Local News

‘These jerks are not the community’: Here’s how a Boston drag queen stood up to neo-Nazis

When masked protesters showed up at her story hour in Concord, N.H., Juicy Garland knew the show must go on.

Juicy Garland, a Boston-area drag performer, said she was talking to a family before the show when the protestors arrived. Courtesy Photo

By Melissa Ellin

3 minutes to read
PRIOR COVERAGE:

Performers are told to prepare for the unexpected. But when a group of right-wing activists showed up at a coffee shop in Concord, New Hampshire on Sunday to protest the family-friendly drag queen story hour, Juicy Garland was forced into crisis management mode.

Garland, a Boston-area drag performer, said she was talking to a family before the 11 a.m. show when the protestors came.

“A group of neo-Nazis showed up to start banging on windows and shouting obscenities and slurs to threaten our safety and disrupt the events just before families with young kids started to arrive,” she said.

The group, which has identified itself as part of the Massachusetts-based chapter of the Nationalist Social Club — or NSC-131 — could be seen clearly through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the cafe.

When Garland and Teatotaller cafe owner Emmett Soldati realized the protestors were there to stay for the duration of the performance, she said they quickly came up with a way to make sure the show went on.

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“There was really no conversation about canceling the event,” Garland said. “It was really about assessing the safety to determine if we could have the event safely.”

Rather than having the story hour in full view of the protestors, she said they moved to an alternate space on the second floor of the cafe.

“[We] moved upstairs to basically entertain, keep all the families comfortable, keep the kids distracted and safe,” she said. “We had the event and it went off successfully despite everything.”

But it wasn’t until hours later that Garland said she was able to start processing what happened. During the story hour, she said her job was to manage the situation for everyone else.

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“At the same time, I am reading, like, ‘Heather Has Two Mommies‘ and I’m telling jokes to ensure that the parents stay comfortable, while the kids are totally distracted and unaware and everybody feels safe in the secondary space, I’m also dealing with the fact that I have [slurs] being chanted behind me outside.”

PRIDE & PREJUDICE:

After the story hour, she said she rushed to her car and immediately left to go celebrate Father’s Day festivities with her partner and family.

“It was something that I couldn’t even really emotionally process,” she said about the situation as it was happening.

When she got home at that night, she said she could finally sit down and think.

“I was so mad, but I didn’t even feel that until 9:30 p.m.,” she said, adding that she felt “rage that these goons had the gall to think that they could even manage to disrupt this event where all I wanted to do was to just — on Father’s Day —read stories about different kinds of families to kids who were just there to see what is effectively a glorified party clown in red, white and blue read about families.”

While there had been protests at events in the past, Garland said the Sunday protestors were another breed. Prior groups were somewhat “lazy” in their organization and took a “lackadaisical” approach to protesting, she said.

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“We had stopped worrying about needing safety measures,” Garland explained. “This group was a different group of people who were clearly organized. They effectively had uniforms.” They also had prepared chants and movements.

Now, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office is investigating the Sunday protest.

Garland said she is grateful to the community of Concord for showing up to support her despite the incident, and she guesses that many of the people protesting were probably not from that community.

“These jerks are not the community of Concord,” she said, adding that they will not win.

There is already another story hour planned, and Garland said she is looking forward to it.

“We had protesters before, we will have protesters again,” she said.

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