London
DailyExpertNews
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An ordinary red-brick library in the southern English town of Reading is an unlikely backdrop for the latest front in the fight for equality for the LGBTQ+ community. But last week — in scenes later repeated across the country — Covid-19 conspirators and far-right supporters blared homophobic and transphobic insults at parents and children to try and prevent the children from meeting drag queens.
Footage shared online shows anti-vaxxer Michael Chaves berating parents – some of whom are carrying babies – arriving for Drag Queen Story Hour UK, an event where children are read books that promote compassion and inclusion. Chaves accuses Sab Samuel, who acted as drag queen Aida H Dee that day, of being a pedophile. DailyExpertNews has reached out to Chaves for comment; he has not responded.
He told local newspaper The Reading Chronicle that he was protesting the tour because it “sexualized children.”
As protesters unfolded a banner that read, “Welcome groomers” outside the library, two women posing as attendees disrupted the reading in the building, calling Samuel an “adult entertainer” while terrifying parents and children, according to Samuel. After the incident, at least one mother was seen crying, Samuel said.
The term “groomer” is a homophobic stereotype used to falsely brand queer people and their supporters as child molesters.
At the end of the session, Samuel left the library under police protection as protesters took advantage.
Recent angry clashes over events involving drag queens in the United Kingdom follow a disturbing precedent from the United States, where right-wing extremist groups ambushed similar events and conservative politicians have pledged to criminalize adults who take children to drag shows.
It coincided with a wider movement to curtail rights related to bodily autonomy ranging from access to abortion to gender-affirming care, punctuated by a wave of anti-LGBTQ laws and Judge Clarence Thomas questioning the equality of marriage. pulls when the US Supreme Court overturned the law. federal right to abortion in the United States.
“This is the same hatred (as seen in the US) but just in a different context…same disgust, same homophobia and transphobia,” Samuel, who founded Drag Queen Story Hour UK, told DailyExpertNews.
Extremist groups in Britain are now feeling emboldened amid “wider resistance to (queer) identities existing in public,” said Tim Squirrell, an online extremism expert and communications director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) think tank. .
“Even people who are fairly progressive in their faith and politics have become quite radical.”[in their opposition to] this thing that really, really worries me, not least because of the real risk that queer people exist in public, but in the US we’ve seen it linked to a much broader effort to roll back LGBT rights ,” he told DailyExpertNews.
The pushback on LGBTQ rights in the UK has particularly affected transgender people, campaigners say, where so-called gender-critical activists and sympathetic British press have managed to slacken efforts to make it easier for transgender people to change their gender marking.
Britain’s Conservative leadership contest has seen hopefuls embrace anti-trans rhetoric and promising policies that would hinder trans people’s rights.
Transgender people could potentially be left out of plans to ban conversion therapy in the UK, while some religious and other anti-trans groups campaign against teaching what they call ‘gender ideology’, or information about the existence of transgender and non-binary identities, at school.
Drag queens have also been targeted by some feminists, who have criticized them for what they consider to be a mocking portrait of women and for being over-sexualized.
Drag culture has long revolved around LGBTQ people, challenging traditional expectations and beliefs about how people of all genders and sexual orientations express themselves.
Samuel said this inspired him to quit his job in marketing three years ago and start Drag Queen Story Hour UK. He said he wanted to provide children with different role models, which he didn’t have when he was growing up. But he says death threats soon followed, and Samuel said he and his friend moved in 2020 because anti-LGBTQ trolls “discovered where I lived”.
He said last week’s incident pushed him to his limits.
Speaking to DailyExpertNews, Samuel vehemently denied allegations that children attending his shows are being exposed to sexual language. What he does is a public good, he said.
Samuel, who is autistic and has ADHD, gave an example from the Reading event as to why he thinks story hours are so important. “Some autistic children and their parents had come to me especially because they knew I was autistic,” he said. When some of the young attendees realized that his drag queen persona, Aida H Dee, was a play about ADHD, a condition they also had, their faces lit up, he said.
“I could see the sparks in the synapses of their brains firing with joy… (they thought) that this person was amazing and like me,” he continued.
But as anti-drag queen protests mount, analysts are increasingly concerned about the hateful extremist discourse that surrounds them.
Monday’s protest in Reading involved both anti-vaxxer Chaves and members of the anti-government, sovereign citizen group Alpha Men Assemble, said Joe Ondrak, head of investigations at the threat intelligence organization Logicically.
The term sovereign citizens came from the US, according to Hope Not Hate. It’s based on the belief that government agencies are fraudulent, so followers don’t have to abide by it. The FBI has noted that sovereign citizens operate in loosely connected networks with no established leadership.
Alpha Men Assemble is described by anti-extremist advocacy group Hope Not Hate as “an attempt to establish a hardcore of activists and has attracted the involvement of a number of far-right individuals.”
The group has received a lot of media attention in recent months over fears that alleged recruiting of former veterans and military training sessions would make it evolve into a private American-style militia. DailyExpertNews has been unable to reach the group for comment as it has been stalled after scrutiny from the media and government.
Ondrak worries that conspiracy groups, which gained a lot of following during the pandemic, are now targeting LGBTQ causes using “groomer” stories.
“I really thought what would happen next (is) some kind of opposition to the green energy transition, but that kind of fell out of public discourse — so unfortunately the queer community has become their target,” he said.
DailyExpertNews has seen at least four anti-vax Telegram channels, including one with more than 17,000 followers, sharing flyers and messages protesting Drag Queen Story Hour.
When asked why groups that seem to facilitate hate speech are allowed to operate on their platforms, a Telegram spokesperson said: “Telegram is a free speech platform where people are welcome to peacefully express their views even when we disagree. be with.” The spokesperson added that “posts glorifying or encouraging violence or its perpetrators are expressly prohibited by Telegram’s terms of service and will be removed by our moderators.”
As for the white nationalist groups that attended the protests, such as Patriotic Alternative, ISD’s Squirrell described them as “deeply homophobic”.
They believe that “whites in Western countries are being systematically replaced by non-whites,” he said. They say a “shadowy cabal of Jews” is encouraging white people to adopt foreign identities as a way to reduce the white birth rate — views rooted in neo-Nazi ideology — Squirrell added.
In response to DailyExpertNews’s request for comment, a Patriotic Alternative spokeswoman said: “Drag queens are often highly sexualized caricatures of women and we believe that children should be able to enjoy their childhood and not be subjected to LGBT indoctrination. ”
Two days after the events in Reading, in the northern English town of Crewe, members of Patriotic Alternative picked up a library where a Drag Queen Story Hour UK event was taking place. The group’s leader later promised more demonstrations against Samuel’s summer tour of dozens of libraries across the country.
The protests continued last Thursday, as Samuel visited libraries in Bristol, a city in the south west of England known for its liberal stance.
Rosie, a local parent who asked DailyExpertNews not to use her last name out of fear for her safety, told DailyExpertNews she had decided to bring her young daughter to the event because she felt it was important to learn more about inclusivity and different communities.
“I like drag queens, I like it, it’s art, it’s laughter and something else with books and stories,” she said.
But Rosie said she was unprepared for the vitriol she encountered in the library, where protesters waved signs reading “Stop taking care of children” and a line of police officers ushered parents into the building. At least one mother cried inside as protesters played the theme song of the British TV show “Jim’ll Fix It”, whose late host was a notorious sexually abused child, on loudspeakers outside the library.
“It was just awful. I expected it to be a joyous event as it was Pride in Bristol a few weeks ago.” Instead, she said the harassment by protesters was “very backward and (I feel) naive to think that any progress has been made.”