study,” studying my image ebook The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish — a playful parody meant to encourage youngsters to precise their interior fabulousness. However the actuality, as PBS CEO Paula Kerger made clear, is that the show was produced by local affiliate WNET, not by PBS itself.
Moreover, her rhetoric suggesting that LGBTQ-affirmative media is a type of “sexualizing and grooming … brainwashing and transing youngsters” isn’t solely false, however offensive. As I famous in my initial response: This rerun is drained and boring. That’s, it’s a part of a well-worn playbook that goes back decades, as exemplified by Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign of the Seventies, and which has sadly been mainstreamed by Republicans in recent years.
Within the listening to itself, a number of Democratic members of the committee playfully poked enjoyable at Greene. Rep. Robert Garcia jokingly inquired: “The American individuals wish to know: Is Elmo now, or has he ever been, a member of the Communist Celebration? … As a result of he’s crimson.” Such a humorous response, from an overtly homosexual politician no much less, earns snaps from me: His foolish strategy highlights the absurdity of Greene’s personal questions.
Largely lacking from this political circus, nevertheless, was a robust protection of various public media. Whereas Kerger and NPR CEO Katherine Maher thoughtfully refuted false claims, they didn’t make a transparent case for the significance of that includes various voices and tales.
To be clear: I imply no shade to both of those public media leaders, as they have been put in a really troublesome place. Nonetheless, I spotlight a broader problem: We should do greater than react to false claims; we should proactively reshape the narrative to make our case for range in public media and establishments.
I’ll say it loud and proud: Drag performers belong on public tv, in public libraries and past.
In fact, drag performers should not the one instance of various artists who belong in public media and areas: We’re merely one taste of the creativity and brilliance that exists amongst LGBTQ+, BIPOC, disabled, migrant, working-class and different traditionally marginalized and resilient communities. And all of us deserve a pleasure of place on bookshelves, in tv programming, curricula, story hours and extra.
It’s on this spirit that revered scholar Rudine Sims Bishop famously described youngsters’s literature as providing windows, mirrors and sliding glass doors. On this lovely metaphor, she acknowledged the necessity for youngsters to study concerning the world round them, see themselves mirrored and step into tales by their imaginations. Given that every one youngsters (and adults) are a mix of intersecting identities, we want various media to supply a number of factors of view. Any try to suppress such heterogeneity isn’t solely unethical, it is usually incorrect and leaves youngsters with a partial story of the world round them.
In my very own childhood as a white, middle-class, Jewish, queer and genderqueer individual, it was exactly by youngsters’s books and tv that I discovered concerning the world. Whereas I usually had the privilege of seeing communities that appeared just like mine, I solely not often caught glimpses of queerness and gender range. (Nonetheless, in retrospect, queer authors and characters have always been present, however recognizing them required skills in reading between the lines.)
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