On a bitterly cold December afternoon, I stood outside the Brooklyn Children’s Museum with my camera, surrounded by protesters shouting “Drag is not for kids” as parents tried to enter with their children. Rainbow umbrellas, held like shields, protected families attending the story hour. There were lines of police officers. Right-wing livestreamers. And toddlers.

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These weren’t isolated outbursts. New York had become a key battleground in a coordinated and escalating national campaign targeting drag events. According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, more than 200 such incidents took place across the U.S. in a single year. In New York, many protests were organized by far-right groups, including the local chapter of Gays Against Groomers, whose messaging fused anti-trans rhetoric with fears about corrupted childhoods and collapsing morals.

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The film follows two people on opposite sides of this cultural fault line: Amaya Perez, a protest leader who identifies as black and bisexual, and opposes drag artists reading to children. Bear Spiegel, a drag performer and story hour reader who sees these story hours as a place for children to have fun and be creative. Journalist Imara Jones, who helped me understand the broader forces at play -- the entanglement of identity, politics and disenfranchising those on the fringes of society.

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The protests have an audience far beyond Brooklyn. In some ways, they are designed that way. Social video posts are shared far from New York, in places like Dallas, Utah and Idaho. The protest language was echoed on the presidential campaign trail. 

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Their stories unfold in bookstores, on sidewalks and livestreams — spaces where the personal and political collide. And that last word — performance — became a central lens for me. Because whether you're reading to toddlers in a sequined gown, or shouting into a megaphone outside a museum, you're performing. And performance, like story, has the power to seduce, provoke, confuse — and reveal.

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The debate is playing out across fractured timelines — in person, on social media, in comment sections, viral videos, counter-narratives, and waves of raw emotion. To reflect that, I took a multimedia approach: vérité footage, protest coverage, Instagram reels, YouTube clips, archival livestreams, quiet interviews, and unscripted conversations. The result captures the fragmented, volatile nature of this cultural moment.

 

I set out to make a layered film that reflects the uncertainty of now — a film that invites viewers to sit with contradictions. At its core, Storytime is about what happens when storytelling — something we associate with care, imagination, and connection — becomes a battlefield.