By Maybeline Tucker, AsAmNews Intern
In 2022, Proud Boys stormed a Drag Story Hour event at which Kyle Casey Chu, as her drag persona Panda Dulce, was the target of their attack. The extremists shouted at her “Who brought the tranny,” and accused her of grooming and raping children.
After the hate incident, media attention quickly surrounded her, flooding her with probing questions about a triggering experience, making her relive her trauma by constantly having to repeat in “excruciating detail the damage it caused.”
Yet in the face of threats and bigotry Chu uses art as a medium to stand up to hate and put her authentic self in the media. This year, her short film After What Happened at the Library came out, exploring how public trauma is handled in the age of social media with a hope of drawing attention to the personal reality of a victim.
Chu/Panda Dulce, is a fourth generation Chinese American and identifies as queer and trans femme. She is a San Franciscan born writer, filmmaker and a founding queen of Drag Story Hour, an organization of queens reading books to kids in libraries. Her storytelling revolves around queer, Asian Americans, drag performers, punk rockers, musicians and artists, people who “lovingly helped” Chu form her voice and vision as an artist.
She shortly followed up the film with a more light-hearted read, debuting a children’s novel called The Queen Bees of Tybee County, a story of a young basketball star discovering his queer self through Southern pageants.
When Chu was in seventh grade, she wrote a comic book, to which a classmate told her, “I’m really surprised you have that in you,” a comment that stuck with Chu long after. It made her question the preconceptions of who she was expected to be and learn to break away from expectations and self-defining by putting herself and her work out into the world.
The novel centers around Derrick Chan, someone who learns to embrace his femininity and love for drag, while also embracing his love for sports. He finds himself through multiple outlets, without being stuck within black and white preconceptions that Chu faced growing up holding him back.
“I’m of the mind that our identities and our experiences can be placed on a spectrum or a scale, as opposed to on and off like a switch,” Chu said. “And that was that type of thinking that I wish I were introduced to earlier on. I think I would have more easily come to terms with who I am and to a place of peace and acceptance with that.”
She chose to place Derrick’s story in smalltown Georgia, spending time in pageants and queer communities to research. She wanted to break away from the narrative that coming out queer in a small town must be miserable and makes people want to claw their way out.
“While that may be true for many people, I know a lot of small town queers and trans people who do not want to leave and who fiercely identify with and refuse to be dislocated from where they grew up,” Chu said. “And so I wanted to shed some light on that, and also some light on the fact that, you know, integrating the contradictions and different aspects of yourself and finding yourself and your place in the world doesn’t necessarily have to involve moving to a big city.”
At one pageant Chu attended, the love and joy present proved the importance of embracing a presence and celebrating a person regardless of titles. The droves of enthusiasm she saw was something unique to the South, people cheering their person on, bursting into song and clapping when they debuted their formal looks.
“From a lot of the people I spoke to, they were supremely happy when they were and they wanted to stay there. And it kind of brings me full circle to this concept that home and belonging is about the people you surround yourself with, and that can be anywhere,” Chu said.
In a time where queer communities, especially trans people are constant bearers of attacks by the Trump Administrations, expressions of joy and love are important tools to combat it, she explained.
“Queer and trans joy as resistance is true because it is only contrasted against the stark black and white,” she said. “It’s only in stark contrast to fascist black and white that we can embrace the beautiful complexity of what life has to offer us in joy and in play and in reveling in how we’re perfect as we are.”
She described how autocratic and fascist regimes have a “subtractive effect,” pushing an idea that there is only one way to exist and anything that falls outside this paradigm is dangerous.
“It is precisely the chorus of voices proclaiming different stories and different joys and different modes of silliness that illustrate, in plain terms, how ridiculous this outlook is,” Chu said.
Jonathan Hamilt, a founding queen of New York’s Drag Story Hour, said Chu “really does light up rooms with her persona.” He recalled a time where, at a conference, he pushed her around on a hotel luggage cart in full drag while handing out Drag Story Hour stickers and flyers for her novel.
“Everybody was just aghast and just so delighted,” he said. “And it was just really fun for everyone to see that much joy at this conference.”
He described Chu as “hilarious, unexpected and sharp as a whip,” quick to respond and build a rapport with anyone.
“She’s a star,” Hamilt said.
Joy remains at the core of Drag Story Hour and in the hearts of all the participants, not only allowing, but welcoming people to be fun and silly and different. The organization has been around for ten years and events are continuously sold out, with families from near and far with their kids to support them.
“Kids are sponges. They learn and absorb anything and everything that you see. Hatred isn’t innate, neither is racism or bigotry or prejudice. Kids learn that. Kids learn a lot of things from who they play with, how adults treat each other, and kids can identify differences really early on,” Hamilt said. “And I think it’s really important to combat that and share stories and books and literature that show a variety of different characters and situations.”
The future for Chu is full of creative projects. While her short film is in the festival circuit right now, she is releasing a picture book about Jose Saria, a founder of an organization of drag performers who raise money for local and LGBTQ causes. Next, she is working on the companion novel for The Queen Bees of Tybee County, about Derrick’s hunt for a missing drag queen.
“We deserve to influence future generations with the stories that we have and so I think all it’s doing is showing what is possible,” Chu said.
(An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the year the Drag Story Hour incident happened)
