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Wake County Performers from the House of Coxx PHOTO COURTESY OF RAAFE PURNSLEY
Hurt Pride From the Holly Springs council’s refusal to make a Pride Month proclamation to drag queen story hour events canceled in Cary and Apex, Pride Month for the LGBTQ+ community is looking bleak in parts of Wake County this year. BY MARIANA FABIAN backtalk@indyweek.com
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ast year, the House of Coxx, a drag collective based in the Triangle, planned a family event to take place at the Cary Theater located in downtown Cary for Pride Month, scheduled for April 1. Raafe Purnsley, a member of the House of Coxx, says he was extremely excited to finally introduce Cary to drag, especially to those who had had no exposure to it before. “We were going to read and talk about the history of drag in the LGBTQ community. [The event] was really to introduce families to drag in a more in-depth and genuine way,” Purnsley says. Drag queen story hours are family events that are hosted by drag queens who read books to children. Purnsley says he had intended for it to be family-forward and even modeled the drag queens’ performances around some Disney songs that the kids would recognize; “Surface Pressure” from Encanto was on the set list. 8
June 15, 2022
INDYweek.com
Days before the event, Purnsley received a message out of the blue informing him that the theater show was no longer happening (the Town of Cary owns the Cary Theater and events are administered by the town’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Resources). Some Cary locals, including Emanuela Prister, a lawyer active with the Wake County GOP, had complained. On March 16, Prister sent a strongly worded email to Cary town manager Sean Stegall about the use of “derogatory language” in the queens’ stage names, arguing that the names referenced body parts and sex acts and were inappropriate for children. “It is in fact grooming,” the email stated. “It is criminal in nature, and it is nefarious and not acceptable in a civil society.” In his response the same day, Stegall said he was not aware that the theater had been rented for the event and that he “decided to terminate the show based up [sic] the use of vulgar language and it’s promotion to children.”
“While the Town supports and wants to encourage diversity in its offerings certainly not in this form or manner,” Stegall wrote. He did not respond to a request for comment from the INDY. Following the cancellation of Cary’s event, more Triangle locals started harassing and sending violent threats to the organizers of Apex Pride, according to Purnsley. A drag queen story hour scheduled this month was originally canceled for Apex Pride, too, due to homophobic backlash from some residents. Equality NC stepped in to sponsor the event and took over the annual Apex Pride Festival, and the story hour went on as planned this Saturday at Apex Pride. Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) North Carolina chapter leader Mary Elise says she knows how much kids love these events and how significant drag queen story hours are for them. “Some kids just love it because it’s another story time, but for other kids, it’s a life-changing experience,” Elise says. “They need to see this representation … whether it be someone with the same skin color as them or someone who might present their gender differently …. There are so many different ways that we represent people in our story hour and our stories.” Elise says drag queen story hour isn’t just about talking to children about Pride or LGBTQ+ issues. On the DQSH website bookshop, recommended booklists include various sections not solely focused on LGBTQ+ pride. In fact, some of the lists involve themes such as self-expression, what makes a family, and the amplification of Black and brown voices. Unfortunately, the cancellations of these story hour events were not the only acts of discrimination occurring across Wake County during this Pride Month. In Holly Springs, first-term Republican mayor Sean Mayefskie refused to make a proclamation for Pride Month and refused to join Wake County and other municipalities in enacting a nondiscrimination ordinance (NDO) for its residents. Carrie Randa, a resident of Holly Springs and 2021 town council candidate, says she reached out to Mayefskie in April to ask if Holly Springs would be signing onto the NDO and issuing a Pride proclamation. Mayefskie didn’t engage much with Randa, but he did send her one response stating, “I am aware of the LGBTQ+ community,” and nothing else. “I sent statistics on why I thought [a Pride proclamation] was important, especially for LGBTQ+ youth,” Randa says. “A lot of the statistics were about mental health impacts, suicide rates—all sorts of things to show why this proclamation is important for our town.” Randa continued following up with Mayefskie and included screenshots of hateful comments left on a Pride event Facebook post that was scheduled to take place in neighboring town Fuquay-Varina in the correspondence. The mayor responded that he didn’t think a proclamation would
