Hinge and Bracket Sing ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring Again’

There’s a controversy raging on both sides of the Atlantic over drag queens. This centres around drag queen story hour and its use by some gender activists to indoctrinate children with ‘queer’, post-modern Marxist ideology. People are also concerned about the highly sexualised drag performances in certain venues to which children, including very young children, have been brought.

But it wasn’t always like this, not in Britain. Drag shows in the UK may have started in the gay clubs, but they were also part of the music hall tradition. Back when I was a small lad in junior school, great drag performers like Danny La Rue were early evening entertainment on British television. They were popular and it was all good family fun. La Rue even starred in a film back in the 1950s or 60s, in which he played a British drag star shot down over Nazi Germany. Taken prisoner, a Nazi officer thinks he’s a woman, falls in love with him and pursues him. I doubt it’s considered acceptable now, but it was all good fun at the time.

Two of the greatest drag acts of the 60s through to the early 80s were Hinge and Bracket. They were supposed to be classical musicians, with one sitting at the piano and the other singing and doing the majority of the patter. They were hilarious, and the characters the two men behind them built up were absolutely convincing. One British female star even thought they were really two elderly lesbians. And because it was based in classical music, you felt a bit cultured with it as well.

Here they are singing the old Victorian/Edwardian parlour song, We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring Again’.

Are Gays Abandoning Pride?

I think June is Pride month over in the Land of the Free, but there seems to be signs that both in America and over here parts of the gay community are turning against it. Some of this seems to be ordinary gay men and women with gender critical views, who feel that the emphasis Pride and the mainstream gay organisations have placed on transgender people and their issues is both dangerous and excludes ordinary gays. There’s a video of the operations manager of the American gay anti-trans organisation, Gays Against Groomers, tearing up the Pride flag saying that it does not represent them or their community. Gays Against Groomers are concerned about the promotion of the transgender ideology among children and its encouragement of them questioning their gender identity. The gender critical gay YouTubers on this side of the Atlantic have similar issues, but they also feel that organisations like Pride don’t represent them because of their focus on trans people. Barry Wall, the EDIJester, put up a video a few weeks ago going through the programme Manchester Pride had put together for their festival. There were plenty of trans-themed events, but far fewer for ordinary gays. Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh of the ‘Queens Speech’ channel had similar complaints about Sadiq Khan’s ideas for London’s Pride festival. Khan had announced that the focus in his city’s Pride festival would be trans people, which left them as ordinary gays feeling marginalised and alienated. They felt the same about all the mainstream gay organisations, declaring that they had been hollowed out and ruined from within. They no longer represented ordinary gays and lesbians. As organisations set up to represent and protect a specific demographic, they were unique in this. The various anti-racist organisations set up to protect and represent Blacks and Asians, for example, still continue to do so. But to them, the gay organisations no longer represented ordinary gays, although Pride and other organisations were still keen to get their money because of the power of the ‘pink pound’.

There also appears to be a feeling that Pride had been taken over by straight people and a revulsion at the appearance of kink. The pair said that it now seemed to be about straight people with fetishes. They didn’t want to go to it because they said they didn’t want to see people wearing dog masks with their private parts on display. And it seems they’re not alone. They mentioned one particular gay rights activist, who had asked her gay audience if they still went to Pride. Many of them didn’t, again complaining that it was no longer the fun event they remembered from previous years, but had had been taken over by kink.

At the same time, it seems to me that the controversy over drag queen story hour is leading to a general backlash against the LGB community in America. There was a video on YouTube the other day of the citizens of one town, Fairview, criticising their local councillors over a Pride event. They didn’t believe it was suitable for children and objected to a drag show that was going to be a part of it. In fact, the event was 18+, so it was very definitely not aimed at children. And while there are good objections to drag shows for children, adults should have every right to see these shows if they so wish. This local controversy appears to bear out the fears of some gender critical gays that the strong promotion of the transgender issue and ideology would lead to a backlash against all gays, regardless of their own stance on the issue.

