‘Continuing to be visible’: Why Courtney Act’s children’s book is an antidote to right-wing rage

Erring on the side of positivity, Jenek’s default is to answer hate with love, or at least a peaceful, reasoned rhetoric, which they hope will help to quell the anger sometimes directed at the LGBTQ+ community.

They hit the political headlines in 2022 when they were mentioned in a Senate estimates hearing by Liberal senator Alex Antic, who held up a photo of Courtney Act reading to children as part of Play School Story Time and asked “Why is the ABC grooming children with this sort of adult content?”

Jenek responded with an opinion piece in this masthead by Courtney Act, and in particular hit back at Antic’s use of the word “grooming”.

“I think the reason that those views are used is because these people with extreme right anti-LGBT views use these narratives to suck people in and get a reaction,” Jenek says. “I think that the detractors to drag queen story time are wilfully misrepresenting the story in order to create a moral panic.”

Drag queen storytime events have been challenged, restricted and shut down in the US ever since the first official one was held in San Francisco in 2015. The states of Tennessee and Texas have even introduced anti-drag bills limiting performers to age-restricted venues so they can’t read publicly to children.

In Australia, there has also been backlash to drag queen story time events.

In May 2023, a series of protests in Melbourne led to sessions being cancelled or moved online due to the threat of violence from protesters who claimed they were child grooming events. Events at libraries in Eltham, Hawthorn and Oakleigh were targeted, as well as in regional Victoria.

In NSW, Sydney’s Hills Shire Council announced it would not host any drag queen storytime sessions at libraries across their council in February 2024, and there was even a bomb threat made ahead of a drag queen story time session at Manly Library in February 2023.

It’s not just drag queens who face an increasing backlash. Authors and publishers of queer books are also being challenged and banned in increasing numbers.

In 2024, a book by Australian author Scott Stuart, My Shadow Is Pink, about a boy who doesn’t like stereotypical “boys’ things” was called out by President Donald Trump at a religious conference for promoting “radical gender ideology”. Trump brought a 12-year-old boy on stage to tell a story about how he was forced to read the book to a child in kindergarten despite holding contrary beliefs.

Scott responded by saying the book, published in 2020, was about helping kids to be themselves without prejudice.

Another book in that series, My Shadow Is Purple, was banned by the Malaysian government in 2022 as it “may be harmful to morals”, and in 2023 a US teacher in Georgia was fired for reading it to her fifth-grade class.

An increasing number of book bans in the US largely target LGBTQ+ authors, with 10,000 books banned from public libraries across the US in 2024, almost triple the number banned in 2023, according to freedom of expression advocates PEN America.

While book banning is not a trend mirrored in Australia, there has been an increasing number of books challenged here, many of them by LGBTQ+ authors. Last year there were 155 books challenged in Australia, but none were banned. The one that came the closest was the graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir by US author and illustrator Maia Kobabe, which was instead rated M Unrestricted after a legal battle to have it banned.

Jenek believes the vast majority of Australians don’t feel this way about LGBTQ+ books or the community. They even quote figures from an Equality Australia survey in the run-up to this year’s federal election showing 89 per cent of people agree or strongly agree that LGBT people deserve to live with dignity and respect, and that 91 per cent agree or strongly agree trans people should have the freedom and choice to live their lives in the way that makes them happy.

“I think there’s probably some architects at the top who know what they’re doing, they know that talking about these very serious subjects that endanger children and linking them to the LGBT community has been something that historically has been a tactic,” Jenek says. “I think they’re trying it again, they’re just trying to create a moral panic because they realise that outrage and division is something that works.

“So really, I think the solution and antidote to those kinds of views is continuing to be visible and to share stories and opinions and experiences.”

Jenek loses a bit of their trademark positivity at the lack of visibility of trans people, in particular in television, struggling to come up with more than a handful. There’s Daniielle Alexis, an Australian-born trans actor living in Los Angeles; Zoe Terakes, a non-binary and trans masculine actor best known for playing a trans man on the prison drama Wentworth; and Georgie Stone, who played Mackenzie Hargreaves, the first trans character on Neighbours and who, at 10, became the youngest person to receive hormone blockers in Australia.

“Most people know a gay person these days so there’s a human connection to what being LGB means,” Jenek says. “I think one of the reasons negativity is easier to take hold in the trans world is because most people don’t know a trans person, or have even seen a trans person on television. They’re not seeing stories about everyday trans folks to humanise them.

“The far right has thought they can zoom in on this population of very vulnerable people who experience mental health [issues], homelessness and suicide rates at far higher percentages than the rest of the populace, and demonise them because nobody really knows who they are. They are not seen as human because there is no human representation of them.

“I think the solution to a lot of the anti-LGBT rhetoric is to share more stories and different types of stories; the real leadership comes from the people at the top saying yes to scripted television dramas that contain LGBT characters.”