It’s a sunny June Saturday and preschool tykes normally might be enjoying their innocence by playing in the park or, perhaps, by visiting the local library for a reading of Winnie the Pooh or The Cat in the Hat.

But these are not “normal” times, so as we drive up to the Spokane Public Library’s South Hill branch, in Spokane, Washington, we are greeted with a sea of rainbow flags and banners, and 300-400 garishly clad revelers, including bearded “ladies” in glittery gowns, facing off against 150-200 opponents, mostly Christians of various denominations. In between these two opposing forces are lots of police officers and half-a-dozen police cars with red-blue lights flashing. Welcome to Drag Queen Story Hour, the latest bizarre salvo in the long-running degeneracy war more euphemistically referred to as the sexual revolution.

The Drag Queen Story Hour phenomenon is not new; it was launched in 2015 in San Francisco (where else?). Men cavorting around in caked-on makeup and mascara, leather-&-lace bodices, fishnet stockings, sequined bikinis — and worse — used to be relegated to the transvestite freak shows of San Francisco and the debauched residents of New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and other major cities. If they ventured out of their “adult entertainment” zones, and particularly if they attempted to associate with children, they were almost certain to face arrest. Today, however, “progressive” politicos and the forces of political correctness that run many of our cities are demanding that these burlesque shows be brought to toddlers in public libraries and public schools — and that the taxpayers subsidize it. Childhood innocence is no longer a sacred thing to be guarded. In fact, according to the prevailing purveyors of enlightened “popular culture,” even very young children should be — must be — exposed to every conceivable sexual vice and perversion. The depraved are coming to rescue the deprived! Are we exaggerating? Not one bit!

As Alex Newman reported for The New American in June, California’s new “Health Education Framework” for kindergarten through 12th grade is so incredibly immoral that it should shock even the most liberal and “progressive” parents. “From teaching children that there are infinite genders, to how-to manuals on sexual perversions so dangerous and obscene they cannot be described here, there seem to be no moral boundaries or taboos that are not being deliberately broken,” he wrote.

“Nothing is beyond the pale,” noted Newman. “For instance, the indoctrination on transgenderism begins in kindergarten, with children being encouraged to question their ‘gender’ and ‘gender stereotypes.’ And it gets progressively more extreme from there: sexual relationships with multiple partners, anal sex, masturbation, ‘fisting,’ ‘blood play,’ sado-masochism, and much more. Even ‘education’ on child rape as a ‘sexual orientation’ was being foisted on children in the state, at least before a massive outcry shut that down — temporarily, no doubt.”

“The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex + (LGBTQI+) agenda is being infused into the entire curriculum from the earliest years,” Newman warned. That is what is being mandated in the “Golden State’s” government school system. The Drag Queen Story Hour is part of the softening-up process to push similar programs across the rest of the country. In the past couple of years, it has exploded nationwide, thanks to the efforts of the LGBTQ “rainbow mafia” matrix of Big Government, Big Business, Big Media, Big Tech, and Big Academia.

In some cities, Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is a year-round weekly program. Opponents of the event in Spokane believe their city is being set up for a similar ongoing program of gender confusion and intensive LGBTQI indoctrination. However, the Spokane Public Library has announced that it would not schedule any additional drag queen readings after the June 15 performance at the South Hill branch and the June 22 reading at the main downtown library. Critics believe that announcement was made simply to diffuse public backlash against the program, especially since library officials are hoping voters will approve a new tax levy for the library in August. If the levy goes through, critics fear, drag queens will be back in force. Your reporter was unable to gain entrance to the June 15 Drag Queen Story Hour. Both excuses given for barring my entry were bogus: 1) that I didn’t have proper press credentials; and 2) that the library was too crowded with children to accommodate additional press. The Spokane police, who were apparently under orders to be partial to the drag queen side of the street, did not confront or arrest LGBTQ activists who crossed the street to taunt the opponents. Reportedly, some Christians were pelted with eggs and other objects, but no attempts were made to arrest the perpetrators. However, they did arrest Afshin Yagtin, the pastor of New Covenant Baptist Church in Spokane and the publisher/editor of Saved Magazine, when he peacefully attempted to enter the South Hill branch library to witness what he called the “Drag Queen Perversion Hour.”