I don’t know if this is a growing trend, and if it will result in more people turning their backs on Pride. I’ve come across other posts and videos online by gay people saying that they also find Pride too corporate and actually quite oppressive, now that governments and corporations are using it to promote their inclusiveness and welcoming policies towards gays and trans people. I think this is what happens to most formerly subversive or rebellious movements as they become the new orthodoxy and the source of new rules and official attitudes. And against this there are the number of gays, who continue to support Pride and the other gay organisations and their campaigns on behalf of transpeople.

Lawrence Fox on the History of Drag Queen Story Hour

This is a video from Lawrence Fox’s Reclaim the Media channel on YouTube, which is part of his Reclaim party. I’m very much aware that by reblogging it I’m tempting the ire of the Labour party for publishing the ideas and content of a rival party. But I think here Lozza and his crew have a point. Looking at it, he doesn’t object to drag as a late night entertainment for adults. What he objects to is very sexualised drag performances being staged in front of children as a vehicle for indoctrinating them with Queer Theory and the gender ideology.

I state again that I am definitely opposed to anyone being stigmatised or persecuted because of their sexuality or gender identity. I’m putting this video up because I do think that there is an attempt to use drag as a vehicle for indoctrinating children, and that the theories about human sexuality and sexual identity are fundamentally wrong and dangerous.

The video traces the history of drag from the days of ancient Greece, the middle ages and the early modern period, when male actors took female roles because of the social taboos against women appearing on stage. He claims that drag as a distinct form of entertainment appeared in the 19th century. The word itself may be a contraction of ‘Dressed As A Girl’. By the late 19th century drag was subversive and political, critiquing social norms about gender. It was originally late night fun for adults, but now there are attempts to put into the classroom. Drag Queen Story Hour is in the vanguard of this campaign.

Queer Theory, which is part of this new movement, has its origins in the postmodernist philosophical movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It begins with Michel Foucault’s 1976 History of Sexuality. Lozza says that Foucault definitely wasn’t a paedophile. This is almost certainly irony, as Foucault used to travel to north Africa for sex with young, pre-teen boys. He also explicitly argued that children can give sexual consent. His book claimed that sexuality was a social construct shaped by culture and history. This was then extended further by Gail Rubin, a lesbian anthropologist in her Thinking Sex. This also argued that sex and gender were the product of cultural norms, which were themselves oppressive and had no basis in nature. She defended every sexual taboo, including ‘boy lovers’.

Rubin was followed by Judith Butler and her book, Gender Trouble, which introduced into the debate the theory of performativity. Gender was not innate, but something people perform. She also challenged the gender binary of male and female. Drag Queen Story Hour differs from other forms of drag in that it is an exercise in gender performativity. This is unlike pantomime dames, who are comic figures exaggerating some female mannerisms while preserving their male gait. Drag queens themselves evolved from gay nightclubs and cabaret to challenge gender norms, but they were adult entertainment.

Drag Queen Story Hour itself began in 2015 in San Francisco, launched by author and activist Michelle Tea. She started it as a way of spreading knowledge of gay culture. Tea was already involved with transgressive culture, touring with a sex workers’ artistic collective and with a Queer feminist poetry collective, Sisterspit, whose anthology included pieces by and about drug addicts and other marginalised, underground groups. Drag Queen Story Hour was launched with Tea’s own group, Radar Productions, and was first staged in San Francisco public library. It was intended to introduce children to gay culture and diversity, equity and inclusion. It was an immediate success, and spread to other cities and across the Atlantic to Britain.

Lozza states that the claim by its defenders that Drag Queen Story Hour is just about teaching children to read in a fun way is dishonest. Here he mentions the recent scandal of the drag king, who performed in schools in the Isle of Man. This individual sparked controversy and a review of the programme by teaching children that there were 72 genders. Amongst themselves, the advocates of Drag Queen Story Hour are quite clear about their intentions to indoctrinate children. He talks here about the paper ‘Queer Pedagogy’, co-authored by the drag queen Little Miss Hot Mess, which appeared in an American journal of education. This stated the goal was to attack racist, capitalist modes of reproduction and the nuclear family.

