WaPo ‘Perspective’ Defends Drag Queen Story Hour, Sexualizing Children as ‘Sincerely Wholesome Event’

The Washington Post op-ed page defended drag queen story hours, which inherently sexualize children, arguing “drag queens are not the ones sexualizing drag story hour.”

“There is nothing inherently sexual about defying traditional gender norms,” wrote Monica Hesse, who also said, “A not-small number of hours in my early 20s were spent attending drag shows in a basement-level gay club in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood.”

“It was silly, it was campy,” Hesse said. “It made me think in new ways about what it meant to behave as a man, or behave as a woman, to perform masculinity or perform femininity.”

And yet, Hesse appears to be equivocating her experience as an adult attending drag shows to that of toddlers being asked to give dollar bills to scantily clad adult men and learning how to “perform” for money.

“Look at all that money you just made!” Drag queen teaches a child to perform for cash tips at a “family-friendly” drag show in Palm Springs, CA pic.twitter.com/JThSO1fOeg

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 2, 2022

This is what @lgbtqnation is defending. pic.twitter.com/7cTyxojghy

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 30, 2022

Quoting Susan Sontag’s Notes on “Camp,” the WaPo op-ed appears to admit at least part of the motive is advocating that children attend these events.

Indeed, the idea is to see “everything in quotation marks.”

“It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman,’” Sontag wrote. “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”

Logically, then, biological existence and gender must also be seen “in quotation marks.”

And, according to Hesse, drag queens performing for children is merely “when performers in glamorous hair and makeup come to libraries to teach lessons of tolerance and self-acceptance and read books out loud.”

Indeed, the op-ed argued, drag queen performances in front of children are unequivocally not sexual.

Going after Christopher Rufo’s comment that conservatives ought to refer to drag queens as “trans strippers,” Hesse argued that for conservatives to be successful, “the debate must be shifted ‘to sexualization’ because without such a shift, there would be no debate.”

Clearly, “there would just be a nice queen in heavy eyeliner reading The Little Engine That Could.”

Parental rights bills, such as the one that made headlines in Florida after leftists erroneously tagged it with the name “don’t say gay,” are unnecessary, argued Hesse, in part because “nobody is forcing any parent to take their child to a Drag Queen Story Hour.”

“The children who do attend are not being exposed to pornography,” she continued, though critics would certainly argue otherwise. “They are being exposed to children’s books for children.”

Some of the “children’s books for children” do, in fact, include depictions of pornography and pedophilia, as Breitbart News has reported.

Referring to child-targeted drag as a “sincerely wholesome event,” Hesse said the issue is “not parental rights. Not sexualization. Not the content of what the drag queens are reading to the kids. It’s the existence of drag queens.”

Critics might agree with that statement as half true, only because it seems Hesse misses their point: the issue for critics is the existence of drag queens — and the gender confusion and inherent sexualization they represent — in front of children.

Attempting to redefine the word “grooming,” Hesse argued that conservatives are not worried about their children being molested, and “grooming” does not mean “grooming for sex,” but rather, conservatives are worried about “grooming for life.”

To Hesse, conservatives are concerned about the obviously innocent “grooming children for a big, accepting, openhearted kind of life in which there are many worse things in the world than a little boy who grows up to do an uncanny impersonation of Cher.”

“Grooming children to accept themselves and accept others who may look different or talk differently than they do,” is what Hesse argued conservatives are afraid of.

What this is really about, according to Hesse, is the marginalized victim groups the left loves to cite and their malevolent victimizers: parents, families, and conservatives.

“What this is about is a conniving subset of people who say they care about children’s welfare but who really care about marshaling outrage toward vulnerable scapegoats,” Hesse said. “Maybe they have turned their attention to drag queens because they, too, are engaged in theater: a never-ending performance in which they heroically take on one supposedly sinister villain after another: feminists, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protesters, Hunter Biden, migrant caravans, and so on.”

“On one side you have flamboyant, dramatic characters who are trying to mess with the minds of children,” she concluded. “And on the other side you have drag queens.”

Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.