“Grooming” and “Queering”

On June 22 at the downtown Spokane Public Library, police and library officials were more accommodating, perhaps due to threats of lawsuits for violating the First Amendment guarantees of members of the press at the South Hill branch the previous week. Again, several hundred supporters and protesters lined opposite sides of the street, yelling through megaphones, singing, and playing music. Along with around a dozen other members of the media, I went through TSA-type security screening and was admitted to the press area, a cordoned-off corner of a room that soon filled with about 150 children (mostly in the three- to five-year age range) and 75-100 adults. A “drag queen” — a man dressed as a woman — and a “drag king” — a woman dressed as a man — “performed” for the children, led them in song and dance routines, including their catchy singalong recruitment ditty “Drag Is Magic.” The refrain for the song goes: “Drag is for you. Drag is for me. Drag is fun. Drag is for everyone. Cuz Drag is magic — Lalalalalalala, drag is magic.” Then drag queen “Tirrany Hex” read the children a favorite transgender book, Not All Princesses Wear Pink.

The constant claim of the Drag Queen Story Hour advocates is that there is absolutely no LGBTQ agenda behind the story hour. Typical of these claims is that of Jackie Huba, an author and DQSH performer from Austin, Texas. “The only agenda these drag queens are trying to get across these kids is to have fun and learn a little bit about other people and accept other people,” Huba said, in an interview with AL.com. “It’s really just about an over-the-top character who is there to entertain children. Kids are creative. They love color and sparkle. That’s all there is to it. There is no more agenda than that.” Yes, it’s all about love, acceptance, inclusivity, tolerance, blah, blah — that’s all. Nothing to get your tutu in a twist over! No LGBTQ recruitment or propagandizing going on here. Yeah, right! That claim would be laughable, if the reality were not so serious. The glittery “queens” do not get the children bouncing, jumping, and singing to their tunes for mere “entertainment.”

Some of the drag queens have been more forthright about their intentions.

Dylan Pontiff, for instance, who performed for the Drag Queen Story Hour in Lafayette, Louisiana, proudly told the Library Board, in a videotaped public testimony: “This is going to be the grooming of the next generation.” Pontiff, who goes by the name Santana Pilar Andrews when in his drag persona, said, “We are trying to groom the next generation to not see the way” that the drag queen opponents see the world. Which is to say, that he and his ilk intend to transform the worldviews of your children by actively propagandizing them.

The LGBTQ “groomers” have already succeeded to an alarming degree. If a recent study by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is to be believed, more than a quarter of California’s children ages 12 through 17 now identify as “gender non-conforming.” That was not even a term in the clinical lexicon a few short years ago, yet now it has been adopted by more than 25 percent of adolescents — without any indoctrination to that effect? In other words, more than one in four teen boys now doubt the fact that they are male, and a similar proportion of girls question that they are female. That just suddenly happens without subversive grooming and propagandizing? And yet, that has been accomplished by the educational-media-entertainment industries even before California’s new K-12 Health Education Framework has been put into effect.

However, the sexual-social engineers are not content merely to triumph in coastal metropolitan areas; they are determined to enlighten the rural hicks and small-town inhabitants of Middle America as well. How do we know? They tell us so, by both word and action.

A February 20, 2019 BBC News story entitled “Drag queen story hour in America’s Bible Belt,” for example, reported that the events “are moving out of the big cities and coming to conservative southern US states.” The story, which focuses on the Drag Queen Story Hour controversy in Greenville, South Carolina, notes that it “is part of a growing movement to bring these events to Middle America.” The BBC, which has been a huge promoter of the LGBTQ agenda in the U.K. and worldwide, continues:

Jonathan Hamilt, a co-founder of Drag Queen Story Hour in New York, told the BBC they have seen “an exponential growth in the number of events in more conservative, rural and southern states over the last year.”

“We have chapters in Nebraska, Indiana and Alabama. I think it is partly a reaction to the political landscape of the US right now and a need for more queer programming for children.”

Mr. Hamilt says events in rural areas “definitely see more protests.” “When you leave big liberal areas, people tend to be more conservative. Their fear can come out as anger.”

You see, Hamilt, the culturally superior New Yorker, knows precisely what all you primitive yokels of “Middle America” and the “Bible Belt” need: “more queer programming for children,” so they can be more like the “big liberal areas.”