From this he moves to the matter of expense and how much these events cost. Much of it is funded by the Arts Council. In 2019 the British Library hosted a Drag Queen Story Hour as part of their ‘Live, Love, Liberty’ exhibition. Last year, 2022, New York public library spent $200,000 on such events. The organisers insisted that these performances were safe, with background checks made on the performers and the performances themselves not sexual and suitable for children. This was belied by clips of some of these events showing very sexualised performances. Seven of the drag queens who performed in the Story Hours have been charged with child sex offences. Sharon Le Grand, another drag queen, also said in 2022 ‘We need to teach our children to open their hearts. We need to teach our children to open their minds. We need to teach our children to open their legs.’ Drag kings, a recent addition to the show, have also exposed their chests during the performances to show their mastectomy scars, blurring the line between drag and strip shows. He also talks about the problem of the adult nature of the drag acts away from children. Many of them have web pages with very adult jokes and content, which children can easily find. As an example, he gives a rather coarse joke from Ruby Violet’s description of herself, who performed in front of children aged 3-11 in an event staged by Hertfordshire council.

He concludes by discussing the way opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour has been misrepresented and the attempts to outlaw protests against it. The Beeb declared that opponents of drag queens were motivated by conspiracy theories and were members of the far right. In Canada a law has been passed banning protests within a certain limit of drag queen performances, punishable by a fine of $25,000. The video concludes with him mentioning that there are a number of organisations fighting the gender ideology and Drag Queen Story Hour, whose details he’ll put in the blurb about the video, and a plug for another YouTube series from Reclaim, Bad Education.

While I feel that the video is broadly accurate, obviously that doesn’t mean that each and every drag queen involved in story hour is ideologically motivated or a danger to children. Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh have said in their YouTube videos, The Queens’ Speech, that many drag queens are just gay men trying to make a buck, and so don’t want a blanket ban on such shows. The EDIjester has also drawn a distinction between British and American drag. In his view, British drag, unlike its American counterpart, came out of the music hall tradition and wasn’t sexual. Again, I remember when British TV comedy frequently included drag. One of the major stars of 70s week day TV was Danny La Rue, while comedians and comic actors like the Two Ronnies, Dick Emery and Les Dawson also performed in drag. Also back in the 70s and 80s were Hinge and Bracket, which mixed musical comedy with drag. Again, this was mainstream entertainment on TV and radio and considered entirely innocuous. There have also been Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage and Barry Humphries with Dame Edna Everege.

And yes, some of the opponents of Drag Queen Story Hour are far right conspiracy theorists. You can see that with Correct, Not Political, who hold weird conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum, staged counter-protests against left wing demonstrations and openly admire Mosley. Their opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour comes from a deeper hostility to homosexuality and its promotion.

But I think critics of Drag Queen Story Hour and Queer Theory, like James Lindsay, are absolutely correct about the attempts to use drag as a vehicle for explicit political indoctrination and very harmful ideas about gender. It’s this aspect of it that needs to fought and combated.

American Senator Calls for ‘National Divorce’ between Democrat and Republican States – Is It All Over ‘Wokeness’?

Okay, I caught some American YouTubers discussing the possibility of a ‘national divorce’ in America the other night. I didn’t quite know what it was, but suspected it was about the dissolution of the USA. After all, it couldn’t be that all American domestic marriages had now become so terrible that a mass divorce across the Land of the Free was the only solution. It seems a congresswoman, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, declared that the political divisions in the nation were so bad that the red and blue states – those held by Republicans and Democrats respectively – should separate. This would, of course, mean the dissolution of America. One YouTuber posted a piece last night wondering if it would be possible.

Okay, I’m British. I haven’t been to America, and what I know about the country comes from books, TV, magazines, newspapers and radio, as well as talking to American friends and people who have lived and worked in the US. So, I’ve got no particular expertise. But it seems to me that the idea is totally mad. Firstly, I’m not sure that the political divisions are necessarily that deep or that pervasive to warrant states’ ceding from the Union. Yes, there always have been a far left strand in American politics, particularly regarding race and gay rights. We took over affirmative action from America, renaming it positive discrimination. Much of the Critical Social Justice movement, which is really just a postmodern twist on Marxism regarding Black rights, gender and feminism and gay and trans rights and other issues, is imported and influenced by American developments. This is particularly true of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was beginning studying archaeology at Bristol Uni, one of the American students on the course complained that we worse than her country. But some of the controversy in these and other areas just seems the result of really hysterical propaganda.

