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Somerville drag story hour is latest to be targeted by the far right, and organizers say they’re getting bolder
In 2018, Somerville Public Library's drag story time went off without a hitch. Six years later, a hoax bomb threat canceled an event that also attracted protesters.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic and the increasingly polarized politics of recent years, more than a hundred children and their guardians packed into the Somerville Public Library’s Central Library for a 30-minute story time with family-friendly drag kings, queens, and their friends.
“Everyone was elbow to elbow in the best way possible,” remembered Cathy Piantigini, the director of library services with the City of Somerville. “I was just watching the looks on the faces of the kids that were there. Undeniable, you could just tell there was a deep connection there, and I’m getting goosebumps just recalling it.”
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Piantigini said that some critics expressed themselves in their Facebook comments, but no protesters showed up that day. That was early 2018, more than six years before a hoax bomb threat completely canceled a drag time story event at the same library earlier this month.
Drag Queen Story Hour was started in 2015 in San Francisco. A year later, the Boston Public Library touted that theirs was the first drag story hour event on the East Coast. Years later, the drag artist set to perform in Somerville and Piantigini said hosting the events is becoming increasingly difficult.
In 2018, the three performers — family-friendly drag artists wearing a red top hat or a pink pantsuit — read aloud from children’s books like “Worm Loves Worm” and “It’s Okay to Be Different.”
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“It really was breathtaking to think that we couldn’t have a Drag Queen Story Time in Somerville,” Piantigini said about the recent cancelation. “When people talk about censorship, and you hear about book bans, that’s still a very real thing, but it seems to me more so with programming now.”
‘A sitting duck’: Somerville bomb threat canceled recent drag event
Patty Bourrée, which is her drag persona, is the director of the Boston branch of Drag Story Hour, a national organization to connect drag storytellers with schools, libraries, or museums for story time events.
She knew ahead of time about online pushback to the event, which she said happens “semi-regularly” to “varying degrees.” Bourrée said she “felt like a little bit of a sitting duck,” dressed in drag, when the bomb threat came in just 20 minutes before the story hour was scheduled to begin.
“All of a sudden, the building is full of police. Fire trucks are outside. Dogs are running through the building, sniffing out for a bomb that we knew wasn’t there,” she said. “I’m always super careful about going in and out of the venue … I’ve got a baseball hat on. I want to be inconspicuous, because I know that there are people who have bad intentions for me, who think the worst of my intentions.”
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Somerville police didn’t respond to a request for an update on the investigation into the threat.
There were a handful of people outside the library to protest the event. They waved signs that said “preserve children’s innocence” and “what about pimp story hour?” An organizer with the far-right group Super Happy Fun America claimed responsibility for the demonstration, posting on Facebook that the cancelation was a “victory.”
Hundreds of people came out to counterprotest the far-right group, waving Pride and trans flags, which Piantigini said is more reflective of the community the library serves than the far-right protesters.
“It was still a majority of people who really wanted to see this happen, and there are definitely people in the Somerville community who embraced it and welcomed the library offering it,” Piantigini said.
‘It’s gotten worse’: Neo-Nazis protest multiple drag story times since 2022
Somerville was the only cancelation her group has seen this year, but threatening incidents around drag story hours have been getting worse, Bourrée said. In June, a drag story hour hosted at a small arts center in Newton was able to address a bomb threat that came in about an hour before the children arrived. But the doors were locked, and the building was cleared before the event, The Boston Globe reported.
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“I’ve dealt with groups that come to these events, and they’re armed with guns and stuff, so I just didn’t know what the intentions were,” Bourrée said about the threat at Somerville.
Neo-Nazis, wearing masks, descended upon a drag story time event for children in Jamaica Plain during Pride in 2022. Their banner said, “PEDO SCUM OFF OUR STREETS,” according to The Boston Globe.
Later that year, neo-Nazis protested outside the Fall River Public Library, calling the drag story hour pedophilic and shouting anti-LGBTQ+ slurs. It was the library’s 14th drag story hour, regularly held there for more than a year, the Fall River Herald News reported.
Neo-Nazis entered the room during a drag story hour in Taunton last year, calling a drag queen reading a children’s book a “pedophile” and “groomer,” she told Boston.com.
“It’s gotten worse,” said Bourrée, who said she performed at 20 to 30 story hours this past Pride season.
Bourrée said there’s a concerning political focus on drag events with children, while she’s a working artist looking to make a living. Most of the protesters “believe what they say they believe,” she said.
“There’s just so much, so much energy being wasted on this issue of gender and sexuality in schools,” said Bourrée, who has a master’s in education from Emerson College. “When I see these things in the media about gender and sexuality, in places of education, in terms of drag story hour, it’s so far from my reality, it’s spooky to me.”
Somerville library might adapt to host drag story times in the future
In Somerville, Piantigini said that political climate is a big factor into the protests, including people’s concerns about whether children should be attending the drag story hour.
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“I get the desire to protest,” Piantigini said, referring to personal opinion, “but these kids were going to be going to a program where they had adults in their lives that were helping make that decision with them. That part is a little bit frustrating to be a witness to.”
Piantigini said Drag Queen Story Hour will hopefully be returning to the Somerville library sometime next year. But,
Both Piantigini and Bourrée said they scheduled another story time in the new year, but for the safety of all, they might take a different approach.
“The more you advertise, the more information you offer, the more vulnerable the event becomes,” Bourrée said.
Piantigini said a future event might have to be promoted differently on social media or named something more general.
“It’s a different climate now,” she said. “Social media has such a large presence in people’s lives now, more so than even a handful of years ago. Clearly we had Facebook and other social media accounts, but it’s just the playing field.”
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