Thirty Years of Subversion

The current onslaught of non-stop, escalating perversion is not something entirely new. It is merely the latest phase in the implementation of an explicit strategy of psychological, social, and moral subversion laid out in a comprehensive plan over three decades ago. In previous articles in The New American, particularly in the June 8, 1998 article “The Queering of America,” we went into considerable detail concerning this scheme, as put forward by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen in their 1989 bestseller After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s.

Kirk and Madsen are not your run-of-the-mill homosexual activists. They are Harvard-trained professionals in neuropsychiatry, public persuasion, and social marketing, and their book is both a theoretical and operational manual for what they call the “overhauling of straight America.” They explicitly stated that by “overhauling” they mean “subverting” America.

“By conversion we actually mean something far more profoundly threatening to the American way of life,” they said. “We mean conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind and will, through a planned psychological attack. We mean ‘subverting’ the mechanism of prejudice to our own ends — using the very process that made America hate us to turn their hatred into warm regard — whether they like it or not.”

Kirk and Madsen made it clear that they were declaring “war” on America and constantly invoked aggressive, military terms such as “Trojan Horse,” “deception,” “propaganda,” “war strategy,” “battle tactics,” “hand-to-hand combat,” “rage,” “fury,” “enemy,” “war conference,” “attack,” “hate,” “vilify,” “destroy,” “conquer,” “subvert,” etc.

Their book provided a program of subversion-perversion-conversion that involves the systematic use of very sophisticated psychological techniques of desensitizing, jamming, and conditioning. By assiduously implementing its step-by-step directions the pervert lobby has racked up one milestone victory after another: admittance of homosexuals and lesbians into the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; legalized same-sex “marriage” and adoption rights; mandated “domestic partner” policies for public and private employers; vast increases in government funding for all homosexual programs; explicit homosexual “education” at all levels of schooling; abolition of state and local statutes restricting homosexual behavior — and much, much more.

Yet, it is one thing to conceive a brilliant, if diabolical, strategy, and quite another to carry it out. Kirk and Madsen did not have the resources to effect their subversive scheme. How then did their plans end up succeeding so wildly in such a relatively short time? Well, that takes us back to our reference to the LGBTQ “rainbow mafia” and the elite pervert lobby in Big Media, Big Business, Big Tech, Big Government, and Big Academia.

We see those same forces hand-in-hand at work employing the same strategy and tactics in the Drag Queen Story Hour that we have observed in those previous milestone battles. Big Media has especially played an enormous role in normalizing — even glamorizing — the DQSH agenda, and intimidating the opposition into silence by constantly playing the “tolerance” and “hate speech” cards. We’ll cite just a few representative examples.

Consider, for example, the NBC News article entitled “Drag Queen Story Hour brings pride and glamor to libraries across U.S.” The subject of the story, a transvestite going by the name Angel Elektra, is presented as an inspiring and fun role model for kiddies.

An Associated Press story entitled “Library brings drag queens, kids together for story hour” sends out similarly sympathetic vibes.

Then there’s “Drag Queen Story Hour Engages Kids With Reading, Gender Creativity,” from the taxpayer-supported KQED, the San Francisco-based PBS-NPR station that provides a generous portion of the “public broadcasting” content. KQED describes the burlesque presentation for tots at the public library in Oakland, California, thusly:

Dressed to the nines wearing glittery makeup, sky-high curls and a green polka-dot dress, Black Benatar could hardly contain her own excitement.

“I’m Black Benatar and I love reading to children!” she announced, right after teaching the audience to introduce themselves like a drag queen (it’s not “hello”, but more like “HAAAAAAY.”)

“Black Benatar led the audience in traditional children’s songs like ‘Old MacDonald’ and ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’ and read some not-so-traditional children’s books whose themes included gay marriage and being transgender,” KQED reported. “The overwhelming crowd favorite was My Princess Boy, a tale about a young boy who likes to dress like a girl and is still loved by his family.”

Any search engine query will yield a glut of similar “mainstream” news stories oozing with positivity about the supposed benefits to children from associating with the cross-dressers. If there is any negativity to be found, it is usually directed at the “bigots” who oppose the transvestite enlightenment. The official Drag Queen Story Hour website provides a press section with links to many glowing articles and videos of positive “news” coverage from the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press, The Guardian, NBC News, CBS News, WNYC, BuzzFeed, LA Weekly, Library Journal, The New Yorker, and many more.

