Our national clown show grows more and more ridiculous, while at the same time not being at all amusing. I guess that’s what they always say about clowns—they are much more frightening than funny.

I think of clowns, and the way they invariably cause at least some children to cry, whenever I see pictures of Drag Story Hours. It’s always the same thing—a few heavily made-up drag queens posing as grotesque caricatures of women, looking basically like a gay misogynist’s nightmare fantasy of a devouring, castrating bitch-mother; some librarians or other regime functionaries silently taking attendance; a bunch of downmarket loser parents trying desperately to opt out of their loathed cishet whiteness and score some cool points which they hope to roll over into the coming social credit system; and, finally and most importantly, a handful of children looking confused and bewildered.

What’s the point of this ritual, other than to own the cons? As an exercise in carnivalesque revelry it falls miserably flat. It’s just forced fun. There is no connection between drag and literacy. The primary argument I’ve heard is that it teaches tolerance—but for what and for whom? Drag is not an identity; it’s a job or a hobby. Drag has been used in university seminars as a metaphor for the performativity of gender, but that’s a little recondite for the 5-year-olds in the average Drag Story Hour. Nobody, not even the most pronoun-forward among us, calls drag a gender.