Last summer, when marchers in a gay pride parade in New York City shouted, “We’re here. We’re queer. We’re coming for your children,” they were not kidding.
A new short documentary out by MSNBC follows children as they experience drag queen story hour at a local library. The film crew put heart monitors on the children to gauge their responses to having stories read aloud to them by men dressed garishly as women.
The film, “It’s Okay,” is part of a wider movement to normalize up-close interactions of men who portray grotesque and garish women with children.
Director David France’s 2017 film, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, was a Netflix original documentary about a transgender that won the Outfest “Freedom Award.” Outfest is an LGBTQIA+ promotion company and France’s films are all about the LGBTQ experience.
“We really wanted to know the kids’ experience, really absent everything else,” France said to NBC News, the parent company for the documentary on children and drag queens. “We didn’t want to interview them. We didn’t want to get their analysis of what happened. We wanted to be embedded with them intimately enough that we could experience their journey through the reading in the way that they were experiencing it.”
The “microphone vest” was mounted on one of the children, so the film crew could monitor breathing.
“We wanted to hear and feel his discomfort if he had it, his joy if he had it, his curiosity,” France said to NBC. “We really invested deeply in his experience, and I think he showed us all of that, and he did it in a real, genuine way.”
Such knowledge will be important to the Drag Queen Story Hour performers in the future, as they learn how to reach further into the psyches of innocent children by studying how the children breathe.
