Douglas Ross – what a drag you are

Blundering onto Twitter this week like one of his beloved Holstein bulls, he expressed his outrage that young children in his Moray constituency were to have the chance to hear stories read to them by a man in drag, Miss Lossie Mouth – the sort of pantomime dame character that young children have been captivated by for 150 years – calling it “totally inappropriate to hold a show like this for kids under the age of six”.

Poor Dougie. If he’s this upset about a man in a sparkly dress and rainbow foam wig, wait til he tunes into CBeebies. The undisputed megastar of preschoolers’ telly in Britain is the incomparable Justin Fletcher, whose alter egos include larger-than-life dames Miss Polly and Nana Knickerbocker, weather presenter Gail Force, know-it-all antiques expert Ann Teak and motherly cook Dina Lady.

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Fletcher is warm, gentle and delightfully funny, and one of his greatest innovations is Something Special, a daily show specially designed for children with delayed learning (Justin is fluent in signing as well as toddlerese). Fletcher is wildly popular with parents and kids, the true heir to Britain’s great music hall tradition and in a UK presidential election would probably have a better chance of winning than any politician in parliament, but if poor wee Dougie encounters Miss Polly, he’s going to need a cold compress and darkened room to get over the shock.

God, it must be exhausting being so offended all the time.

“Story time for babies and young kids shouldn’t focus on gender or sexual identity,” sniffs Ross, adding that this is “common sense”.

But the Elgin library event he opposes doesn’t “focus on gender or sexual identity”, any more than Scotland’s dozens of annual sell-out family pantomimes do, or generations of children’s telly shows. With a bit of luck, they will encourage tolerance and inclusivity – part of the stated aim – but that’s not the same thing.

The event is about making children aware that people are diverse. It’s about accepting others for who they are and, presumably, showing any young kids in the audience who feel different that there’s a place for them too. Oh, and it’s about making reading fun. Miss Lossie Mouth is a teacher, John Campbell. What’s “common sense” is that drag acts have been part of young children’s lives since always, without controversy, and alleluia to that.

Well-known drag story-teller Aida H Dee (Image: free)

So why are Tories getting their knickerbockers in a twist about it now? Well, that seems to have much more to do with Conservative desperation than it does with safeguarding concerns. Devoid of convincing ideas about how to revive the fortunes of an increasingly reviled Tory party, Ross seems to be falling back on the much overhyped “culture wars” to shore up his base. It’s a cynical, low-ambition strategy but besides bashing the Nats, it’s all the Scottish Tories under Ross have.

It's also off-the-peg as a political play. Cast your eyes across the Atlantic and you quickly see that the anti-drag narrative is a totem of reactionary conservatism. There is near-hysteria in sections of the Republican party about drag artists. For a man to wear a dress is now seen by some as the ultimate capitulation to the great, undefined woke liberal plot they imagine is threatening America.

Drag queen story hour – men and occasionally women in drag reading stories to children – started without controversy in the US and is now a fixture in bookshops and cafes all over the country. But it inevitably attracted ire from the right and it has become increasingly difficult to stage the events safely.

Proud Boys, the neofascist men-only group cultivated by Donald Trump and involved in the January 6 Capitol riots, have stormed some events. There were 141 documented attacks on drag events last year (not just drag queen story hour). And being America, it doesn’t stop there. Conservatives are proposing legal crackdowns on drag events in public or in venues where under 18s are present in eight states, including Texas and Arizona. Make no mistake – this is getting nasty.

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The vast majority of drag queens reading to children across America appear to be from the same mold: over-the-top characters overlaid with camp glamour, more Everage than Izzard.

There have, though, been a few disappointing reported incidents at drag events for children here and in the States of sexualised dressing and behaviour, with drag queens in nipple tassels or thongs or bondage gear. That’s not pleasant, it’s not appropriate and it suggests a profound lack of sympathy with and understanding of young children. If I took my young daughter to an event that turned out like that, I’d object too.

But it appears that these unsuitable examples are very much the exception, not the rule.

They don’t represent the drag queen story hour genre any more than sexual harassers like Rob Roberts (and a number of others) represent all Tory MPs – or are we to start objecting to any Tory MPs going into schools because of safeguarding concerns? Parents can choose whether or not to take their kids to drag queen story hour – no one is forcing them – and their popularity suggests parents are happy with what they find.

I doubt Douglas Ross has stopped to consider much of this. He doesn’t seem to mind that he’s encouraging parents to think the worst of this particular act. Perhaps he wants to fan the hysteria around drag acts as a sort of proxy for trans activism. Perhaps he imagines that because Scottish people have concerns about how extending the capacity to self-identify gender could affect the safety of women and girls, they will now be suspicious of all drag acts.

But why would we? We are not stupid. Drag acts have not suddenly become a threat to the fabric of society.

So grow up Douglas Ross. Stop being such a drag.