I remember what the bonkers American right said about Barack Obama. According to the nutters, Obama was a Black nationalist with a burning hatred of Whites, and was, depending on who you listened to, a Maoist Commie, a Nazi, a militant atheist and a secret Muslim planning to overthrow Christian America and make it subservient to Islam. One pair of Lutheran pastors in a church radio station went as far as declaring that he would be a dictator, who would kill more people than Mao. Alex Jones was prophesying that he would use an environmental catastrophe to seize power and force decent Americans into refugee camps.

The truth is Obama was none of these things. As people remarked at the time, he couldn’t simultaneously be a Marxist, Nazi, atheist, Muslim, Black nationalist subversive, and indeed he wasn’t. Despite the hoo-ha and the Nobel Peace Prize, he really didn’t do much for Black America. A few years ago, he said he always thought of himself as moderate Republican. He certainly acted like one, continuing Bush’s militaristic, imperial wars. Domestically he pushed through the charter schools despite community opposition in many areas. I think these are like the academies over here. Even Obamacare wasn’t the radical assault on private healthcare the Republicans screamed it was. It wasn’t a single-payer system, like the one advocated by Bernie Sanders. It simply made private health insurance more affordable to more Americans. It wasn’t even a Democrat policy – Obama took it over from Newt Gingrich, a Republican politico who proposed it in the ’90s.

And the same people are screaming that Biden is ‘far left’, when they aren’t suggesting he’s too old and doddery to hold the office of president. That accusation to me holds far more water. Biden is a bog-standard corporatist Democrat. He got in because the powerbrokers in the Democrat party didn’t want Bernie getting the nomination. Or somebody like the good senator from Vermont. But Biden pushed trans rights, and so he must be a communist.

I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and other bits and pieces by and about Marx and Engels. You won’t be surprised that neither of them wrote very much, if at all, about gay rights. I think it was also illegal in Soviet Russia, punishable with seven years in a forced labour camp. I’ve also got the impression that it was illegal generally in much of the Communist bloc. Contemporary gay rights are very much a western, post-War development, and not confined to one side of the political spectrum. Margaret Thatcher voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1968 or whenever it was, while Labour politicians like Jim Callaghan were opposed. Her former Personal Private Secretary, Matthew Parris, was one of the founders of the gay charity Stonewall. Section 28 was frightening, as it did look like the Tories wanted the mass imprisonment of gays, but it was brought in, so I’ve heard, because a school or schools in one London borough was teaching gay rights and there was a fear that this included paedophilia.

There are real issues with the contemporary trans movement. There’s been a devastating critique of the treatment of the children who came to the Tavistock Clinic in London. Many of them were just confused kids, often neuro-divergent. A very high percentage were autistic, depressed, in care, or came from families where one parent was a sex abuser. Eighty per cent of the boys were same-sex attracted, and ninety percent of the girls. Nearly all of these were nevertheless put on puberty blockers and progressed to surgical transition. It has been estimated that if the children had been treated properly, both medically and ethically, only two percent of them would have had done so. Gay opponents of trans militancy, like Barry ‘the EDIjester’ and Clive Simpson and Denis Kavanagh view this is a new form of conversion therapy, in which they gay is not prayed away, but dispelled with drugs and surgery. Many of the kids said they preferred to be trans rather than a gay man or lesbian woman. This is internalised homophobia.

