Why Many Gay People Don't Want Kids and Drag Queen Story Hour, Ryan Field Books

Why Many Gay People Don’t Want Kids and Drag Queen Story Hour

What I’m about to write here is not something most straight people have ever heard before. Most gay men keep this unspoken, but many of us are completely aware. I know this goes against everything you have been told about gay men from straights who write gay content, but it’s the truth as I have always known it.

With that said, there is an old joke in the gay community that I’ve heard hundreds of times. Someone in a gay bar, or a gay venue, will ask a gay man if he likes kids and he will reply, “Only if they are well done.” It’s an old line from W. C. Fields, but it still rings true today.

In short, many of us don’t like kids, we don’t want kids and we don’t even want to be around kids. But more than that, with all the discussions going around about drag queens doing story hour in libraries, I’m usually left with my mouth wide open. I’ve known many drag queens in my time and I have never known one who aspired to become a story teller, to sticky fingered little kids, in a library. Not one.

The drag performers I have known prefer to work with adults, and a good deal of their material can be campy and rough. They focus on the show, the performance, and the costumes. Doing drag and performing is, indeed, their life. And I have seen this first hand. So how this rumor got around that all drag queens want to read kiddie stories to screaming little kiddies, just passes me by. Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with drag queens who do want to read to kiddies. My problem is that it misrepresents us to the world. And I’m sick of that.

And it’s the same with most of the gay men I have known. We don’t want kids. Now, I do applauded the gay men I’m seeing who did decide to raise families. I also find them fascinating, too, because whenever I come across them on Twitter or other social media, they seem to be trying too hard to fit in…to be just like the straights. One, who is a high profile weatherman on the east coast tries so hard to be the next Martha Stewart I almost feel bad for him. Because no matter how hard he tries he will never fit in completely in the straight world. They always do this to the point of ignoring all gay culture. It’s as if gay culture never existed. It’s just about the little kiddies, and I find that both tiresome and sad.

Now I’ll link to a piece that tries to explain, in a much more polite way, the reason why we don’t see more gay people having kids.

In the end, LGBTQ folks do still seem to have different reasons for not becoming parents than our straight counterparts.

Here’s the link. As I said, it’s very logical and polite. But I still think my reasoning is valid, too, and honest to a fault. We just don’t like kids. And we don’t want to be breeders.