Storming Drag Queen Story Hour
Conspiracy theorists team up to disrupt a children's event
Dear subscribers — welcome back to Scout. After a summer holiday, we’re back in business with a look at Drag Queen Story Hour. Protests have been kicking off at previous stops along this tour, drawing together an odd coalition of conspiracy theorists. This article looks at an event that turned sour yesterday. If you like it, please share it with your friends and ask them to subscribe to Scout. FYI: we’ve got some excellent stories in the pipeline this summer and autumn.
An unholy alliance of conspiracy theorists
This summer, a moral panic has been raging in conspiracy world over Drag Queen Story Hour. Yesterday it boiled over. A group of parents infiltrated and disrupted an event at Blackpool Library, shouting about child grooming before staff hustled them out. The tour is run by a drag performer named Sabastian Samuel (stage name Aida H Dee), who has been travelling the country reading children’s books like Guess How Much I Love You and We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Samuel hopes his tour will promote literacy and acceptance of gay youths, a majority of whom report being bullied at school. His opponents, on the other hand, claim that Samuel is trying to indoctrinate and abuse children.
Drag Queen Story Hour events are an American import. Over in the States, they have prompted some pretty nasty demonstrations by far-right groups like the Proud Boys. On our side of the pond, the first group to protest the tour were hardcore anti-vaxxers, as Scout reported last month. Francesca Dill of Outreach WorldWide, an anti-vaxx group from London, was one of the primary agitators against the tour, claiming it was an example of “paedophilia brought in by the arts”. Since then, far-right groups like Patriotic Alternative and Britain First have started campaigning against Samuel.
Blackpool’s rally was coordinated by two prominent far-right activists. One was Amanda Smith, aka Yorkshire Rose, best known for monstering refugees at their temporary accommodation. And the other was James Goddard, a former regional organiser for Patriotic Alternative, who has a restraining order against a journalist and a harassment conviction for targeting an MP. Goddard urged his followers to go to Blackpool to protest against the “ungodly, immoral” event, but didn’t attend.
Incidentally, Goddard and Smith turned up on Saturday to demonstrate against the tour, but they got the date wrong. So they went to look for hotels housing asylum seekers instead.
At Tuesday’s event, the woman who actually led the charge isn’t known for being in the far-right or the hardcore anti-vaxx scene. She’s principally an activist in the world of Satanic Ritual Abuse, the conspiracy theory that paedophiles at the heart of the British establishment are trafficking, abusing and murdering kids. There has never been any proof that Satanic Ritual Abuse, or SRA, has existed, and yet there is a campaign network busily claiming otherwise. Hocking is part of it, and has turned up to demonstrations, spoken on podcasts and is close to the most prominent figures in the SRA world (including “Sarah”, a woman we can’t name for legal reasons, who organised an antisemitic protest against the Rothschild family earlier this year).
Hocking, on a livestream, described how she booked a ticket for the Blackpool event under a false name and borrowed three children from a friend to blend into the library audience. Partway through the event, when Samuel was acting out the different parts of a story book, Hocking stood up with a sign that said “YOU’VE CROSSED THE LINE” and repeated that the event “has to stop”. Hocking, who broadcast her protest live in Facebook, added: “You’ve got to be responsible. You’re being used, you’re a puppet.” A man in her group — Hocking’s partner perhaps — shouted that the event was a form of child grooming.
Samuel was silent and motioned for librarians to step in. Hocking and her party were ushered from the room, yelling that the library was run by freemasons. On the pavement outside, they were cheered by the crowd, one of which called her a “national hero”. Hocking gave a speech and claimed Samuel is targeting children. “It’s sick,” she yelled. “A man dressed as a woman… it’s a sexual crime! This is a massive undercover thing. It’s an agenda, it’s going to be forced into schools in September.”
The man who accompanied Hocking described the tour as a “sex show for children” (what did they think they saw?). Hocking joked that she had made Samuel “wet himself” in fear. Then she pointed at police officers stood nearby and accused them of “protecting” the event and being freemasons.
Her speech was especially interesting as it showed how fanatical campaigners from different movements can find common ground. On Scout, we’ve been writing about how far-right activists have been teaming up with anti-vaxxers and SRA influencers. The Blackpool event seems like a bleak example. Outside the library, Hocking praised a man named Michael Manuel Chaves for “inspiring” her to disrupt the event. Chaves is an anti-vaxxer who commands an audience of 17,000 followers on Telegram, and has been instrumental in agitating against the drag tour. He has also posted approvingly of Patriotic Alternative. After Hocking thanked Chaves for motivating her to infiltrate the library event, she met and swapped details with Smith (Yorkshire Rose), who called her “amazing”.
Hocking has been hailed as a “total legend” for her stunt, clips of which are racing through conspiracy theorist Telegram channels. Samuel, meanwhile, is being vilified by the likes of Chaves. “It will not be long before — in between fucking Teletubbies and Thomas the Tank Engine — Aida H Dee will be reading to kids,” he said in a broadcast that praised Hocking. “You can fucking guarantee they will put paedophile child groomers on the TV for kids.”
Drag queen events have proved fertile ground for conspiracy theorists of all stripes, apparent evidence of a gay agenda corrupting children. It’s not surprising that far-right groups like Patriotic Alternative are against drag: their online groups are filled with homophobic messages. The same could be said of the SRA activists, who have accused gay politicians of sexual deviancy. But it is surprising to see it come from anti-vaxxers, many of whom coalesced during the pandemic as libertarian groups: against vaccine mandates and digital passports, seeing them as curbs on freedom. Many anti-vaxxers also come from leftish backgrounds, and it’s weird to see the curdling of their hippie ideals.
Drag Queen Story Hour has prompted a huge reaction for what it is. The event is not being forced upon kids. Nor is it that popular: a ticketed event in a library during school holidays is hardly the must-see event of the summer. And yet Samuel’s small event (it’s a one-man show) is seen as the manifestation of a wide-ranging conspiracy.
Far-right activists often speak of “globohomo”, a conspiracy that a globalist cabal is enforcing a homosexual agenda to weaken western society. I thought about this when reading a writer’s account of the event, which he attended with his young son, backhandedly describing Samuel as a “perfectly competent children’s entertainer”. If global elites with limitless power really did have a plan to turn kids gay, might they have put a bit more effort into it?
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