Anti-LGBTQ bigots bully a North Carolina town over its Pride festival

Violent threats led the town of Apex to cancel one of the events planned for its upcoming Pride Festival, a family-friendly celebration of the LGBTQ community.

The event in question was a drag queen story hour where, as the name suggests, drag queens read stories to children. Mayor Jacques Gilbert said in a Facebook announcement that he had received a “variety of feedback” about the story hour, which ultimately led the Apex Festival Commission to decide to remove it from the festival’s programming.

Drag Queen Story Hour was created in 2015 in San Francisco and has since grown in popularity across the country. The Triangle area chapter of Drag Queen Story Hour held its first event in Raleigh in 2019. The organization’s website says it envisions a world where kids can “love themselves, celebrate the fabulous diversity in their communities, and stand up for what they believe in and each other.”

“We have had many emails sent to us at Council complaining about the drag story hour event. Multiple members of Apex Pride have been sent nasty emails, messages, etc.,” Apex Town Council member Audra Killingsworth wrote in a comment under the mayor’s post. “Over the past couple of weeks it has escalated to violent threats against multiple members of the Apex Festival Commission. Because of those threats, the commission decided to pull the drag queen story hour from the kids zone.”

So much progress has been made toward LGBTQ acceptance in recent years. A decade ago, it was much less common for local governments to host official Pride celebrations — the Apex Pride Festival is only in its second year.

But now? It feels like we’re moving backward.

They may have given up on fighting same-sex marriage — at least for now — but Republicans in North Carolina and across the country are still snarled in a panic over LGBTQ issues.

Anti-LGBTQ legislation introduced by state legislatures across the country in the past year has reached an all-time high. Lawmakers want to ban transgender kids on school sports teams. They want to silence any whisper of sexuality or gender identity in public schools because, they say, it qualifies as pedophilia or child grooming. They even want to criminalize gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

Now it appears conservatives don’t even want anyone to be able to bring their child to an optional event at an optional festival celebrating the LGBTQ community.

The right insists that this moral crusade is about protecting children, but it’s not. It’s about trying to will LGBTQ people back into the shadows.

And the worst part of all is that it’s working. When towns like Apex allow bigots and bullies to dictate their decision-making, it reinforces the notion that a loud enough minority can set the agenda — even when it comes at the expense of everyone else.

In a month that’s meant to honor LGBTQ people, their pride and their fight for liberation, the backlash implies the opposite: being gay or trans is something shameful. That’s not a message our cities and towns should tolerate.

This story was originally published June 6, 2022 at 4:38 PM with the headline "Anti-LGBTQ bigots bully a North Carolina town over its Pride festival."