It’s no secret that California has long enjoyed disproportionate influence over American cultural and sexual norms, and even much of the world’s, due to its dominion over the film industry through Hollywood and its influence on the pornography industry through the San Fernando Valley, which reportedly is home to “more (porn) companies … than anywhere else.”
Another equally depraved force emanating from the Golden State has also been hard at work peddling perversity on an international scale, this time with a younger audience in mind.
Drag Queen Story Hour, the organization responsible for promoting drag queens reading to children at public libraries, likes to bill itself as a grassroots organization, writing on its website that “all DQSH events are produced locally and independently.” Upon deeper examination, however, it becomes apparent that a number of wealthy interests, almost all from California’s San Francisco Bay Area, have bankrolled the initiative.
DQSH has brought not just one, not two, but at least three convicted sex criminals, two of whom are convicted pedophiles, into confined spaces with large numbers of young children on multiple occasions. Its events also have been sponsored by a man who’s been charged with seven counts of child pornography possession. So much for the “safe space” that drag queen “Miss Terra Cotta Sugarbaker” claims the program provides.
Origin Of Drag Queen Story Hour
Before examining the financial backers of Drag Queen Story Hour, it’s vital to understand the organization’s roots. DQSH was founded in 2015 by colorful characters Michelle Tea, a lesbian (former) prostitute; Virgie Tovar, author of “You Have the Right to Remain Fat”; and Juli Delgado Lopera, who leads Drag Queen Story Hour’s parent organization, Radar Productions, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that describes itself as a “Bay Area queer literary arts organization.”
Radar Productions proudly notes that Drag Queen Story Hour “captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity in childhood,” and says it managed Drag Queen Story Hour up until 2018, guiding it from infancy to its rise as a “global phenomenon.”
How did Drag Queen Story Hour, which now describes itself as “a global network of local organizations, each of which is independently managed and funded,” rise to international prominence in six short years, with chapters on four different continents and in 29 different states, as well as in Puerto Rico?
While a wealth of slobbering puff pieces from corporate media like Cosmopolitan, NBC, CBS, and the Daily Mail, among others, most certainly aided the growth of the pedophile-assisting nonprofit, generous donors undoubtedly drove much of the organization’s early successes.
Drag Queen Story Hour’s San Francisco Funders
The Zellerbach Family Foundation, which is perhaps better known for funding refugee resettlement programs, gave to Radar Productions in 2015, 2016, and 2018 while it was managing Drag Queen Story Hour. The foundation is based in San Francisco, where the organization’s namesake started a paper business in 1868. The Walter and Elise Haas Fund, which is also based in San Francisco, gave Radar Productions $10,000 in 2018.
The San Francisco Arts Commission, an agency of the city government, gave Radar $38,000 between 2015 and 2018, while the California Arts Council, a state agency, donated a whopping $74,040 to Radar Productions between 2015 and 2018.
The Horizons Foundation, yet another pro-LGBT organization based in San Francisco, gave Radar $24,500 from 2007 to 2012, before Drag Queen Story Hour was created, but Radar Productions still lists Horizons as a donor on its website. Furthermore, the Horizons Foundation, which is funded by PG&E, Facebook, City National Bank, and a number of other prominent corporations, advertises Drag Queen Story Hour as a program of one of its “grantee partners.”
Radar Productions also lists Poets and Writers, the Queer Cultural Center, the San Francisco Public Library, and the San Francisco Foundation as funders, although it isn’t clear whether these organizations offered monetary support while Radar managed Drag Queen Story Hour. Notice how much of DQSH’s financial backing comes from San Francisco.
Not all of these donors designated their donations for Drag Queen Story Hour. Given the fungible nature of donations, however, any funds given to Radar Productions from 2015 to 2018 at least indirectly benefited the program, much in the same way that donations to Planned Parenthood, no matter to what they’re designated, all tacitly serve the organization’s ability to provide abortions, if in no other way than by freeing up funds or labor to be reallocated.
What This Means For America — And Beyond
The process of Californication, in which California exports its culture to supplant the way of life of other states or regions, isn’t just an issue facing Idaho or Texas, two common destinations for those fleeing the Golden State. It’s an issue that threatens any community with a library and a group of parents who are sick enough to take their four-year-olds to cuddle with registered pedophiles for the sake of social brownie points or the entirely nebulous value of “tolerance.”
The culture of the Castro District is coming to a library near you, no matter if you’re in Tennessee or Tokyo, Mississippi or Malmo, Arizona or Australia. Pause to think of how incredibly dangerous it is for San Francisco, of all places, to play such an oversized role in defining our youngest generation’s understanding of sex.
This money trail makes yet another rip in the libertarian claim that LGBT issues are simply a matter of personal liberty rather than a dire struggle between traditional morality and an insurgent sexual ethic that, with the help of moneyed interests from California’s Bay Area, targets children and seeks to export itself from San Francisco to the rest of the country and beyond.
Conversely, these financial details vindicate the concerns of conservatives who frequently rail against urban, coastal elites who use their wealth and prestige to enforce their progressive orthodoxy on the rest of the country (and even on other countries) through cultural imperialism — in this case, Californication.
While the financial background of Drag Queen Story Hour is certainly intriguing, it isn’t unique, nor should it be surprising. It’s just one more chapter in the conflict between the generally Christian-derived values of Middle America and the cosmopolitan urban centers that have the money, the institutions, and the will to supplant and disrupt indigenous ethical frameworks they deem “bigoted,” whether at home or abroad.
Source: The Federalist