Thus it was telling (though hardly surprising) that when real news broke about one of the much-hyped drag queen stars being a convicted child sex offender, the media cheerleading section went mostly mum. It turns out that 32-year-old registered sex offender Alberto Garza, who participated in the Houston Drag Queen Story Hour under the name Tatiana Mala Niña (Tatiana “Bad Girl”), was convicted in 2009 of aggravated sexual assault of an eight-year-old child. He is a “Bad Girl” indeed! Now, might that possibly be of interest to parents, grandparents, and, well, anyone committed to the safety of children? One might suppose so. After all, isn’t “child safety” one of the arguments put forward for the story hour by the program’s proponents?

So how did the truth about Garza/Mala Niña’s criminal sexcapades reach the light of day? Was it the library, the city government, the police department, or the local or national media that discovered and exposed this pertinent fact? The answer: None of the above.

No, Houston children are safe from “Bad Girl” Garza thanks to the determined efforts of the dads and moms at Houston MassResistance, a Texas affiliate of the national pro-family group MassResistance based in Massachusetts.

After failing to halt the Drag Queen Story Hour with a lawsuit, and failing to get Houston city officials to release background information on the participating drag queens, the parent activists at Houston MassResistance did their own research and uncovered Garza’s criminal record. What’s more, they found plenty of additional damning evidence: Garza’s own photos posted on social media and Web pages. Typical of the transvestite culture, which revels in the outrageous, many of the costumes and poses are revolting and hardly exemplify what any sane person would consider healthy for children to be exposed to. MassResistance delivered a 163-page report, documenting what it described as Garza’s “lurid activities,” to the Houston City Council, the mayor, the library, and the press.

The revelations forced Houston Public Library officials to issue an apology. “In our review of our process and of this participant, we discovered that we failed to complete a background check as required by our own guidelines,” library officials said in a statement issued in March of this year. “We deeply regret this oversight and the concern this may cause our customers.”

“We assure you that this participant will not be involved in any future … programs,” the officials added, saying they “are taking the appropriate action to ensure that the status of every participant in every program throughout our system is verified.”

Houston Public Library Executive Director Dr. Rhea Brown Lawson told KTRK-13, the Houston ABC network affiliate, that the Garza background check “slipped through the cracks” because Garza listed his name as Nicky Salazar when volunteering, and didn’t provide a birth date or Social Security number. “It was an error Dr. Lawson said won’t happen again. And now, if a name is not on a list and can’t be checked, the volunteer won’t read,” KTRK reported. “We do background checks and we do not allow people who have criminal backgrounds to read to our children,” Lawson told KTRK on March 18.

Oh yes, the Garza/Mala Niña slip-up was just a one-off error, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In April, Houston MassResistance issued a new report exposing yet an even worse sex offender in the Houston Drag Queen Story Hour program. It turns out, according to the report, that William Travis Dees, who goes under a number of drag queen aliases, has been convicted of sex crimes against four young children (ages four, five, six, and eight), was jailed, and is listed as a “high risk sex offender.”

Moreover, the MassResistance report notes that Dees worked as a transgender prostitute and is a self-confessed practition-er of BDSM (bondage, discipline, sado-masochism). The MassResistance report includes many disturbing photos of Dees in his various personas, including his regular mockery of Catholicism while dressed as a drag queen “nun.” The report notes: “Dees appears to be a very troubled and dysfunctional man.” That much should be obvious. Nevertheless, Houston library officials deemed him suitable to serve as a “greeter” of young children and a DQSH reader. So much for Dr. Lawson’s “won’t happen again” pledge.

As a result of the public outcry over the outrages exposed by MassResistance, the Houston Public Library was forced to shut down its transvestites-for-tots program. Parents are also finding that taxpayer retaliation, in the form of threats to defeat tax levies for libraries and schools, is proving effective. Public officials who have been deaf to parental concerns can become suddenly attentive when their funding is in jeopardy.

Thanks to the persistent efforts of the MassResistance parents, the Drag Queen Story Hour has been derailed — at least temporarily — in Houston, as well as in Leander, Texas, and other cities around the country. They have shown that determined, ordinary citizens can fight and beat City Hall, as well as the Rainbow Mafia and its Big Business/Big Media supporters.

Photo credit: AP Images

This article originally appeared in the August 5, 2019 print edition of The New American.