A Drag Story Hour, simply observed in “It’s Okay”

When protesters gathered outside a Queens public library in late December 2022 to protest a Drag Story Hour, filmmaker and investigative journalist David France was there, observing the scene. “Members of the Proud Boys were there in uniform,” he recalls. “Real Nazis were giving the real Nazi salute. They claimed the drag queens were pedophiles who were targeting the children—they were going to abuse children and do worse.” France continued, “And then I noticed that the children who were attending the event were watching all of this through the second-floor window of the library. They looked terrified.”

In the years that followed, state legislatures across the U.S. introduced dozens of bills to criminalize or otherwise restrict certain drag performances as potentially harmful to minors. However, many of these proposals failed or were later blocked by judges on constitutional grounds. Drag Story Hours, which had been a fixture of libraries and other kid-friendly spaces in major progressive cities and beyond for nearly a decade, suddenly became the focal point of a broader right-wing backlash against trans and queer rights.

France, a renowned chronicler of the LGBTQ movements and LGBTQ life, is best known for the Oscar-nominated documentary “How to Survive a Plague” (2012), a story of AIDS activism, and the acclaimed book of the same name that followed four years later. With his new short film, “It’s Okay,” presented on MSNBC Films, France said, “I wanted to document the experience of a young library-goer attending his first story hour, someone who has no idea what to expect.” He chose a North Carolina boy named Leo, “whose thoughts seemed to be playing out on his face in real time,” France said; queen of the hour was Shelita Bonet Hoyle, who contrasts her fabulous purple gown with sparkly cat-eye reading glasses, and the picture books are Todd Parr’s “It’s Okay to Be Different” and “The Family Book,” which convey a cheerful cartoon message of inclusion and acceptance. Leo is nine years old and a few years outside the typical story hour target audience. In the film, his cautious, distant participation in Story Hour offers a dynamic contrast to that of his enthusiastic little brother Mateo, who, at four years old, is clearly part of the target audience.

Most children have no sense of the gender and sexuality issues being addressed in drag performances. Instead, they respond to the energy of the mime: the elaborate costumes and makeup, the slapstick voices and faces. “I don’t think Leo and Mateo saw Shelita as a drag queen,” France said. “They saw her as some kind of happy clown.” (When I took my then-4-year-old daughter to a Drag Queen Story Hour years ago, she referred to the reader as “the princess”—it was the “queen” part, not the “drag” part that stuck in her mind.) So much of the outrage stoked over drag story hours is a matter of ugly projection; “It’s Okay,” with its unreflective, matter-of-fact approach, replaces perception with reality. France said his film strives to be “pure observational journalism,” which can create cognitive dissonance in viewers – the disbelief that an unremarkably pleasant event like this could ever be fodder for violent protests.

The political buzzword of the moment is “weird” — in fact, the use of that epithet helped propel Tim Walz into the Democratic vice presidential race. In an unusually optimistic moment for progressives, “It’s Okay” argues quietly and powerfully that the epitome of weirdness is scapegoating a glamorous lady who reads beautiful stories to children. ♦