There are also issues regarding women’s sports and privacy and dignity, as shown in the recent scandals about the incarceration of extremely violent, predatory, biologically male rapists in women’s prisons. But many of the critics of this aspect of trans militancy are socialist feminists. Left-wing ladies were against this long before Matt Walsh appeared and claimed it for the Republican right, demanding to know where all the feminist women were. They were there, just ignored. And people like Simpson and Kavanagh are worried about the absence of the left and ordinary people with just moderate political views from protesting this issue. They said in their recent Queen’s Speech video that the American right is the equivalent of our far right. If ordinary people don’t make themselves heard, they’re afraid it’ll be left to far right organisations like Patriotic Alternative, who’ll protest against Drag Queen Story Hour and there will be a backlash against gays in general. I fear this is happening already. Correct, Not Political not only protest against Drag Queen Story Hour, but against gay rights generally. And the ‘Terfs’ don’t necessarily hate trans people. The EDIjester talks about how he knew and partied the night away with trans people and drag queens back in the 1970s. In a recent video describing his experiences in Glasgow, Mr Menno, another gay critic of the trans movement, was moved to tears. So many of the trans people who came out to protest Kelly-Jay Keane and her women were trans-identified women, some of whom, despite their declarations that they were happy, seemed to be anything but. And J.K. Rowling, despite being a moron when it comes to Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, has never urged the hatred or murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. And to be fair, the book criticising the Tavistock, Time to think, also includes statements from people who transitioned, who were happy in their new gender.

Okay, this is the situation in Britain, but it also exists in America, where some of the most powerful opposition to the militant trans movement comes from left-wing as well as right-wing ladies. Helen Pluckrose, who is a staunch critic from the left of the Critical Social Justice Movement, holds the position that it should be possible to work out a compromise position between the trans rights advocates and their opponents, but she fears that this may not be possible considering how entrenched and intransigent the debate has become.

There have also been problems in America with rioting due to Black Lives Matter, as well the assassination, and planned assassination of various politicians by Antifa. Andy Ngo’s been putting up a number of videos about this, though considering his own record of falsifying reports sometimes a little scepticism might be in order. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who supports Black Lives Matter, or simply thinks more should be done to help impoverished Blacks and people of colour, is a Marxist revolutionary wanting to tear up the flagstones, raise the barricades and shoot cops. Similarly, despite well publicised cases, I don’t know how many school teachers in America, or even here for that matter, are draping the LGBTQ++ flags around their classrooms, indoctrinating kids in Queer Theory and taking them to inappropriate drag shows. Probably much fewer than the impression Walsh and his ilk would like to give.

And people don’t necessarily hold opinions that are uniformly right or left. Many Republicans now genuinely support gay rights, including marriage, as well as trans rights. And I can imagine that for some Americans it might just be a matter of differing priorities. For example, I’m sure there are some Americans, who vote Democrat because they approve of what exists of the American welfare state and some policies towards the poor, women and minorities, but aren’t necessarily in favour of the more radical social policies. Ditto for some Republicans, who may support, against the stereotype of the right, gay and trans rights, but are afraid of what they see as the left’s attack on personal freedom. Some of these people cross party lines on some issues, and how they vote may depend on what is of greater importance to them at that moment.

I can remember reading an interview with an American author, who said that America is a weird mixture of the radical and deeply conservative, often in the same individuals. Looking at it from outside, it seems to me that there’s far more that unites Americans – a common political discourse and tradition than divides them. Certainly not the point where the country’s dissolution should be a serious consideration. I really don’t think these divisions are so deep as the economic and political division over slavery that caused the American Civil War.

But I fear this is being pushed by the Libertarian far right. Way back in the early part of this century White Supremacists like Richard Spencer were and are calling for the creation of a White ethnostate. The extreme right-wing, anti-feminist YouTuber Theodore Beale, alias Vox Dei, was looking forward to the collapse of America and the emergence of such a Whites-only state. And others have been posting up pieces about the coming collapse of the US since. I also found a piece on YouTube ages ago, which featured an interview between one of the Libertarian intellectual leaders, who was looking forward to the creation of a Libertarian, low-tax, free trade, no welfare and everything privatised state in the American heartland. They didn’t have a name for it yet, but were provisionally calling it ‘Reagan’ after Ronald Reagan.

