By Tyler O’Neil
Children as young as 5 years old were exposed to a man’s erotic drag show performance at the end of a school district talent show. Irate parents yelled and left the auditorium, but not before a full-grown man had begun gyrating, flipping his tongue, and flashing a G-string.
“People were horrified,” Raquel Morales, a mother in the audience with her 10-year-old son, told the New York Daily News. “It looked like a nightclub performance. I’ve been asking for an apology from the district for the last week, and they’ve been ignoring it.”
The two-hour talent show held on May 25 in Manhattan had billed the final performance as a “Special Surprise Performance!” After parents watched endearing performances by children who played various instruments and sang, they saw a grown man take the stage — in a black sequin dress, a flaming red wig, and pumps. He grinded the stage and spread his legs up in the air.
“My first reaction was what the hell is going on,” Morales told Fox News’ Todd Starnes. “I saw her doing things like sticking her legs out and shaking her bottom and it felt weird,” her son said. “I don’t know why they would do that for an elementary school.”
When the drag queen dropped to the floor, the audience erupted.
“I left the show the minute he started sticking his tongue out,” one parent told the Daily News. “I had my children with me and I wasn’t going to allow them to see that.”
Morales filmed the seven-minute routine on her cell phone and gave Starnes the video.
“Once he got to that part it was chaos,” Morales recalled. “People were yelling and leaving. A lot of parents were saying had they known this was going to happen they would have taken their kids out after they had performed.”
The man who performed the drag routine was identified as Public School 96 Parent Association President Frankie Quinones.
The mother explained that “the school district told me the performance was about LGBT awareness,” but her problem is not with the LGBT movement.
“I’m 100 percent against discrimination,” Morales told Starnes. She insisted that her complaints are not about sexuality but about age-appropriate behavior. “The superintendent was the emcee — and she has a responsibility to protect all children,” she said. “That wasn’t a child performing. It was an adult.”
Starnes suggested a new policy for elementary school talent shows: “If a drag queen wants to spread his legs and show off his G-string he should do that at a nightclub — not a public school talent show.”
But Dr. Michael Brown, founder and president of FIRE School of Ministry in North Carolina, explained this phenomenon as a result of the widespread acceptance of the LGBT movement. Brown explained that the most offensive elements of the gay community led the original movement — drag queens were on the front lines of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, out, proud, and unashamed.
In the 1980s, gay leaders altered the strategy, putting forward a more family-oriented, less promiscuous, and less bizarre image.
“But now that so many of the goals of LGBT activism have been realized, there’s no reason to push some of their own to the back of the bus, so to say,” Brown argued.
Drag queens put pressure on Facebook in 2014 to alter the policy that users have to use their real name, not a made-up name, like a drag queen persona. Facebook caved.
A concerned parent from Bloomington, Indiana, wrote to Brown about a summer reading program for children. There was an announcement of an event this July — specifically for kids ages 2-6 — involving drag queens. “Learn about someone new! Local drag queens present stories and encourage us all to embrace our uniqueness,” the announcement reads. Yes, the event is intended for kids between 2 and 6 years old.
Brown fittingly paraphrased the event this way: “Parents, bring your toddlers and little children to the library where local homosexual men who dress up as flamboyant women will read stories to them.” This is just a clearer explanation of what will happen on July 21 at the Monroe County Public Library.
When Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote about the importance of “dignity” in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that legalized gay marriage across the country, did he have this in mind? When “love is love,” where does society draw the line?
Now that the LGBT movement has achieved many paramount goals, their less savory elements start to emerge. Biological boys who identify as transgender are allowed to defeat biological girls in track. Transgender 9-year-old children are put on the cover of National Geographic. “Sesame Street” brought up the issue last year.
In 2013, Slate’s Jillian Keenan noted that many social conservatives warned that gay marriage is a slippery slope. “Gay marriage is a slippery slope! A gateway drug! If we legalize it, then what’s next? Legalized polygamy?” she wrote. Watch what comes next: “We can only hope.” Yes, people are pushing for legalized polygamy and normalized polyamory.
Every line must be crossed — private things being shown in public, children being exposed to adult themes, and “age appropriate” boundaries crossed in every way possible. The idea of a childhood innocent of complicated issues like sexuality, gender identity, and drag queens may be a thing of the past, unless parents speak out, yesterday.