This past Tuesday, I got an email:
In the 3 1/2 years since I helped found Drag Story Hour Arizona, I’ve received plenty of these types of emails. This was one of the nicer ones. I always prefer when they spout Bible verses at me instead of calling me a pedophile and wishing I would get AIDS and die. But still, this one pissed me off more than usual. Pissed me off so much, in fact, that I was driven to the last refuge of the damned, the Instagram slide show. But since graphic design is definitely not my passion, and Instagram has annoying character counts and makes citing sources difficult, I’m here with the extended remix of that slideshow.
So why did this email piss me off so bad? As the email mentions, this was in response to an event Drag Story Hour Arizona was hosting on Tuesday at Phoenix College, part of the sprawling Maricopa County Community College District which governs all 10 community colleges in the Phoenix area. And on the same day we held this event and I received this email, we found out that two weeks prior, on October 4, that a far-right Republican candidate for the MCCCD governing board had been arrested for masturbating in the parking lot of one of the college campuses. Later we found out he was caught doing this within sight of the campus daycare center.
So on the same day this good Christian felt compelled to let me know that having performers wearing clothing that may or may not conform to specific culturally-defined gender norms read cute books about friendship and diversity to kids was “abominable in the sight of the one true God who made you,” one of his ideological allies was literally whipping his dick out in front of preschoolers.
I have been fascinated by moral panics ever since high school, when I both read The Crucible - which was ostensibly about the famed Salem Witch Trials panic of the 1690s but was actually about the McCarthyism panic of the 1950s - and watched Paradise Lost, the famed HBO documentary about a trio of teens in an Arkansas town convicted of a brutal triple murder mainly because they were goth weirdos into Alastair Crowley and Metallica. Paradise Lost became one of the seminal texts of the Satanic Panic, which along with its cousin Stranger Danger, were the defining moral panics of my 1980s childhood.
The academic literature on moral panics defines it as a widespread, usually irrational fear that someone or something is a threat to the community. This threat is almost an outsider or a member of a marginalized or despised group. In recent years, as elder millennials like myself work through the trauma of our fucked up Reagan-era childhoods, there has been a cottage industry created by the need to understand moral panics, as best exemplified by the hit podcast You’re Wrong About and its offshoots.
One of the most persistent aspects of a moral panic is that it finds an outsider or marginalized group on which to dump blame for problems. And the ones most likely to lead such moral panics are the ones with the most guilty consciences, looking to deflect their own blame. And thus, Catholic, Mormon and evangelical churches, for example, led the Satanic panic in the 1980s, blaming Satanists for child sexual abuse. Meanwhile, as we know now, these same organizations were responsible for more damage to children than any group of heavy metal-listening teens could ever do.
Today, the same right-wing creeps who whipped up the Satanic Panic have a new target: drag queens. Or more specifically, organizations like Drag Story Hour and any other educational or cultural programs that expose children and young people to LGBTQ+ representation or acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ children and youth.
As the Great Drag Queen Panic of 2022 has unfolded, as a student of moral panics, I knew it was only a matter of time before the same people accusing us of being “groomers” would out themselves as predators themselves or - at best -deeply weird creeps with hangups about kids and sex.
And in the last few months here in Arizona, we’ve seen at least three right-wing candidates for educational positions who have shown themselves to be creeps while attacking LGBTQ+ people as a threat to kids.
Content Warning: Before we go further, from here on out we'll be discussing instances of sexual abuse, homophobia, and generally gross Republican weirdo behavior.
Randy Kaufman
Let’s start with the most recent and most famous example, which I alluded to before. Randy Kaufman is a Trump-loving, election-denying far-right weirdo who is running for an open seat on the Maricopa County Community College District governing board against Democratic state legislator Kelli Butler.
Though Kaufman’s social media has disappeared since his arrest became public on Tuesday, Huffington Post managed to find a Facebook post from May in which Kaufman said he wanted “our children protected [from] the progressive left. He was clearly jumping on the bandwagon of “anti-woke” bullshit propagated by Fox News talking head Christopher Rufo. The “progressive left” agenda people like Kaufman think kids need protecting from includes any mention of LGBTQ+ identity as well as an history lessons that acknowledge systemic racism or otherwise make white people uncomfortable.
