Have you bigots never seen the ugly sisters in Cinderella? | Emma Kay

A lovely kids’ activity, Drag Queen Story Hour is touring nationwide with one aim: to ‘show the world that being different is not a bad thing’.

Sadly, some residents of Kent, who came a long way to our culturally vibrant city to soil a nice event, are still stuck in the Stone Age. They protested outside the library against what they dubbed ‘sinister’ and ‘insidious’ with the sole purpose of it being used as a blanket activity to ‘groom children’.

Should we feel any sympathy for these people who have clearly never grown up seeing a pantomime where men play the ugly sisters in Cinderella? It’s part of our culture and embedded in our childhoods.

In the ’90s we had Paul O’Grady as Lily Savage and there was never an outcry. It was a staple of primetime telly.

This reading activity was to promote inclusiveness and equality for CHILDREN. It wasn’t for you to stampede over like an anti-woke wildebeest and take it away. But you did. You screamed and stomped to make children scared to go into libraries, a place that is supposed to be safe and inclusive.

Did it make you feel powerful? Do you feel better putting humans into ‘pervert and non-pervert’ boxes without an ounce of empathy as to what dangerous and wrongful mislabelling does to a person? It is narrow-minded and insidious to promote such misinformed bigotry at the expense of others. It is about books, not burlesque.

Ironically, the protesters are probably the ones who would benefit most from the library and realise the world is more than they deem it to be.

Thankfully their hateful spew and scare tactics were met with positivity from people who pushed back: either the kind Facebook comments, or the LGBTQ+ members of the community who turned up to offer support and who bought bubble-blowing tubes for the children so they would not be scared.

To those people... thanks for restoring faith and showing there is still kindness in the world. Let’s continue to evolve diversity, not condemn it.