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Drag, panic and performance: how a misread library booking inspired KINDER

Richard Beck Richard Beck
27 Jul 2025

We spoke to Ryan Stewart about their new EdFringe show, KINDER. It involves a drag artist, a library and a catastrophic misunderstanding of a ‘reading hour’…

Language is a lifeboat in a frigid, iceberged ocean of heteronormativity – a tool to safely connect with our kin and create community


Ryan, your show features a drag artist, a library and a misunderstanding about a ‘reading hour’. How do those come together?

Words and languages have always been such queer things, haven’t they? We all use them in our own ways to make sense of the world we’re in; and as the world creates new things that need naming and describing, words are born, or changed, or recontextualised. That transfigurative nature makes them very queer.

Formal understandings of our languages have often been filtered through ethno-national boundaries and limitations that flatten complexity and homogenise those languages’ speakers and writers. Think of the variety of dialects, accents and regional differences in meanings and spellings that exist, and the various sociopolitical connotations and implications intertwined with the speaking or writing of these variations, and it all starts to be very queer indeed. It becomes the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick understood “queer” to mean.

And for people whose queerness extends far beyond any of the borders we’ve demarcated humans by, language is a lifeboat in a frigid, iceberged ocean of heteronormativity – a tool to safely connect with our kin and create community. We took words from all different pockets of our languages and made a bricolage of our own that only recently has begun to spill over with the commercialisation and mainstreaming of drag culture, which has increased the capital of our words.

Opening up libraries for people to give readings has become ubiquitous – but what would happen if a drag artist misinterpreted the nature of a reading hour they were booked to do, and what would the implications of that misunderstanding be in today’s world? That’s how KINDER came about.

You talk about finding poetry in panic and comedy in chaos, but beneath that you are dealing with the important issue of censorship. At the same time, drag artists reading to children has become a big issue in the USA. Why do you think that is?

To be honest, I don't know what is behind the rationality of those who protest for drag bans. I guess that’s why I’ve written the show – to try and get to the bottom of how something so innocent as reading books to children in libraries has become so politicised.

What I do know, though, is how we ended up here. For marginalised communities, history is a long game of two steps forward, one step back – and the last decade has seen massive social and political gains for queer people. At the same time, and almost in spite of the progress we’re collectively making, the world is becoming an increasingly difficult place to navigate economically. And rather than own up to the gross inequity that has led us here, those in power direct our gaze horizontally to those around us, not up towards them.

History is littered with these periods of economic upheaval, and whenever you see a populace suffering, you also see the rise of a moral panic that seeks to shift blame away from those who have the ability to meaningfully change something. Today, that new moral panic has centred on disruption of gender and scapegoating our trans siblings – of which protests against drag are an extension. The freedom offered by recognising the fluidity of our bodies is a threat to a capitalist system that thrives on divisions created by saying what people can and cannot do, and so anything that seeks to dismantle that, or is seen to be in collusion with that, suddenly comes under fire.

But you say you use drag as both a disguise and a magnifying glass. How does that work?

Great question! The short answer is that it can all be summed up by summoning the proverbial Trojan horse.

Venturing a little further, sometimes it is the most outrageous and the most outlandish that stealthily reveals what we’ve been hiding for so long – that forces us to look upon ourselves and think, “Hmm, where did we go wrong?”

We have long utilised the aesthetics of drag to uncover societal anxieties. Think about Marlene Dietrich’s androgyny in Morocco, the iconic Daphne and Josephine in Some Like It Hot, or Robin Williams’ beloved Euphegenia of Mrs Doubtfire. Comedic, yes – but through the laughter, we’ve watched as these loud and brash characters navigate experiences of harassment, objectification and ridicule (or radical acceptance, as in those closing moments on the boat in Some Like It Hot).

The gender-bender, even in their positioning as the joke, occupies a sort of mythic, Puckish space that undermines hegemony. Drag offers the artist a mask – a literal second face, if you will. So, for me, the character of Goody in KINDER has been a mask that I’ve been able to use to talk about the things in my life I’ve not yet been able to give voice to as Ryan. They are my disguise, and I use them to talk about what’s really going on right now.

And if you think about the figure of the drag artist today, and look at how much power the proponents of this current moral panic have imbued them with – in spite of the precarious reality we really understand artists to be living under – you begin to see how this disguise starts to magnify our problems.

Richard Beck

Richard Beck

A graduate in theology and education, Richard acted and contributed to dance, drama and music productions throughout his teaching career. He joined Broadway Baby in 2014 and is now our Editor-in-Chief. He usually disappears to warmer climes for the winter to pursue his passion for travel.

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