By Staff Reporter |
A University of Arizona assistant professor who moonlights as a drag queen, Harris Kornstein, pushed children to support Hamas during a recent drag story hour with Valley Families for Palestine, arranged by Queer Storytime for Palestine.
Kornstein encouraged the crowd of children to chant “Free Palestine!” as a response to: “If you’re a drag queen and you know it…” during a performance this week.
Palestinians don’t tolerate LGBTQ+ individuals, especially Hamas. Anyone involved in those lifestyles in the area risks persecution and violence at minimum, even death.
Valley Families for Palestine, an activist coalition located in the Connecticut River Valley, privatized their social media accounts after Kornstein’s video went viral.
Also involved in the drag story hour were Sarah Prager, an LGBTQ+ author; Hannah Moushabeck, a queer author and Palestinian supporter; Jewish Voice for Peace Western Mass; Booklink Books; MassEquality; Parasol Patrol at Western Mass; and Western Mass Mask Bloc.
Kornstein, who goes by the drag name “Lil Miss Hot Mess,” often does his drag performances for minors in other states in addition to drag story hours.
Kornstein is also a board member for Drag Queen Story Hour, and author of two books marketed to children normalizing drag lifestyles: “The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish,” and “If You’re a Drag Queen and You Know It.”
Drag Queen Story Hour is a national organization with state chapters that emerged from Michelle Tea, a leftist author from San Francisco who launched it out of her desire almost 10 years ago to raise her toddler in “queer culture.”
In a 2021 research paper, Kornstein defended the creation of Drag Queen Story Hour as a means of allowing children to explore “queer pedagogy” and engage in “queer imagination” from a young age. The latter term, Kornstein said, enhanced child development through play as praxis, aesthetic transformation, strategic defiance, destigmatization of shame, and embodied kinship. Kornstein noted that drag queen engagement with children would lead to normalization of the practice.
“Within this complex political landscape, [Drag Queen Story Hour] seems to uniquely thread the needle between queer activism and broad cultural acceptance,” said Kornstein.
At the University of Arizona, Kornstein taught in the College of Humanities Public & Applied Humanities. Up until he went on research leave last year, Kornstein served as an assistant professor for the Institute for LGBTQ+ Studies, School of Art, School of Information, and Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory.
Kornstein was able to go on leave thanks to a $60,000 grant from the Biden administration’s National Endowment for the Humanities. That funding is going toward a book project theorizing queer and transgender strategies of countering “surveillance capitalism” through observations of drag queens, transgender taxi drivers, cruising gay men, witchcraft, “mystical intuition,” and “gay hanky codes.”
Last December, the University of Arizona awarded Kornstein the Chatfield Impact Award — an honor for exemplary teaching, research, and service — for which he received $5,000.
Kornstein auctioned his books for a “Books for Palestine” fundraiser last November.
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