I’ve no doubt that if you’re a rich industrialist, who can afford private schooling and has no chance of being unemployed or needing Medicare or Medicaid to pay your medical bills, such a state would would be an absolute paradise. But if you’re poor and a member of the working class, you’d be a dirt-poor, exploited wage slave, just like the ‘factory slaves’ over here in the 19th century. They can fantasize about the benefits of competition all they like, but on its own it ain’t going to drive medical bills down, provide better schools or create better working conditions. As for the economy, one of the goals of the invasion of Iraq was to liberalise the Iraqi economy. This meant American multinationals seizing the country’s oil and state industries, and removing the tariff barriers protecting its economy. This was planned by the Neo-Cons to create a new, prosperous Iraq, as the kind of economic order they’d like in America.

It didn’t work. When the tariff barriers were removed, any country that could dumped its goods cheap in Iraq. Iraqi industry couldn’t compete. There was a massive wave of bankruptcies and unemployment shot up to astronomical levels. If a similar state is created in the US, then that’ll also happen there. Only big business could compete, and the small businessman or woman would go under.

This is what I’m afraid is really driving the call for a new national divorce between right and left-wing American states. It isn’t abou8t irreconcilable political differences, but about the weird fantasies of the Libertarian extreme right about a state of their own. A state that in reality would be a dystopian nightmare. The panic about Critical Social Justice is just a means to push this.

And I’m afraid that calls for the dissolution of America would also be echoed in this country. Carl Benjamin and the rest of the Lotus Eaters are Libertarians, and I think they’d love to have a similar type of government over here. Indeed, one of them actually said so in one of their videos. If the calls for the dissolution of America become stronger, I think the right-wing nutters would demand something similar for Britain, despite their hostility to regionalism and the fact that England has been a united country since the reign of Edmund Ironside in the 9th or 10th centuries.

‘E Pluribus Unum’. I think it means ‘Out of Many, One’. The motto of the American nation. Well, I hope it continues that way and ordinary Americans ignore the panics caused by the extreme right.

Right-Wingers Outraged at Trans/Gay Pop Video, But It’s just a Return to the ’80s

Now for a bit about the latest right-wing rage about pop music. This morning there were a number of videos on YouTube by various pundits, right-wing and otherwise, discussing or denouncing a pop video. I honestly don’t know who the pop star who made it is, and have actually forgotten his name. I gather he had quite a successful career a few years ago, after which he came out of the closet and revealed he was gay. A little while later he said he was non-binary and now he seems to have gone a bit further in declaring his sexual identity. The video showed him in a revealing dress or robe, surrounded with dancers wearing chaps to expose their rear ends, during which he mimes various sex acts. Right-wing American YouTuber Matt Walsh was outraged, while somebody on GB News defended it, and claimed the video’s critics were homophobic.

What struck me, as someone who grew up in the 1980s, was how familiar it all was. I can remember when Frankie Goes to Hollywood were shocking the press and provoking scandal and outrage with their single ‘Relax’. It’s video seemed to be about a man in suit being pushed and pulled about the dance floor in a gay club by people dressed as gay bikers, watched by a fat bloke dressed as Nero. The single was banned, so say, by the BBC, although I’ve heard since that it was simply that one particular DJ refused to play it. This was entirely counterproductive, as the moment people heard it was banned they went out and bought it, with the result that it got to No. 1. And then there was Divine, an overweight drag queen and friend of American underground filmmaker John Waters, who starred in several of Waters’ deranged productions. Divine also had a hit in that decade, ‘Walk Like a Man’. Of course, Divine was a drag queen, rather than trans, but he wasn’t too far away from this latest attempt to climb the charts. The video’s shocking now, but it’s little different from what people were listening to and watching in the ’80s.

And the worst thing that came out of that decade was Margaret Thatcher. Her policies have done far more damage than anything that came out of the charts ever did.

