Small Town Immoderation

Everyone behaving badly...

Our small town recently made the news (in a bad way) about a Drag Queen Hour at our local community center. Drag Queen Story Hours - for those who have actually in fact been living in caves for the last ten years - are opportunities for kids to be hear gender-diverse individuals read stories about acceptance and belonging. All that sounds nice.

Absolutely predictably, what started as a nice idea morphed into a rather nasty conflict where both sides behaved badly and further eroded civil norms and community along the way. It’s hard not to wonder how it could have been handled differently had everyone had had their Radical Moderate hat on.

But first, some background...

A Local Kerfuffle

The conflict over a children’s story hour started when a group of parents did some digging about the event and discovered that one of the drag kings who planned to read stories to children goes by a stage name that is both a play on words about mental illness and genitalia at the same time*. This person also has a somewhat sexualized internet presence, which was also not hard to find. These parents-turned-investigators predictably threw a fit, angry words were exchanged online, and our town supervisor responded by requiring a sizeable security fee at the event so that the community group organizing it couldn’t afford the community center anymore.

At this point, academic parents who live in our town circulated a letter defending freedom of speech and association and criticized the town supervisor for wielding his power to shut down legitimate free expression.

I grudgingly signed the letter since I don’t like government shenanigans that lean toward censorship at baseline, but it was indeed a grudging signature. In my view, both sides were behaving badly and the radical moderate in me prefers to avoid taking a side at all when both sides kind of suck.

Nope and Nope…

Call me old-fashioned; call me bourgeois; call me a perpetrator of middle-class respectability culture. All those things are probably true to some degree. But the radical moderate in me just can’t quite get over why someone with a sexualized stage name and readily available social media profiles was chosen to read stories to children. If I didn’t know enough about the Left, I would think this was a setup by the Right. But the mind boggles. Aren’t there any trans economists or nonbinary dentists or gay artists and writers or drag queen lawyers or lesbian biologists who would love to come share their stories about acceptance and belonging with children while reading a nice story about people wanting to be themselves? I actually know quite a few of these people myself and they would be fantastic ambassadors for a children’s story hour about being who you really are.

I say all this with a healthy dose of humility, because I have no idea what this particular individual ultimately brought to Drag Queen Story Hour. Perhaps a mellifluous voice and a beautiful rendering of the book The Red Crayon. Who knows? The drag king in question is also apparently a psychology student who wants to do counseling with LGBTQ+ youth, a noble cause. They seem to genuinely care about the cause of acceptance. But they also have a stage name about genitals. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Aren’t there plenty of trans economists or drag queen dentists or gay artists and writers or nonbinary lawyers or lesbian biologists who would love to come share their stories about acceptance and belonging with children while reading a nice story about people wanting to be themselves?

At this point it doesn’t really matter what the intentions were or what will happen in the actual story hour, because the internet exists and people in 2023 should know that whether you are a drag performer or an accountant (or both) your internet activities will absolutely catch up with you. If you post sexualized pictures of yourself on the internet and if the very stage name under which you will be interacting with children is a pun on genitalia, parents with basic Googling skills will absolutely - at minimum - wonder why you were chosen by the group organizing the event. This is simple common sense.

At the same time, the town’s response was not good either. If the cost of security as a result of likely dueling protests really did seem high to town officials, I would hope they would sit down with the community group hosting the event and go through the numbers, bringing in an assessment from local law enforcement agencies, and discussing possible options. I realize that’s often not how the bureaucracy works, but it would have helped with damage control at the very least. Otherwise it’s hard to interpret an $8000 fee slapped onto a children’s story hour as anything other than intentional censorship. Better transparency over how the decision was made and where those numbers came from would have been a good (very basic) first step. It’s possible of course that greater transparency wouldn’t have helped (or maybe it happened behind the scenes with the relevant stakeholders and no one heard about it). But the optics aren’t great.

Optics Matter for Civil Society

And that’s the problem on both sides. We hear more and more from everyone that we need to jettison tone policing and respectability culture and pretend as though optics don’t matter (while still vehemently claiming they do matter in other spaces), but this entire fiasco was a good example of not doing due diligence to think about how people who disagree with you might interpret your actions. And if the goal is actually to get people on your side, that’s an absolutely, incredibly, fundamentally important step.

The people who organized the Drag Queen show claim to care about inclusion and increasing awareness and acceptance. But if they really cared about those things they should have wondered how people who are not entirely comfortable with LGBTQIA+ folks would think about a speaker for children whose name references genitalia. They should also have spent much more time wondering what including that person under their stage name does for the LGBTQIA+ cause among that group of fence-sitters. I feel pretty sure it didn’t help.

At the same time, the town responded to a genuine civil society conflict with a policy bludgeon. Instead of claiming to speak for all citizens of the town and trying to work on a way to balance the conflicting claims of different citizen groups, the town made a mealy-mouthed statement about protecting “taxpayers” from liability. Taxpayers are a convenient and amorphous group that politicians can trot out to justify a variety of ill-considered policies. But the whole point of this situation was that the taxpayers themselves were citizens with conflicting values. Instead of trying to recognize and mediate that pluralism, the town pretended it didn’t exist and sided with one of the tribes over the other. Any opportunity for community-building was lost as both sides then arrayed themselves for battle.

