Jackboots And Rainbows
The far-right could only mobilize around 200 supporters to protest against a Drag Queen Story Hour that took place in Vienna over the weekend
Servus!
And welcome back. On Sunday, a coalition of far-right groupuscules including Austria’s identitarians, fundamentalist Catholics, and members of the Freedom Party (FPÖ)’s youth organization organized a protest against a Drag Queen Story Hour for children that took place at the Türkis-Rosa-Lila Villa on Vienna’s Linke Wienzeile near the Naschmarkt. Their presence was met by a larger counter-demonstration planned by anti-fascist groups and an alliance of LGBTQ+ organizations.
Both demonstrations took place on the street in front of the Villa, with police erecting a small exclusion zone to separate the two groups. When Vienna hosts the Akademikerball, the annual ball organized by the country’s greater German nationalist fraternities, police cordon off a not-insubstantial part of Vienna to keep anti-fascists out of the way of ball-goers. Local politicians and LGBTQ+ organizations had requested police afford the same level of protection to the parents and children attending the Drag Queen Story Hour; police never offered a convincing explanation for why that wasn’t possible.
APA, the Austrian wire service, estimated that about 100 people attended the far-right demonstration against the Drag Queen Story Hour. The journalist Markus Sulzbacher believes around 200 people showed up; his numbers seem more convincing. However, whether it was 100 or 200, the point is they were unable to fill the space on the street allotted to them by police and were easily outnumbered by counterdemonstrators who, among other things, blasted ABBA and Queen out the windows of the Türkis-Rosa-Lila Villa. Two far-right protestors were charged by police with having violated Austria’s Prohibition Law on National Socialist activity for making the Hitler salute.
Indeed, besides the chaotic and in some sense comical nature of a scene which saw the far-right facing off against drag queens over a storybook reading, one of the most striking things about Sunday’s events was the far-right’s failure to mobilize in larger numbers. It was a far cry from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time during which the far-right’s various strands forged closer ties as they successfully cohered around a common cause and formed the core of a large, street-based protest movement that attracted tens of thousands of supporters on a regular basis and political allies in the guise of the FPÖ.
It would seem, then, as if Drag Queen Story Hour or trans issues more broadly may not prove to be the new galvanizing issue for the extra-parliamentary far-right. After all, this debate—with which American readers will be particularly familiar—has been imported wholesale from the United States, right down to the terminology the Austrian far-right uses like ‘globohomo’ or ‘protecting children’ from ‘premature sexualization’ and their framing of drag queens as child predators. In an Austrian context, the phantom menace of drag queens reading books to children seems very remote and alien.
Where there is potential for growth, perhaps, is if this small, far-right street movement can take advantage of their links both tangible and ideological to the FPÖ and make drag queens or trans people an issue in federal and state legislatures. On Drag Queen Story Hours, the Vienna FPÖ might also find an ally in the local branch of the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) which, the day prior to the event, put out a statement whose language mimicked that of the far-right. The two parties are in opposition in the capital don’t have the numbers to pass legislation, but they do have the capacity to agitate and grant this issue the imprimatur of parliamentary seriousness.
Bis bald!
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Did you get my invitation to book reading in vienna may 16/