Bristol Live on the Local Protests Against Drag Queen Story Hour at a Bristol Library

Drag Queen Story Hour, in which drag performers tell stories to children in school and public libraries, is the subject of growing intense controversy. It was started in Los Angeles or one of the other Californian cities with a strong gay community a few years ago. Since then it’s spread across America and into Britain. It’s supporters believe that it promotes tolerance, while their opponents are worried that it’s a forming of paedophile grooming. The accusation has a degree of verisimilitude, as there have been papers written by from the perspective of Queer Theory, a form of postmodern Marxism, promoting Drag Queen Story Hour as a form of ‘queer pedagogy’ intended not to create tolerance and acceptance for gays, or to lead young gay people to become comfortable in their sexuality and become otherwise normal, well-adjusted, happy members of society. Or as happy as anyone can be as capitalism crumbles all around us and the elite get richer while making the rest of us plebs and peasants poorer. No, it has been promoted as a way of getting them to ‘live queerly’ and to make their psychological problems worse in order to generate the militant revolutionary consciousness needed for the violent overthrow of capitalism. One such essay, published in an academic educational periodical is the subject of a series of videos by one of the anti-postmodernist activists and critics. How many people involved in Drag Queen Story Hour are aware of this activist fringe, let alone support it, is a good question.

There have been protests against it in America. An angry group of fathers turned up at a Story Hour event in Texas, where they harangued the drag artiste as a paedophile and groomer. A day or so ago a similar event in Reading here in Britain was stopped after a similar protest was staged. Now there’s this article from Bristol Live, reporting that a Story Hour at a library in the suburb of Henleaze was also cancelled today following protests. The article by Ellie Kendal, ‘Drag Queen Story Hour UK protests: Bristol City Council says discrimination and abuse will not be tolerated‘ begins

‘Bristol City Council has today issued a statement to say it will not tolerate any discrimination or abuse aimed at any community, following protests at a library event for young children in the city. Drag Queen Story Hour was scheduled to begin a series of library appearances in Bristol today, starting at Henleaze Library, however the event was later cancelled as protesters against the event gathered outside.

Drag Queen Story Hour began its national summer tour on Monday, July 25, in Reading where its founder and performer Aida H Dee, who grew up in Bristol, had her reading interrupted by protesters, two of which organisers said had “gained access to the story hour by using their own disabled autistic child as a ‘human trojan horse’.

The police had to get involved and Aida herself had to be escorted out of the event, with officers having to form a ‘human wall’ to protect her from an assault, or a ‘citizen’s arrest’ – something even protesters here in Bristol today said they were planning on doing. Police also attended today’s Bristol event in Henleaze, acting as a barrier between two opposing groups of protesters.

Read more: Live: Protesters clash outside Drag Story Time as group threatens citizen arrest on drag artist

Meanwhile, parents and their young children queued up outside the library mere metres from the protesters – some fearing for their safety. They were let inside, however the event was later cancelled. The next event is due to take place at another library in Bristol at 1pm.’

I think the Reading Drag Queen event was part of a national tour organised and begun by Bristol libraries service. The event got the attention of the American right-wing internet pundits a few weeks ago when there were protests about the ‘family sex show’, advertised as suitable for children as young as five, staged by a group at the Tobacco Factory theatre in Bristol.

Vandal Attacks BBC Statue Because of Colston Verdict

This evening, a man climbed up to a ledge on the front of Broadcasting House, the Beeb’s HQ, and started to attack the statue of Ariel by Eric Gill. Someone took film of him smashing the statue’s feet with a hammer, and it’s been widely posted and reposted by right-wingers over YouTube. The man was David Chick, and there’s a phone call from him on the channel of someone rejoicing in the monicker ‘Tyrant Finder UK’. Chick and the Tyrant Finder are both men, who can’t utter a sentence without using the F-bomb nor other foul language, but in the phone call Chick makes it clear that he’s attacking the statue because Gill was a paedophile. Indeed he was. During his life he professed to be the model of Roman Catholic piety as a tertiary Franciscan. After his death it was discovered that not only did he rape his two daughters but also the family dog. But Chick also seems to have done it out of anger for the acquittal of the Colston Four. And he’s being applauded by people, who similarly believe, or seem to believe, that the BBC is promoting child abuse with the statue and who are also angry at the Bristol verdict. The attitude seems to be that if the woke can tear down statues, then so can they.

