Two Democrats locked in a New York congressional primary are racing to promise federal money for a drag queen reading program aimed at schoolchildren, a program that has already cost city and state taxpayers roughly $700,000 and drawn years of public backlash from parents who never asked for it.
Rep. Dan Goldman, the incumbent seeking a third term, and former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander both told an LGBT political club they would direct federal funds to Drag Story Hour programming if given the chance. The New York Post reported their statements on Tuesday, drawing from a questionnaire issued by the Jim Owles LGBT Liberal Democratic Club and a spokesman's statement from the Lander campaign.
The pledges arrived at a moment when the national Democratic Party is already struggling to persuade swing-district voters it shares their priorities on kitchen-table issues. Instead, two of its New York candidates chose to compete over who could more eagerly funnel taxpayer money to drag performers reading gender-themed books to children in public schools and libraries.
Goldman's answer came in writing, on a questionnaire from the Jim Owles club. He did not hedge:
"Unfortunately, the Majority does not allow funding from Members of Congress to support LGBTQIA+ programming. However, once we take back the House, I certainly cannot wait to fund programs like Drag Story Hours and other programs."
Read that again. A sitting member of Congress described the current House majority's refusal to fund drag programming for children as a problem he intends to fix. Not a policy he would consider. Not a proposal he would study. He "certainly cannot wait."
Lander's camp matched the enthusiasm. A spokesman told the New York Post that the former comptroller was looking forward to "funding affordable housing, health care, child care, USAID, libraries, and lots of arts and culture programs, most certainly including Drag Story Hour."
Notice the framing. Drag Story Hour gets tucked between health care and libraries, as though reading gender-identity books to kindergartners in drag is as routine as funding a community clinic. That packaging is deliberate.
The program in question, now called Drag Artists for Expression NYC, was founded in 2018 under the name Drag Queen Story Hour NYC. It partners with public and private schools and public libraries across New York to bring drag performers into rooms full of children.
City and state taxpayers have spent approximately $700,000 on the program. Of that, $207,000 went directly to the organization since its founding. The money flowed without much public debate, and, in some cases documented in 2022 reporting, without parental knowledge or consent.
The content is not a mystery. One Drag Story Hour video features a reading of a book in Spanish about a character "who comes out as a trans boy after everyone thinks he was born a girl." Another book commonly used in the program, The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish, presents gender-fluidity themes to young children in a picture-book format.
Parents who object to this material being presented to their kids in school settings are not fringe activists. They are people who expect to have a say in what their children are taught, a principle that used to be uncontroversial in American public life.
The Drag Story Hour program has generated friction at every level of New York government for years. In 2022, New York City public schools were spending taxpayer money on drag queen performances for children, often without notifying parents. That same year, Mayor Eric Adams drew criticism for praising "drag storytellers" and their supposed contribution to the school system.
In 2023, New York Attorney General Letitia James planned to hold her own drag story hour event that welcomed children. And in 2025, a drag queen show organized for a children's advocacy group in New York was scrapped after community members found out and complained loudly enough to shut it down.
Each incident followed the same arc: officials or institutions pushed drag programming into spaces occupied by children, parents pushed back, and the political class treated parental objections as an inconvenience rather than a signal. The late Barney Frank spent his final days warning Democrats that exactly this kind of tone-deafness was costing the party credibility with ordinary voters.
Goldman and Lander are not listening. They are doubling down, and promising to use federal dollars to do it.
The Jim Owles LGBT Liberal Democratic Club questionnaire tells you who Goldman and Lander are trying to impress. This is a primary race, and both candidates are courting the activist base that dominates low-turnout Democratic primaries in deep-blue New York districts. The incentive structure is clear: move left, promise more, worry about the general electorate later.
That calculus has consequences beyond one House race. When Democratic candidates treat federal funding for children's drag programming as a campaign selling point, they hand Republicans a ready-made argument about misplaced priorities. They also confirm what many voters already suspect: that the party's leadership class is more responsive to ideological interest groups than to the parents and taxpayers footing the bill.
Frank, who knew something about winning elections in liberal districts, delivered a blunt warning from hospice that the far left was costing Democrats voters. His party's New York candidates seem determined to prove him right.
There is a meaningful difference between a city council earmark and a congressional appropriation. Goldman's statement makes clear he views the current Republican majority's refusal to fund LGBTQ programming as a temporary obstacle. "Once we take back the House," he wrote, the money will flow.
That framing should concern anyone who thinks parental rights and local control still matter. Federal funding comes with federal reach. A program that has already spread through New York's public schools and libraries with $700,000 in city and state money would gain a far larger footprint with congressional backing.
And the accountability gap would widen. Parents who struggled to get answers about how their local tax dollars funded drag performances in their children's schools would face an even more opaque federal funding pipeline.
Meanwhile, the broader Democratic Party continues to struggle with the perception that its leaders prioritize cultural signaling over bread-and-butter governance. Even Gavin Newsom has conceded that Democrats misread voters' economic concerns, then proceeded to pitch a progressive wish list of his own. The pattern repeats.
Neither Goldman nor Lander addressed parental consent. Neither acknowledged the years of community pushback against drag programming for children. Neither explained why federal taxpayers in Ohio, Texas, or Montana should subsidize drag queen readings in New York City schools.
Goldman's questionnaire response did not mention educational outcomes, reading proficiency, or any metric that might justify the spending on its merits. Lander's spokesman bundled Drag Story Hour into a laundry list of progressive priorities, housing, health care, USAID, as though the program's merits were self-evident and required no defense.
That evasion is its own kind of answer. When politicians refuse to engage with the strongest objections to their proposals, they are telling you they know those objections land. They just don't care, because the voters they need in a primary are not the voters raising them.
This is the same dynamic playing out across the Democratic Party, from a Maine Democrat promising to get arrested as a senator to progressive legislators staging theatrical protests over policy losses. The audience is always the activist base. The bill always goes to everyone else.
The 2025 cancellation of a New York drag queen show for a children's group, killed by community complaints, showed that ordinary people can still stop these programs when they find out about them in time. The problem is that they often don't find out until the money has already been spent and the performers have already been in the classroom.
Goldman and Lander want to make that problem worse by adding a federal funding layer. They want to take money from taxpayers across the country and route it to a program that a significant number of parents in its own city have rejected when given the chance to weigh in.
That is not arts funding. It is not literacy programming. It is a cultural project that treats parental objections as obstacles to be routed around rather than concerns to be addressed. And two Democratic candidates for Congress just told voters it is a top priority.
When politicians tell you what they plan to do with your money, believe them.
