When Susan Steinberg, the chairman of the Mahwah Pride Coalition in Mahwah, New Jersey, began organizing a Drag Queen Story Hour for Pride Month last year, she anticipated it would be well-attended and relatively non-controversial. Though Mahwah, which has a population of about 26,000, tends to skew conservative, Steinberg says residents have largely been supportive of local Pride events. “We live in a very nice town,” says Steinberg, a realtor. “People are very friendly most of the time.”
Then someone asked Steinberg if she had seen a flier being circulated under doorsteps and among local Facebook groups, accusing the drag queen hosting it of being a “known pornographer” and claiming the event “normalized pedophilia and abuse of children.” The backlash went national: the Mahwah Drag Queen Story Hour was publicized on the far-right transphobic Twitter account Libs of TikTok, and Steinberg says the mayor of Mahwah received more than 300 calls protesting the event. She went to the police to see if she could add extra security in light of all the threats, but she says they told her she would have to pay extra. “We’re a small group,” she says. “[We] just don’t have the resources.”
When the Drag Queen Story Hour was held on June 13, 2022, it attracted a small phalanx of protesters associated with the white supremacist movement White Lives Matter, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The protesters held megaphones and shouted epithets, an event that garnered national news...
Tehran – Saba: The Iranian Foreign Ministry condemned the subversive actions taken by the rulers of Abu Dhabi against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Last night, Tasnim News Agency reported that the...