When participants in a gay pride parade in New York City last summer chanted, “We are here. We are gay. We are coming to take your children,” they were not joking.
A new short documentary from MSNBC follows children during their drag queen story time at a local library. The film crew put heart monitors on the children to measure their reactions as they are read stories by men garishly dressed as women.
The film “It’s Okay” is part of a larger movement that aims to normalize the direct interaction of men who portray grotesque and garish women with children.
Director David France’s 2017 film The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson was a Netflix original documentary about a transgender person that won the Outfest Freedom Award. Outfest is an LGBTQIA+ promotional company and France’s films are all about the LGBTQ experience.
“We were very interested in knowing what the children were experiencing, and we ignored everything else,” France told NBC News, the parent company of the documentary about children and drag queens. “We didn’t want to interview them. We didn’t want to hear their analysis of what happened. We wanted to get close enough to them to experience their journey through the reading as they experienced it.”
One of the children was given a “microphone vest” so that the film crew could monitor his breathing.
“We wanted to hear and feel his discomfort when he had it, his joy when he had it, his curiosity,” France told NBC. “We really dug deep into his experience, and I think he showed us all of that, and he did it in a real, sincere way.”
Such knowledge will be important for the Drag Queen Story Hour performers in the future as they learn how to delve deeper into the psyche of innocent children by studying their breathing.
