Several men dressed in colors associated with the extremist far-right group Proud Boys stormed a Drag Queen Story Hour event in California’s Bay Area on Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Drag queen Panda Dulce said she was reading to a group of children at a library in San Lorenzo, California, when a group of men walked in, and began shouting anti-LGBTQ+ slurs.
“Proud Boys marched in, single file, with the cameras blazing pointed at me,” Dulce said. “And one of them had a shirt in the black and yellow Proud Boys colors with an AK-47 on the front and the message ‘Kill your local pedophile.’”
Dulce said members of the group used a transphobic slur to refer to her.
“They started calling me a groomer and a pedophile and talking about how sexualized I was,” she told the Times. “They were freaking out the children. The children buried their faces into their parents’ chests, and they could not comprehend what was going on.”
Sheriff’s deputies escorted the men from the library, SFGATE reports, and Dulce resumed the reading.
The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said it’s investigating the event as a hate crime and as an act of “annoying and harassing of children,” a misdemeanor in California punishable by a fine or jail sentence.
Dulce said she’s still shaken by the incident.
“There’s a part of me that’s still in that room,” she told the Times. “There’s a part of me I’m never going to get back. I don’t think after getting into that fight-flight-freeze response I’ve ever left it.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
