Mere minutes before she would greet families who came to see her lip sync and read children’s books at Crazy Aunt Helen’s, drag queen Tara Hoot looks out from the D.C. restaurant’s second-floor window to see who came to protest her on this Saturday in May.

Only a few people who disapprove of her (and others who are LGBTQ+) are across the street from the establishment in Capitol Hill. One, a young boy, carries a sign that says, “Jesus Saves.”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree, friends. Like you’re not going to change my mind,” says Hoot, as she peers out the window decorated with pink neon lights. They don’t hear her; the window’s shut. But a restaurant server standing beside her nods in agreement.

Roughly a dozen of the drag queen’s supporters are also outside, carrying open umbrellas that block the families from the angry protesters as they wait for the restaurant to open.

“There’s so many people with rainbow umbrellas out here,” Hoot continues. “It’s beautiful. That’s what makes me happy and excited. Rainbow dresses. Rainbow glitter power. Here we go, friends.”

At 10 a.m., staff open the doors and welcome dozens of jubilant parents and their children, many who are dressed up in brightly-colored clothes or glitter makeup for the occasion.

Marla DeMoss, her husband, and two daughters are among those in the crowd. Her family has seen Tara Hoot perform twice now because it’s a good time; Hoot brings a puppet and streamers. DeMoss also thought it would be a good learning opportunity for her little ones to see resilience firsthand, outside of the storybooks.

“Do you want to be on the side of the street that is yelling and bringing negativity? Or do you want to be on the side of the street that’s blowing bubbles and saying welcome and helping us get in safely?” DeMoss says. “What side do you think is the team you want to be on?”

Drag story hours increase around the D.C. region

Hoot has been performing drag story hour, events where drag queens or kings read stories to children, for over a year now. While drag itself is a century-old art, dating back to when a formerly enslaved Black man organized drag balls in D.C., story hour can be traced to less than a decade ago, after queer author and parent, Michelle Tea, sought to create kid-friendly readings for families like hers in San Francisco. Now, the events are becoming increasingly common at libraries, parks, and restaurants around the country, but also around D.C.

The events have also become a target for right-wing politicians and extremists amid broader legislative attacks on the LGBTQ community. Tennessee has banned drag performances in public spaces, and a handful of other states have sought to restrict the longtime mainstay of LGBTQ+ culture. Protesters, which have sometimes included the Proud Boys, have disrupted story hours in the D.C. region, including one at Silver Spring’s Loyalty Bookstore where some anti-drag protesters got violent in February.

Tara Hoot has received threats — Crazy Aunt Helen’s owner Shane Mayson has also received bomb threats to his restaurant and home — so DCist/WAMU agreed to only use Hoot’s stage name. But she’s not consumed by worries of her safety because community support has so far outnumbered the threats and protests.

“I’m really grateful and thankful for the community that comes out to support,” says Hoot. “We need people to show up, to stand up, and to help us.”

The show must and does go on. That weekend she performed story hour, Hoot had three other drag events: a Golden Girls-themed group show Friday night, Saturday evening bingo, and Sunday brunch. Hoot is motivated to work around the clock because of the joy she gets out of it, and the joy it brings to the audience, especially coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Sometimes I need to cry to a kids book. Sometimes I need to connect with a song that’s going to bring emotion to me,” says Hoot. “If that works for me… maybe that will work for others and help others?”

Becoming Tara Hoot

Hoot, 47, likes to joke during her performances that when everyone else was making sourdough bread during the height of the pandemic, she bought 27 wigs and made meals in drag. She was already the cook of the house, whipping up favorites like curried collards and grains, or chicken cacciatore. So the only thing left to do for the drag cooking videos was to learn how to put on a full face of makeup.

She sought inspiration from watching other drag performers like Mx Justin Vivian Bond. She also consulted the classics, even if they aren’t explicitly drag, from RuPaul’s “Supermodel” to anything Judy Garland.

