Progressiveness is fine, but let's not ignore a little decency
Not everything means what it seems to mean.
In the post-industrial New England town where I live, the library is a big granite structure built to impress in the 19th century. Over the front door are chiseled the words, "THE PEOPLE'S UNIVERSITY."
Local politicians and civic pride hobbyists assure us it means a man or woman can use the books inside to get an education.
My father, born here to parents who worked the cotton mills, had a different take on the phrase.
"They wanted us to know this was as close to a real college as we were going to get," my pop said, laughing.
Despite that bitter joke, my father loved the library, and he took me every week. He never read fiction, only history and biography. Our house was full of books, and my father never had the "sex talk" with me. I learned the mechanics of sex in some book about the court of the 17th-century French kings.
Last week, the people who run the same library announced that "Drag Queen Story Time" will become a monthly event.
The library had one such event, and it was so well attended that they decided there was a need for more.
The first one did draw a crowd and a few protesters of the "REPENT THE END IS NEAR" variety.
As I recall, the event was as advertised. Children sat around on the floor while a drag queen read them a story. I thought the drag queen was a little big for real femininity, but I'm an old-school man. If you put anyone or anything in a dress, I'll think something like "kinda big in the thighs, huh?"
Other than learning that I'll body shame anyone in high heels, the event didn't make much of a change in my life.
It got me thinking, though.
There are two ideas behind Drag Queen Story Time.
The first is to display the great progressiveness of the people who run the library.
The second is to show the kids that the world has a lot of different kinds of people in it, and it always has, so you might as well get used to the idea.
The public library is located in a fairly bad neighborhood. The homeless cluster outside. Prostitutes work the sidewalk out front and not always at night, either. There's a housing project two blocks away.
I don't mind Drag Queen Story Time at all, but I think it should be expanded to include Married Mothers and Fathers With Jobs, No Restraining Orders, No Warrants and Steady Jobs Story Time.
If you live in that neighborhood, it's entirely possible to look out your window and see transgender prostitutes working the street, but you may never have seen a functional, long-term marriage that produces children in wedlock and has no reliance on government funding or housing.
And it isn't just that neighborhood.
Poorer kids from all over the city attend free events thrown by the city. Many of them are not acquainted with the kind of family life I took for granted in 1964.
In addition to showing them a drag queen, it might be a good idea to show them a 48-year-old registered nurse and her 54-year-old husband Ray, who drives a truck. The couple could read them books about driving a truck or being a nurse or what it's like when Mommy and Daddy live in the same house and are planning to go to Disney World someday.
Get a few plumbers in there to read.
A couple lawyers.
A waitress.
A dorky couple in their 50s who run a gas station.
You know what you see, and not everything means what it seems to mean.
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