Friday, April 25, 2025

drag queens

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Houston's drag queen story hour: KHOU tells us librarians let in a child molester. Who fought this?

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I last wrote about drag queens reading stories to kids at public libraries about six weeks ago and now the story has taken off.

Someone –- we are not told who –- did some document digging as part of an ongoing campaign to stop drag queens from taking up space at the Houston Public Library and made an interesting discovery.

KHOU TV, the CBS affiliate in Houston tells us what that was:

HOUSTON — A registered child sex offender has been reading to children at Houston Public Library as part of its Drag Queen Storytime.

A group called Mass Resistance, which has been trying to put an end to the program, contacted KHOU about the child sex offender.

Mass Resistance claims it had been asking the City of Houston for months to disclose information about the drag queens, and when requests went unanswered, they did their own digging and made the shocking link.

The library has been trying to fix this PR disaster ever since.

A media spokesperson for the library confirmed one of the program’s drag queens, Tatiana Mala Nina, is Alberto Garza, a 32-year-old child sex offender. In 2008, he was convicted of assaulting an 8-year-old boy.

“Most parents would not allow that individual to sit in this library and be held up as a role model to our children. Shame on you, Mayor (Sylvester) Turner!” said Tracy Shannon with Mass Resistance.

In a statement, the Houston Public Library admits they didn’t do a background check on Garza and said Garza will not be involved in any future library programs.

A photo of Garza in drag appears with this blog post. Despite this hiccup, the American Library Association isn’t dropping the idea of drag queen stories any time soon. See the ALA site’s resource page for libraries facing “challenges” with staging these events.

As this NBC-TV story points out, these story hours bring “pride and glamor” to libraries and have spread like wildfire across the nation in three short years. As the Brooklyn (N.Y.) library system says on its website: “Drag Queen Story Hour captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity in childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.”


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Happy birthday to ... Oh nevermind. Back to critics and supporters of drag-queen story hours

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It was on the first day of February in 2004 that GetReligion co-founder Doug LeBlanc clicked a mouse and put the first version of this website online. That post — “What we do, why we do it” — is still up, for those who have never seen it.

That was the day after my birthday, the last day of January. That was a coincidence, back in 2004, and that fact has never been all that relevant.

But now it is, because today is my 65th birthday and, as old folks know who read GetReligion, for many people that starts all kinds of clocks ticking. In my case, that means I am one year away from retirement as editor of GetReligion.

That doesn’t mean that I will vanish. After all, for a decade GetReligion was my part-time work, while I was a full-time professor in West Palm Beach, Fla., and then Washington, D.C., while also writing my “On Religion” column for Scripps Howard and then the Universal syndicate.

But Jan. 31, 2020 will mean changes at GetReligion, of one kind or another. That’s fine with me, since the realities shaping news and commentary work about religion have radically changed, over the past decade and a half. Still, I hope to keep doing some GetReligion-esque work at this site or whatever evolves out of it. I’d like to do more writing, for example, about the religious content of popular culture — one of the topics that pulled me into teaching back in 1991, at Denver Seminary.

But back to the our digital world and the American Model of the Press. Consider, for example, the current mini-wave of coverage of drag queen story hours.

Yes, Julia Duin just wrote a post on this topic: “Drag queens: Reporters can't comprehend why many parents don't want them in kid libraries.” I would urge you to read it. Here’s a key quote:

Just what is the religious case against drag queens, as it would be articulated by people who hold that point of view? Is there one?

Think like an old-school journalist. Wouldn’t it have been nice if we could have heard more about what that is, like there was an actual debate taking place?


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Drag queens: Reporters can't comprehend why many parents don't want them in kid libraries

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It’s not so much that the Washington Post is running feel-good stories these days about drag queens appearing at libraries.

That’s a valid story and many readers would be interested. The problem is that the opponents of this trend are drawn in such stark, dramatic negativity. And, yes, religion is in the mix there.

The Post’s recent story about drag queens doing the story hours for children in a Detroit suburb is drawn in predictable lines. The pro folks are described in colorful adjectives and attractive personalities who come with “lots of hugs.” The librarian comes with “a thoughtful air, nose ring and cat-eye glasses.” What’s not to like?

The dreaded antis are colorless people with signs and no disarming descriptions. Even the hapless city commissioner who was forced out of office for being against the drag queens didn’t get much sympathy.

I happen to like this quote from the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber about every church needing at least one drag queen, but the issues with a public library are different. The story starts here:

HUNTINGTON WOODS, Mich. — The last time drag queens came to the public library here, two dozen children and their parents crowded into a cozy room to enjoy holiday stories. Jessica J’Adore — decked out in a curly red wig, a shiny green cocktail dress and elaborate makeup — read “The Night Before Christmas,” while another costumed queen offered up a lively Hanukkah rhyming book. One little boy gave a pipe-cleaner bracelet to his favorite performer.

“There were a lot of hugs,” librarian Joyce Krom said. “Kids love holidays, and they’re just very excited. It was a lot of fun.”

It was also the latest flash point in what’s become a noxious national controversy. Variations of Drag Queen Story Hour — which aims to teach children gender diversity and acceptance — have been sprouting nationwide in libraries large and small. But their popularity has provoked an increasingly fierce backlash from conservative religious groups, with Huntington Woods the latest target.

Who could be against “gender diversity and acceptance?”

Four paragraphs down, we’re told there’s an anti-campaign “stoked by outsiders.” Way further down, we hear of the (local) city commissioner who opposed the drag queens. Would the reporter have mentioned outside help had the demonstrators been from Planned Parenthood or organizers from the national Women’s March?

Then we get a dissenting point of view.


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Sympathy for Santa Fe drag queen: The Los Angeles Times really pours it on

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One could not avoid reading this story from the Los Angeles Times with this headline: “Great Read: A Drag Queen’s Final Tribute to the Grandmother Who Love and Accepted Him.”

It’s about events in New Mexico, a state where I lived 20 years ago. I was not in gorgeous Santa Fe, but in the northwestern corner of the state that was New Mexico’s industrial quarter with a chunk of Navajo reservation thrown in. Everyone in this part of the world knew Santa Fe was pretty left-wing and up there with Taos insofar as being favorite haunts for starving artists and rich Californians. Which is why it’s a bit surprising to read that a drag queen found disapproval there. The piece starts:

From under his black veil, sweat trickled down Paul Valdez's face.
On the long walk to the casket in the towering Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, dozens of pairs of drifting eyes found him and bored in. To his left, through the veil's spider web of nylon gauze, he could feel the spite in his aunt's voice.
"At your own grandmother's funeral," she hissed. "Dressed like a girl."… Framed in a tight bustle and trimmed with black crepe, the dress Valdez designed was inspired by Victorian mourning garments. He pressed the dress' black cravat close to his throat and felt himself sway for a moment before his grandmother's coffin.


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