She always wanted to try out drag because she’s a performer at heart, she says, and because the pandemic put some things in perspective. The thought of COVID-19 killing her before she ever gave it a try pushed her to dress up and perform for friends over Zoom — and then later to make videos with her husband, Michael, for YouTube and other social media.

“You’re gorgeous and you’re a champion,” she repeats at the start of one of her videos, in which she makes a tater tot casserole.

Hoot’s shtick is that she is the queen of the fictional Hoosier Tater Tot Casserole Festival. She’ll often pair a beehive wig with a 1960s vintage dress; her and Michael’s favorites are from Sears. She thinks of herself as a midwestern mom, partially modeled after her own, whom she says “would talk to everybody in the grocery store.” “We’d never get out of there,” says Hoot.

For the Saturday story hour, she paired a blue bouffant wig with a blue and white floral dress that resembles a tablecloth. In her 4-inch, wing-tip-styled stiletto heels, she’s nearly 6 feet tall. Michael, who’s her number one fan, as evident by the Tara Hoot swag t-shirt he’s sporting, advised her to throw on a rainbow boa to give her outfit some flair for the children. Being the jokester Hoot is, she played like she was offended before agreeing to wear the boa her husband suggested.

The name Tara Hoot is all her though — a riff on Terre Haute, Indiana, where she’s originally from. That state has filed a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills, including banning books that the state deems “offensive.” The books are almost always about empowering marginalized groups.

Hoot reads a number of banned books during her story hour shows, including one of her favorites, Alma and How She Got Her Name, which is a picture book about a little girl who learns about her very long name and comes to appreciate it and her culture.

“I got choked up with that one a lot… I remember being made fun of for my middle name growing up,” says Hoot. “I wanted to read and connect with people.”

Hoot and her husband both make space in their lives for Hoot’s pandemic hobby turned calling. Not only will Michael accompany her to performances, flipping the books’ pages for her during story hour, but an entire room in their three-bedroom Northwest D.C. townhouse is devoted to Tara’s accouterments. Centered in the room between racks of clothing is a vanity table that’s cluttered with her essentials, from lipsticks to eyeshadow palettes to elmer’s glue.

Well, call it one and a half rooms: In the next room, technically their son’s room but he’s away at college, are Hoot’s bingo show prizes, like a box of Dolly Parton cake mix. The items are scattered across the bed or neatly placed inside the dresser.

“It is fun. I love it,” says Michael. “I’ve always loved drag.”

Hoot chimes in: “I couldn’t do it without him.”

Michael tries to go to all of Hoot’s events, not just because he enjoys drag but because he wants to make sure she’s safe. He takes into account potential protests and drops her off in a way that minimizes her time outside. That’s what he did just this past weekend, when Capital Pride Alliance recognized her and other Drag Story Hour DMV performers.

So how did Hoot get from Youtube to the Capital Pride Honors? Those cooking videos caught the attention of the Crazy Aunt Helen’s owner, who then invited Tara Hoot to perform at his bar. Before that, she’d only ever performed in person during drag bingo at Petworth burger joint Slash Run — an invitation she accepted because she wanted to support local restaurants struggling during the pandemic, she says

“I remember being extraordinarily nervous,” she recalls feeling ahead of her first performance. “I didn’t know how people were going to react. I remember practicing nonstop for the songs I was going to do.”

But the nerves have largely subsided the more she’s performed. She’ll still practice lip syncing in the car on the way to a gig, but she doesn’t always have the time to rehearse more than that, given that she’s also juggling a full-time job at a local school. She’s worked in schools for 25 years, including as a band director to middle and high schoolers, she says.

“It’s important for us'”

Back at Crazy Aunt Helen’s, the kids can barely stay in their seats.. “Who’s ready for storytime,” Tara Hoot tells the cheering, 80-person crowd. “This is probably the fullest story time has ever been!”

She kicks off her performance with the classic, Reading Rainbow’s theme song, then reads Let’s Make Friends by local author Ken Fishman, and another book called The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish by the founder of the Drag Story Hour organization, Lil Miss Hot Mess.

