Dragging kids to the library

The nation’s children have recently endured two years of social and educational deprivation. They are now more depressed, less able to socialise, behind with reading and counting and very young ones are having problems with facial recognition and communication. Scare the bejeebers out of them about a virus that they were unlikely to become infected with, smother them with face masks, make them sit inside socially distanced chalk circles in the playground like convicts in an exercise yard, and then send them home at the drop of a lateral flow test; many to homes unfit to live in, let alone gain any kind of home schooling, thereby widening the gap in educational achievement between children from rich and poor families. And all, it turns out, for no good reason. Covid-19 allegedly killed only fifty children in the UK. Fifty tragedies of course, but over three hundred children are killed on our roads each year and I don’t recall the last time I heard calls for a national 10 mph speed limit.

Help is at hand, however. There is now a national scheme to get children into libraries, which is surely what they need. Assuming there is a section not dedicated to global warming and saving the polar bears, will they be taken to the maths section and shown the joys of counting? Will it be the literature section so they can discover the treasures of the English canon? Maybe it’s the music section where they can dream about joining a rock band or conducting an orchestra. Well, not quite. They are going to attend a performance of Drag Storytime promoted by Drag Queen Story Hour UK (which suggests that this has branches in other countries). The show is suitable, apparently, for ‘0 to 7’ year olds, although how a new-born baby benefits from seeing a fella in a dress beats me.

I have no idea what Drag Storytime is like or what it contains, but the organisers claim they will be: “giving them (children) a brand-new, positive experience” and want: “to show the world that being different is not a bad thing”. The experience will undoubtedly be brand-new for most of them, but exactly how positive remains a matter of debate. Being different is, indeed, not (necessarily) a bad thing, but for kids in this age group being different means preferring Jackanory over the Flower Pot Men (admittedly my knowledge of contemporary kids programmes is somewhat dated). Even then, Jackanory regularly featured the sublime and outrageously camp Kenneth Williams, and Bill and Ben of Flower Pot Men fame seemed to be in some kind of ménage à trois with a drug dealer called Little Weed. But the point is, as subtle and deliberate as these references may have been, no message was being pushed. Kids accepted without question that a man with a funny voice and strange mannerisms could breathe life into children’s stories, and that flowerpots and weeds could live in perfect harmony.

When I was a kid if a sexually ambiguous apparition with hairy legs, a dress, rouged cheeks and an Adam’s apple had appeared at my school, I would probably have run screaming from the building. Only preceding said apparition running screaming from the building as my father chased him out with a mallet. Drag Storytime is just another manifestation of the indoctrination of children into rejecting binary notions of sexuality, and will undoubtedly be the vanguard for further efforts to fill their minds with notions about sexuality that they do not need to be aware of until they are much older. Let drag queens flourish, is my motto. But let’s confine them to pantomimes and adult entertainment. Our kids have suffered enough.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.