Neo-Nazi group disrupts drag story hour for children in New Hampshire | US News
A group of masked neo-Nazis disrupted a drag queen story hour in New Hampshire over the weekend, chanting and performing Nazi salutes.
More than a dozen men wearing sunglasses, baseball caps and matching shirts and trousers can be seen shouting outside an LGBT-owned coffee shop in Concord, the US state’s capital in a video viewed millions of times.
The drag story hour, at which drag queens read children’s books to kids, had to be moved upstairs away from the disruption.
State officials say NSC-131, a neo-Nazi group based in New England, had claimed responsibility for the protest. NSC stands for the Nationalist Social Club.
The men chanted “131” and homophobic slurs, according to Juicy Garland, a drag performer who was at the event and posted the video on social media.
“This isn’t something strange and unique onto itself,” Garland, 37, said. “Fascism and dangerous extremity on the right are something that has been here for a long time.”
One person was seen banging on the window as others shouted slurs. Pic: Twitter/Juicy Garland
It follows an escalating series of threats and attacks against America’s LGBT+ community in recent months.
The coffee shop’s owner, Emmett Soldati, said the shop hosted drag story hour events for the past decade.
While there have been demonstrations before, they have increased in size and severity over the past 12 months, Soldati said.
“This kind of response is very new,” Soldati said. “There appears to tactically be a shift, even if six years ago people did have a problem with what we did.”
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Since June 2022, there has been an average of 39 anti-LGBT+ protests in the US each month, according to a recent report by the Crowd Counting Consortium, a research group that tracks the size of political protests.
In comparison, the group recorded just three protests per month from January 2017 through May 2022.
“The reason why we’re seeing this here in this way in Concord and in other places around the US is because these people feel like they have permission to be violent and aggressive and loud,” Garland said, citing a recent legislative campaign to limit some drag performances.