The families really engage with the nursery rhyme book about drag queens. “The hair on the drag queen goes up, up, up,” reads Hoot, as the kids and their parents laugh and repeat “up, up, up.” Kids don’t have to be on their best behavior, Hoot says during her performance. She wants people to engage with the material, even if that means kids getting out of their seats and joining her near the stage.

“I really like the show,” says six-year-old Naomi.

She came with her best friend, Seba, who’s five and has gone to many of Hoot’s shows because she says she likes to “dance to fun music.” Her family even wants Hoot to perform at her upcoming birthday party.

Seba wore a colorful coat that day inspired by one of the songs Hoot often performs, Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors.” Seba and Naomi trail Hoot as she moves around the restaurant. When Hoot twirls, they twirl. When she sings, they shout.

“I love it,” says Naomi’s mom, Tracey Blakeney. “I also think it’s really important to expose our children to all different types of people.”

Another parent in attendance, Sarah McLemore, is Tara Hoot’s neighbor. In addition to wanting to support a “great neighbor,” McLemore, who’s queer, says she wants to expose her kid to an aspect of her culture.

“It’s important for us to be able to have her be a part of that queer culture in a way that is sort of appropriate for her kids,” McLemore says of Hoot.

Drag blossoms in the day with family-friendly events

That’s a relatively new phenomenon. The local drag scene used to be exclusive to gay nightlife, according to drag queen Shi-Queeta Lee, who’s performed in D.C. and elsewhere since 1999. She describes her performances as more subtle compared to story hour drag, which can be a bit loony to hold children’s attention. She doesn’t do story hours, but instead typically impersonates celebrities like Tina Turner or Diana Ross.

“Drag life used to be mostly nightlife because it was hidden. It was very taboo,” says Lee. “Now, today, we are on television. We are on Broadway. We in movies, motion pictures.”

Lee could not overstate how much drag has changed over the last three decades, something she attributes largely to RuPaul’s Drag Race. In 2016, the Obama administration invited Lee to perform at the White House, making her the first drag queen to do so.

When she first started out, she recalls, she didn’t leave her house in drag, instead getting ready at the clubs, usually the now-shuttered Bachelors Mill or Frat House. She’d also remove her makeup and clothes there too, at the end of a performance, because she didn’t want her neighbors to suspect anything.

“But now I don’t really care,” says Lee. “I put on my clothes and walk out my front door and just be as free as I am.”

Hoot also preps at home because it takes her two hours to get ready. Sometimes, she’ll even walk to her nearby performances in drag. The worst that’ll happen is she gets catcalled, she says. When that happens, she reminds herself that women get unwanted attention like that all the time and she, who presents as a cisgender man most of the time, only has to put up with it while in drag.

“Everybody needs to be brave”

Given that it seems like attitudes toward drag are generally changing for the better, at least locally, neither performer understands the protests against them and others. Lee, for one, says she’s never seen such public outcry until recently.

In March, when Hoot was performing inside Crazy Aunt Helen’s, Lee, who also performs at the restaurant occasionally, confronted one of the regular protesters outside who carried a sign that read “Pride is of the devil.” Lee, who grew up Southern Baptist, recited Bible verses and sang Gospel songs at the protesters. She assured the protesters drag queens will continue to perform at Crazy Aunt Helen’s every week.

Hoot recalls a February story hour, when she and Crazy Aunt Helen’s were expecting crowds of protesters. In the end, Rainbow Defense Coalition, the group of drag story hour defenders who carry the rainbow umbrellas, eclipsed the few protesters that showed up. Hoot ended up reading the crowd one of her story hour books, Marianne Richmond’s “Be Brave Little One” as the snow started to fall.

“It was just so beautiful and peaceful outside and filled with love,” says Hoot. “I wanted to make sure that I took some time to thank and to read that book out to everybody. Because everybody needs to be brave at some point in their life.

This story has been updated to clarify that the group that defends drag story hour at Crazy Aunt Helen’s is named the Rainbow Defense Coalition, which was earlier this year affiliated with the Parasol Patrol.