Drag Story Hour to reschedule after threats

Bookmans stands against censorship. President Sean Feeney said the company’s mission is to act as a public square, an inclusive space for everyone.

But when The Bridge Church in Marana and Tucson and extremist hate groups organized a threat campaign against Bookmans’ March 25 planned Drag Story Hour, Feeney said he felt a line was crossed.

“The line was to call to infiltrate the event ‘undercover’ in order to disrupt,” Feeney said. “That represents in my view a clear threat to the health and safety of everybody who’s at the event. To me, it’s unacceptable.”

The Bridge Church encouraged its congregation on its website and social media channels to contact Bookmans on Ina Road and tell the staff to cancel its event.

“As Christians, we need to stand against sin and this is a great chance for you to do so,” the post said on its website.

“We hope that you will join us in calling, every day all the numbers below. We are hoping that many churches will decide to get involved and help stand for our community, city and society. It is a time to stand for our children and their future. Stand for God and His truth. Our goal is to have this event canceled.”

The church staff refused to comment on the situation, saying, “We are going to not conduct any more interviews. We feel we have made our position against the sexualization of children clear.”

Feeney said Bookmans received unsigned information online that called for “undercover attendants,” particularly men posing as fathers and grandfathers, to show up and occupy seats to block children and parents from attending. After coordinating with Marana PD, the company determined the pushback had become a safety threat.

“We knew these things were happening,” Feeney said. “We felt, perhaps naively, that in Tucson, this would not be an issue. There might be some people who don’t agree, but it would not be an issue from a safety or a security perspective.”

The campaign sparked protest and counterprotest on social media, and due to the Ina Road bookstore’s small size, Feeney and his staff could not ensure safety. Bookmans announced on March 20 that it would postpone the event until further notice.

Despite the national debate over Drag Story Hour, the company had not seen severe pushback in almost 10 years of hosting the event. Bookmans has partnered with Drag Story Hour-AZ since 2019, but its own events date further back. Feeney noted whenever there was dissent, no more than a dozen protesters would show up in front of their stores. In fact, community support would overwhelm the opposition.

“We have had very small protests at past Drag Story Hour events,” Feeney said. “When there is public pushback, the support completely overwhelms the detractors. We start receiving an outpouring of positive messages, and we usually see a huge uptick in attendance.”

In the past, pushback has created more interest in Drag Story Hour events, increasing the number of attendants. The Bookmans on Ina Road is its smallest store in Arizona, and Feeney indicated another major reason for rescheduling was to find a larger venue for the growing interest.

Along with support from individuals, many organizations and community leaders, both faith-based and secular, have reached out to the company to assist in rescheduling. Feeney mentioned the Jewish Community Resource Council as one of the associations they’re working with for the new event.

“Our intention is to absolutely bring this event back to the Tucson metro area,” Feeney said. “Given what has happened in the past week, our objective is to make this more of a communitywide event, where Tucson can express holistically that this kind of hate and exclusion is not what we’re about.”

Bookmans will look for a new location in the Tucson metro area to support the increase in attendance. To organize the new event, Bookmans will also have to restructure its security plan, Feeney said.

He noted the company has hired security or off-duty police officers for minor crowd control in the past. But beyond minor safety efforts, Bookmans has never assessed a need for more complex security measures.

The upcoming event will be a community celebration with a larger and more robust Drag Story Hour. Feeney said he and his staff hope to bring the event back to its proper context, and he understands it will take a team of community members to do it with safety in mind.

“We’re a bookstore. We’re not a security company,” Feeney said. “We want to bring in people with expertise in this area to contribute to the conversation. One of the reasons we postponed was so they would have an opportunity to properly assess the security situation.”

In the face of organized dissent, Feeney and his staff were touched by the overwhelming support from the community. Feeney has lived in the city for more than 30 years, and although shocked by the threats, he addressed the encouragement as the Tucson he knew and loved.

“Bookmans, as part of our mission, has always first and foremost stood for inclusion,” Feeney said. “We feel it’s particularly important at this moment to be inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community, to present it as a representation of our broader inclusiveness for the whole community.

This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2023.