That drag queens read, even to toddlers, at first glance, is not disturbing: the theater is a game of disguise. In Shakespeare’s time, as today in Japan, actors play the female characters. Children are quite capable of grasping the concept. So I was about not to be shocked… when I discovered that the proposed readings were ideologically oriented. That drag queens read fairy tales, Harry Potter, Cinderella Or Little Red Riding Hood, All in good time ! But not “LGBTQI + tales” intended “to break gender norms and challenge the heteronormativity of families to make children think,” as the drag queen Bergamote Lips learnedly explains to the Figaro. What use are these ideologized readings? What does it mean to “promote homosexuality”? Of transsexuality? Is homosexuality a choice? But if it’s a choice, we can change it. This brings water to the mill of the mad scientists of the reconversion.
When homosexuality was punishable by prison in the West, homosexuals lived their sexuality despite the risk. Today it is condemned to the death penalty in the vast majority of Arab-Muslim countries, it has not disappeared there for all that. Homosexuals hide, live a hell in fear of denunciation and death, but nothing, no reading, no condemnation through religious texts, politicians, activists, no beating can force them to approach the shores heteronormativity. The opposite is just as impossible. And that’s happy.
Man is a mountain of prejudices who sees the world through blinkers developed by an education, an environment, a normative will until the day when he rubs shoulders for real with what he did not know and opens his eyes to reality. For children who will become adults – it is sometimes good to remember the order of things which inadvertently tends to get lost in these deconstructivist times – to relieve themselves of homophobic and other prejudices, it is sufficient that they frequent what inspires mistrust or rejection. It is not necessary, child or adult, to see the alphabet of horrible heterosexuality and joyful homosexuality being hammered at you, it could even prove to be counter-productive, in view of the numerous protests from parents of pupils who refuse these readings and other courses of education in tolerance.
Commercial gibberish
Since sex education entered schools by the circular of July 23, 1973, the thorny question of sexuality explained to schoolchildren has logically followed social developments. Today, it merges more and more with an education in LGBT sexuality, with the “promotion” of transsexuality – as at the Alsatian School, where a militant association refused any debate on the biological possibility of a man to be pregnant, and referred the students and their legitimate doubts to transphobia. It would be necessary to begin by prohibiting the enclosure of schools to any militant association to open it wide to sexologists and doctors, even to public figures whose coming out could have been a source of conflict, insults, etc., and especially in the sports world.
This would perhaps save us from Kafkaesque controversies (with many versions of the facts) as in Lyon, where the town hall was criticized for a subsidy granted to the duo of ecosexual artists Lundy Grandpré. The creation of this duo, Small intractable manual of introduction to ecosexuality, consisted of a dance in a garden in order to pay “homage to dildos, subversive links between the public and the private, the intimate and the political. A garden where we fuck with plants and share herbal teas” (which are sold on the spot or on the site of the duo, it would not be a question of losing the direction of the trade in the middle of roses kissers).
The opposition expressed concern about the presence of children in front of this natural “spectacle”; the supporters argued that the children present were those of consenting parents, etc. I don’t know if “a garden where you awaken your body to the joys of ecosexual practice and thought” will make children less receptive to prejudice, but it is certain that this commercial gibberish will not advance one iota the fight against discrimination and will increase parents’ fears of seeing their toddlers confused by so many mysteries worthy of the pythia of Delphi.
* Abnousse Shalmani is a writer and journalist committed against the obsession with identity