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I too am bemused at kids being exposed to drag, it puts me in the same weird headspace as Las Vegas. (Caveat: I'm aware actual people with families live and work in Las Vegas, but I'm talking about the touristy stuff). It always struck me as quite odd that Las Vegas at least in its marketing, had tried to clean up their act and put on a family friendly sort of facade. You can search for family friendly attractions and find official Vegas tourism guides that just pitch Vegas as a fun spot for the whole family. I am still astonished at how many corporations think Vegas is an excellent place to hold their trade shows - and then are somehow caught off guard when the HR reports of inappropriate behavior start piling up.
The thing is, when you are actually there on the Strip, the "family friendly" facade is paper thin. The smell of weed is everywhere. Aside from the many scantily clad costumed characters you'll see roaming around in broad daylight, the many leaflets for various erotic shows, it's common to see tourists themselves cutting loose because, hey, it's Vegas baby!
I went for work events three or four years in a row, and my boss always looked for some attraction or some show we could see for a night out. And no matter how family friendly it was billed (of course the explicit stuff would have been way off limits because work function) I left afterwards wondering if I needed to make a report to HR. There was one occasion where we ventured off the Strip - that was a big mistake. I don't know the name of where we ended up but it was highly awkward to be there with my coworkers, let me tell you.
Drag shows hit me in a similar way. Like it's so clearly designed with particular content for an adult audience. The fact that this one person wants to tone down their act this one time and read little kids a book does not to me, take away from the fact that this is fundamentally an adult-oriented performance art, made for adult consumption. I am absolutely baffled why people want to sanitize it and pretend it's something other than what it is.
I think, if you want to be more charitable than "activists doggedly and automatically want to normalize anything which scandalizes prudes without stopping to think if maybe, sometimes, the prudes have a point", it's a response to anti-trans attempts to equate trans women presenting female in public with drag. The right-wing firebrands say "so-called trans women are doing drag, a sex thing, in *public", and the activists maladaptively decide to respond with "uh, actually, drag isn't inherently sexual" instead of sticking with "yeah, well trans women aren't the same thing drag queens".
Didn’t drag queen story hour predate trans as a culture war battlefield?
Per Google, DQSH first started in 2015 in San Francisco. The first big national-news-grabbing fight over trans bathroom access was in 2016 (North Carolina), but there had been several state- and local-level squabbles over trans issues in the years before.
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I don't think so? It wasn't until several years after the enstunnening and enbravening of Caitlyn Jenner, and the general topic of bathroom drama, that I even heard of drag queen story hour. Maybe in some deep-blue strongholds?
I'd speculate that what actually happened here wasn't "deep-blue strongholds", but the opposite - an increasingly noteworthy phenomenon of deep-red strongholds who somehow managed to ostrich-with-head-in-the-sand their way through the entire LGBT activist phenomenon until recently. They can wind up thinking of things like drag queen story hour as opening blows in the conflict because they weren't paying attention before that.
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Drag Queen Story Hour co-occurring with the rise of trans as a prominent... subculture? ideology? post-Obergefell claim-staking? surely plays a role in that conflation. Not sure if it can be meaningfully disambiguated.
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