The Word Was Recruit in 1977. It Is Groomer Now.

Reform Australia says drag performers are a danger to children. Anita Bryant said it in almost the same words forty-nine years ago. Here's what actually happened to Australian kids because of it.

Told by Paige Turner · 30 August 2026

The claim is that drag performers are a danger to children and that anyone in politics, media or education who's ever put one in front of a kid should be charged with child abuse. That's the post. That's the whole argument.

It's a lie, it's forty-nine years old, and we've got the receipts on both counts.

In 1977 a singer called Anita Bryant ran a campaign in Dade County, Florida, to repeal an ordinance protecting gay people from discrimination. She called it Save Our Children. Its central line, the one that did the work, was that homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. The ordinance was repealed sixty-nine to thirty-one.

Recruit. That was the word. The claim was that we can't make more of ourselves the ordinary way, so we come for yours.

Change one word and you've got the post. Recruit became groomer somewhere around 2022, and indoctrinate is the polite version for people who want the same accusation with a tie on. The grammar hasn't moved in half a century. Neither has the evidence, because there never was any.

So: oh, fuck this. Not the debate — there isn't one, there's a slander with a forty-nine-year paper trail. What I object to is being asked to treat the fifth rerun of Anita Bryant as a fresh question that reasonable people are still weighing up.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED TO AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN

Here's the part that matters, and it isn't hypothetical.

In the six months to May 2023, at least ten LGBTQ+ events across Victoria were cancelled or postponed after being targeted by far-right groups. That's the Guardian's count, published on 16 May 2023.

A drag storytime at Woodleigh School on the Mornington Peninsula was cancelled. An event at Eltham library was moved online after threats to staff safety. The school's deputy principal, Rod Davies, said what happened in plain terms: a systematic and targeted response by right-wing fringe groups led to the involvement of Victoria Police, who advised cancelling to avoid public altercation or disruption, which were among the actions threatened.

Frock Hudson had read at that school the year before. Nothing happened. Nothing was ever alleged to have happened. The event was pulled because of what adults were threatening to do outside it.

Mayors across Victoria held an emergency meeting that week about how to handle aggressive behaviour at council meetings. That's where this ends up: elected officials taking briefings from police and extremism researchers about story time.

So when someone asks what the real-world harm to children is, the answer's on the record and it runs the other way. A few hundred kids in Victoria didn't get read to. Nobody was groomed. Somebody's calendar got cleared by a threat.

THE PART THAT'S NEW

Something did change in Victoria, and the timing's worth sitting with.

There were no laws in that state protecting LGBTQ+ people from vilification in 2023. Race and religion were covered. Sexuality wasn't. The Greens introduced a bill that week; the attorney-general said these things are complex and take time.

They took three more years. The Justice Legislation Amendment (Anti-vilification and Social Cohesion) Act 2025 passed in April 2025, and its civil protections commenced on 15 April 2026 — four months ago. Sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics are now protected characteristics under the Equal Opportunity Act.

The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission publishes a list of examples of what vilification can look like. One of them, verbatim, is publishing claims that a person or group with a protected characteristic is involved in serious crimes without any proof.

I'm not going to tell you that a particular post breaks that law. There are real exceptions for public interest debate, artistic work and fair reporting, and whether any given thing crosses the line is for the Commission or a tribunal, not for me. But the shape of it is now written down in Victorian law, with an example that reads like it was drafted with this exact accusation open on the desk.

For twenty-six years you could say it here with no consequence at all. That stopped in April.

AND THEN THE SMALL TRUE THING

What actually happens at a drag story time is that a person in a very good wig reads a picture book to some four-year-olds, and the four-year-olds are delighted, because a giant glittering adult who's clearly having the time of their life is the funniest thing that's ever walked into a library.

That's it. That's the whole event. It's been running in one form or another since 2015, and the worst thing anyone's ever documented happening at one is a child asking too many questions about the shoes.

The people who keep saying otherwise have had forty-nine years to produce something and have produced nothing, twice, in two countries, under two different words. At some point that stops being a concern about children and starts being a hobby.