Gay bars all over the United States are closing their doors as historically queer neighbourhoods gentrify and community-building increasingly moves online Footnote 2 (Ghaziani, Citation2015 Morgan, Citation2019). Still, visibly queer space is increasingly hard to find, and queer and trans communities face dangerous realities. For example, the commercial success of the television show RuPaul’s Drag Race has raised the international profile of drag, drawing what seems to be an increasingly mainstream audience. The emergence of DQSH coincides with a heightened visibility of LGBT people in general and drag performance in particular, intensifying critical questions about the commodification of queer cultures around the world. We are guided by the following question: what might Drag Queen Story Hour offer educators as a way of bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children? Through this programme, drag artists have channelled their penchant for playfully “‘reading’ each other to filth” Footnote 1 into different forms of literacy, promoting storytelling as integral to queer and trans communities, as well as positioning queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education. In this article, we explore the pedagogical contributions of a programme called Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) as a form of queer imagining in an early childhood context. These efforts build upon the foundational work of many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth organizations, like San Francisco’s Queens of the Castro, which has explored drag with high-school students for the last decade (Hsu, Citation2016). Drag superstar Nina West released a children’s music album entitled Drag Is Magic in 2019, and multiple children’s books about drag were published in 2020 (Bussell, Citation2020). In the past few years, however, drag performers have made their way from the dimly lit bars of gayborhoods and into the fluorescent lights of libraries and classrooms. Drag queens have historically been relegated to the realm of the night.
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