Mad right-wing Youtuber Alex Belfield was one of those who put up an approving video of the attack earlier this evening. He has his own grievances against the Corporation. He claims he was forced out of the Beeb because he’s a poor White kid from a pit estate and not one of the middle class, Guardian reading, university educated Naga Manchushy types, as he calls them. He also has some kind of personal feud with various broadcasters, like Jeremy Vine. He frequently rants against the Beeb demanding its privatisation and the Eric Gill statue is one of the weapon he uses in the attacks. He criticises the Corporation for keeping the statue on its facade, which he seems to claim shows the indifference to child abuse which allowed Jimmy Savile to carry on with his predations unstopped.

Gill certainly was a vile human being, and some of his art does pose a genuine moral problem. A few years ago Victoria Coren discussed him in her documentary, How to Be a Bohemian, which traced the history of bohemianism from 19th century Paris and the Romantics to Britain, the Bloomsbury Group, the Bright Young Things and today’s London and its drag queens. Gill was one of the Bohemians she discussed. She was particularly upset at a bas relief Gill had made of a nude girl. I can’t remember what the sculpture’s official title was, but Gill called it ‘F*cking’. The girl in it was his 15 year old daughter, whom he was abusing at the time. Victoria Coren was talking to a female art expert about the sculpture and the unsettling questions it raised. The expert denied that this was a problem with a comparison to W.B. Yeats and his poetry. Nobody, she declared, objects to Yeats’ poetry because he was a Fascist. Coren replied that they did, and she was particularly unhappy about it. As her father, Alan Coren, was Jewish, it’s very easy to understand why Victoria Coren would have deep misgivings about the poet. It must be said, though, that Yeats was only a Fascist for a short time. If I remember correctly, this was c.1919. He later left them and was very critical about them.

I’m sure most people would be unhappy at Gill’s sculpture of his nude daughter, and would have very strong moral questions against its display. But it isn’t the Ariel statue. And there is still a need to separate the artist from the art. Many of the greatest figures in the arts, literature and science were vile people, or had loathsome views, like Dickens, for example. He’s undoubtedly one of the greatest writers in the English language, but he fully supported General Eyre and his brutal suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion by former slaves on Jamaica. But that in no way invalidates his work, in the same way that Orwell pointed out that Hamlet isn’t diminished by the fact that Shakespeare left his wife his second best bed. I also don’t think you can quite compare the Ariel statue to that of Edward Colston. The Ariel statue is of a character from Shakespeare, used as a kind of mascot by the Corporation. It is not a monument to someone who was a slaver, even if he did give most of his money away in charity.

Those defending and applauding the attacker are wrong on another point. They seem to believe that Colston’s Four’s acquittal has somehow become a precedent, which they can use to defend their attacks. But this isn’t the case. Jury trials, according to Adam Wagner, a lawyer on the Net, don’t set precedents, so Chick could still find it difficult to defend himself if he’s arrested.

I’m deeply unhappy about cultural vandalism regardless of who’s doing it. The attack on Colston’s statue is understandable given that it’s been a subject of controversy and demands for its removal for decades. And now it seems the right have also decided that they are entitled to attack any statues they find offensive, and I’m afraid that this will kick off more vandalism rather than reduce it.

I don’t deny that there’s a good case for taking some statues down, but I don’t support violent attacks on public art, regardless of whether it comes from the right or left. And I think Belfield’s attacks on the Beeb’s statue largely come from his own personal feud with the corporation and the Conservative’s demands for the Beeb’s privatisation and its replacement by a private broadcaster. This hostility partly comes from the Tories’ deep ideological objection to nationalised industries, their loyalty to Rupert Murdoch and his shoddy empire and their hatred of the Beeb because, once upon a time, it used to hold them to account. Some of us can still remember the time Michael Heseltine stormed off Newsnight, tossing his mane after a grilling by Paxman.

Britain’s statues are now threatened not just by the woke left, but by a vengeful, intolerant Conservative right using the outrage it has generated against the offending statue as part of its campaign to silence its critics.