The New York City Department of Education is taking heat after revelations that it sponsored a drag queen video series aimed at 3 to 8-year-old children.
The series, titled “Let’s Learn,” features a drag queen going by the name “Lil Miss Hot Mess.” The drag queen, née Harris David Harris, is a media personality from San Francisco, California, and bills himself as one of the first drag queens to host a reading hour for kids.
“I am a drag queen and a children’s book author, and you may be wondering to yourself: ‘What on earth is a drag queen?'” Harris says on one of the videos before going on to define what he does.
As Lil Miss Hot Mess, Harris explains, drag queens “everyday people who like to play pretend and dress up as often as we can,” adding that they “are leaders in our community, and if you ask me: we make pretty good role models.”
At one point, Harris excitedly tells his audience, “I think we might have some drag queens in training on our hands.”
Harris goes on to read from his book, The Hips On the Drag Queen Go Swish Swish Swish, which is performed to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round.”
“I wrote this book because I wanted everyone to get to experience the magic of drag and to get a little practice shaking their hips or shimmying their shoulders to know how we can feel fabulous inside of our own bodies,” Harris explained.
The video series was hosted by the Dept. of Education in partnership with PBS member station WNET-TV. But the PBS outlet insists that they just aired it and have had nothing to do with the actual production of the series.
Various schools and city-sponsored libraries have been featuring drag queen story hours for little children since at least as far back as 2008. The stunts have riled parents in cities across America in states including Alabama, California, Georgia, Texas, New York, and many others.
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