Ultimately, optics go deeper than appearances. It’s actually - when it’s principled at least - part of a crucially important process. Bringing people together requires that we do the work of putting ourselves in other people’s shoes and assessing our own actions from their perspective. This is what Adam Smith called the “impartial spectator.” Smith considered the development of our own impartial spectators an expected part of functional adulthood. Now everyone seems motivated by their own highly partial spectator who just signs off on whatever ideological priors they have. True community is just not possible on this model. The space where people could actually converse has been totally hollowed out.

Civil Society Will Only Work If We Let It

The only good news about what finally happened is that no one came to blows, which is - I guess - all we can count as success these days. The much less good news is that both sides ended up resorting to state-sponsored coercion to get what they want and ultimately the side with the scariest government backer won.

The letter from concerned academics triggered intervention by the NYCLU threatening a lawsuit. This in turn forced the town to reconsider its use of security fees to shut down community events it doesn’t like (still appealing to “taxpayers” as the constituents they’re trying to protect). The event went ahead as planned at a local bookstore (and will be repeated at the community center itself just to stick it to The Man) and lots of people came out to show support and a much smaller group came to protest. Parents who didn’t want their kids exposed to drag performers took their kids out for ice cream or whatever else they were already planning on doing that day, which is what they probably should have done in the first place.

What everyone learned from this debacle is that when someone disagrees with you you just keep screaming louder and louder until you can find a government sponsor you can swing around until the other side folds. What I wish everyone had learned was a bit different:

• For the angry parents, I wish they had learned that toleration doesn’t require liking what other people decide to do. It just requires not using force (like excessive fines) to control other people’s activities. It was objectively a jerk move to try to get the local government to shut down the story hour, if in fact that’s what happened. If you don’t like it, don’t bring your kids. And if you really don’t like it, hold a protest, create a competing event, or blog about it. The world is your oyster!

• For the organizers of the event, I wish they had learned that the internet exists and that messaging matters if you really want to build acceptance. If you feed into the narrative of sexualization of childhood by having someone whose stage name literally refers to genitals reading stories to children, nothing about liberal toleration requires parents to pretend that’s not a problem. (Most) parents protesting this event weren’t (as far as I can tell) doing so out of reactionary rage or transphobia or rightwing extremism (as some in the news and on my Facebook page claim). Many seemed genuinely concerned about the basic expectations we all share (or used to share) about what it’s appropriate for children to be exposed to.

In the end, everyone lost because the lesson everyone took away from this interaction is that the way to solve civil and social disagreements is to hold political power and/or lawsuits over people’s heads and whoever has the most power behind them will win.

I’m not sure why the participants in this Drag Queen Story Hour weren’t more carefully vetted, because someone must have known that this would stir up a fight. In fact, on one internet forum a very civilized conversation between opposing sides actually concluded with the idea of asking this person not to perform under their stage name, which would have removed a lot of the (legitimate) opposition. That didn’t happen for some reason and when I’m being less charitable, it’s hard not to see the fight as the point of this story hour in the first place. But political leaders also have an obligation to not take the bait, and our town supervisor took it, hook, line, and sinker.

In the end while one side won, civil society lost; the lesson everyone took away from this interaction is that the way to solve civil and social disagreements is to hold political power and/or lawsuits over people’s heads and whoever has the most power behind them will win. That’s not a radically moderate conclusion and it’s not the way a healthy civil society functions. But here we are!

A Radically Moderate Lesson for Parents

The silver lining is that despite this macro-level failure, parents still have a lot of power to model what a good civil society looks like on the micro-level. The most obvious way is to model radical moderation to our kids in our conversations and in our deeds. This event and the fallout provides an opportunity for parents to have conversations with their kids about acceptance and pluralism, both in terms of identity but also in terms of belief.

Parents can discuss this situation with kids (some of these topics are age-dependent) and have conversations about:

1. the tradeoffs and interactions between freedom of association and cultural and community norms,

2. the expectations and boundaries of free speech,

3. the way your internet presence will affect your in-person experiences,

4. how to think about cultural and social norms and when to challenge them, and

5. that putting yourself in the other person’s shoes matters (a lot), particularly if you really dislike that person or think they’re really wrong.

There’s a lot to unpack here and this just scrapes the surface. But these kinds of conversations are really important for parents to have with their kids, who are experiencing something akin to socio-cultural whiplash. These are also complex questions that will require different approaches across contexts and none of them have easy or obvious answers. Teaching kids how to navigate the rich landscape between extreme positions may be the best gift we can give them right now. But this requires that we do the hard work - as parents, citizens, educators, and neighbors - of identifying the moderate middle and being able to defend it. I’m not sure we’re there yet, but I hope we can get there.

As always, let me know what you think! Leave a comment, subscribe, and share.

*I’m not using the stage name for privacy reasons because this person is young and doesn’t need to be plastered all over the internet, but the issue has been widely covered in our local press

(You can also check out a much longer and more nuanced post about Drag Queen Story Hours by drag performer Sky Gilbert here. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s an interesting and thought-provoking read.)