But do you know what Kaufman apparently doesn’t think kids need protection from? Grown men jerking it to cell phone porn in their daycare parking lot. On October 18, we found out that two weeks earlier Kaufman had been arrested for masturbating in his truck in the parking lot of a Maricopa Community College campus. As the officer who had the unenviable job of approaching Kaufman pointed out, there was a daycare center within sight. Kaufman’s response was “I fucked up. I’m really stressed.” He then asked the officer not to include the daycare detail in the report and name dropped the head of the local police union.
Tom Horne
Tom Horne is a former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction running to get his job back from Democrat Kathy Hoffman, who was the first actual educator to head the Arizona Department of Education in over 20 years. He has jumped fully on Rufo’s bullshit, with “Stop Critical Race Theory” signs polluting every street corner in my neighborhood.
And in a debate in early October, Horne criticized Hoffman for including Q Chat Space, an online space for LGBTQ+ youth, on a list of LGBTQ+ resources on the Department of Education website. As Hoffman said in the debate and an Arizona Public Media fact check confirmed, Q Chat is a nationally-recognized program used by other government websites around the country.
But Horne of course tried to insinuate a nefarious purpose to the site:
I stand for empowering parents. Q Chat stands for Queer Chat, believe it or not, and it's on the official Department of Education website. Kids can go on there without their parents' permission, they give detailed information about themselves, they give detailed information about their sex lives or sexual thoughts, and then they talk to Q Chatters who are volunteers from around the country who are not licensed professionals.
With no evidence, Horne is implying that Q Chat volunteers, who do go through a screening and training process, are all predators looking to groom and prey on children. Though, as Hoffman pointed out at the debate, if Horne is looking to root out predators who are dangerous to children, he should look closer to home.
In August, it was revealed that former state legislator David Stringer was working on Horne’s campaign. Stringer was forced to resign from the state legislature in 2019 when, after a series of wildly racist statements raised his profile, it came out that he had been convicted in 1983 of soliciting sex from two minors, one of whom was developmentally disabled. After this happened, his virulent opposition to a bill to ban child marriage made a dark sort of sense.
When Stringer’s association with Horne became public, Horne followed the 2022 Republican playbook of refusing to apologize, claiming Stringer had been railroaded. And when that didn’t work, he went to step 2 of the Republican playbook, denying reality, returning a small donation and then denying Stringer had anything else to do with the campaign.
Kurt Rohrs
Kaufman and Horne are both terrible and should never be allowed anywhere near children, let alone charged with making educational decisions. But they are merely the tip of the Pervert Iceberg. If you want to find the real freaks - the kind who a hundred years ago would have been part of a carny sideshow traveling the south and charging yokels two bucks a gander but who now become YouTube stars and right-wing social media influencers - you have to go down to your local school board meeting.
In the Chandler Unified School District here in my hometown of Chandler, one such freak is Kurt Rohrs, an incredibly sad, divorced middle-aged white man who has made himself a school board meeting fixture over the past few years and is now running for a spot on the board.
This past June, for example, Kurt “celebrated” Father’s Day with an incoherent, homophobic rant about how “drag queens get more respect than fathers" nowadays. You get the feeling this had more to do with his relationship with his own estranged adult children than RuPaul’s Emmy wins.
More disturbingly, in an August 2021 rant, Kurt encouraged his right-wing ideological allies to infiltrate schools by applying to be substitute teachers and spying on kids and teachers. Kurt then put his plan into place by applying to be a substitute himself. In a post to his ideological allies in a right-wing parent group, he promised to “send reports from the ‘front’.” It was only after outcry from community members that the district took action and prevented him from becoming a substitute.
If your idea of “protecting” kids is spying on them under the guise of teaching them, maybe it’s time to ask if you’re actually the bad guy.
And Kurt is just one of the thousands of Republican freaks and weirdos running for school boards and other offices across the country by attacking LGBTQ+ kids. And as with any moral panic, when anyone starts throwing baseless accusations at marginalized groups, you want to ask what they are trying to hide.
Always a pleasure to read.