Teatotaller’s drag story hour had been going off without a hitch for the last few months, manager Liam Magan tells Teen Vogue. The New Hampshire café and bakery has hosted drag shows and story hours for a decade, first in Somersworth, then in Concord, the state capital, after moving locations. Since Trump's presidency, however, the hosts have had to be much more careful. In November, the story hour was targeted by the Proud Boys, who were met by an insistent crowd of counterprotesters showing support for Teatotaller. Other incidents, says Magan, had been small and manageable since then.
So when only a few guests showed up before story hour's start time on Father’s Day, Magan shrugged, assuming it would be an uneventful, slow day — until he looked out the shop windows and saw “25, 30” people dressed in black, banging on the windows as they passed. Photos from that day show the group held a big banner that read “Defend White Communities” with an LGBTQ+ pride flag, Black fist, and Antifa flag all crossed out underneath.
The internet soon found out about the incident after a video from story hour host Juicy Garland went viral on Twitter. “We've got some verified Nazis today! Golly, I didn't order those,” Garland wrote.
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“We work closely with the peacekeepers in New Hampshire to always have them on hand,” Magan explains, but because of a miscommunication, the peacekeepers hadn’t yet arrived when the neo-Nazi group began to occupy the space outside Teatotaller. “Usually, we go for a more casual approach — they're not marked, they're just here in case things escalate, so the kids aren't like, 'Why is everyone wearing vests, and what's going on?'” Magan says a few peacekeepers came five minutes after he called.
“I really don't know how many people might have been on their way to come to story hour and turned around upon seeing the [neo-Nazis] because it was right as people normally would be coming down,” Magan says. “They were chanting [‘off our streets’] and banging on the windows.”
At that point Magan moved the host and small group of attendees, which he estimates was 10 or 12 people, to Teatotaller’s upstairs area. “I was like, I don't really want all the kids coming around that,” Magan recalls.
After disengaging, the neo-Nazi group eventually left Teatotaller without further incident. “They want a reason to come beat the crap out of you,” says Magan of why he reminded everyone to keep their distance.
He continues, “All in all, everything went off as planned. And we're already planning our next story hour,” a sentiment echoed by host Juicy Garland and Teatotaller owner Emmett Soldati. But obviously, the incident wasn’t a one-off — and it only remained as calm as it did thanks in part to Magan and Juicy’s level heads and quick thinking.
“I hate that everyone's like, ‘They were protesting.’ They were terrorizing,” says Magan, who offers a reminder of the years of drag-related programming at Teatotaller that went on without incident. This level of antagonism, he says, has emerged in roughly the last seven months. “A decade ago, this wasn’t the case,” Magan notes. But extremists now “feel more emboldened to come out and do it — even though they have to cover their faces.”
Footage from what happened at Teatotaller's shocked the internet, but what happened that day is just one in an avalanche of similar stories. A year ago this month, Teen Vogue’s Fortesa Latifi reported on a Bay Area drag queen whose story hour was similarly targeted by the Proud Boys. In the last year, the targeting of drag performances has ratcheted up, including state restrictions in places like Tennessee. (Singer Hayley Kiyoko said she was recently told by police she couldn’t bring drag artists onstage in Tennessee — she brought them on anyway.)
Magan suspects this increase has more to do with ignorance and fear of the unknown than anything else. “For anyone who doesn’t know or understand what’s happening at a drag show or drag story hour that’s all-ages friendly, just come and check one out. It's not the big, scary thing that people are trying to make it out to be,” he tells Teen Vogue. “People are like, 'Oh, my gosh, they're gonna, like, striptease in front of the children!' and she's literally sitting down the whole time reading books.”
Juicy Garland posted to her Instagram after the incident went viral, describing the hours of effort she puts into selecting children’s books at libraries and creating goodie bags for participants. “I do story hour because, for a long time, I wanted to teach,” Garland wrote. “I'm a glorified party clown tricking kids into an extra school class for an hour on the weekend because I'm a nerd who loves teaching. The most nefarious thing I do at this event is trick kids into having fun while learning something intangible.”
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