Drag queen for a day, Stockholm's deputy mayor castigates 'intolerance'

June 18, 2023

Summer dress, Marilyn-style blonde hair and scarlet lipstick: the deputy mayor of Stockholm turned into a drag queen for a meeting with children as part of a campaign launched this week against ” intolerance and populism”.

Member of the Liberal Party (center right), Jan Jönsson, 45, explained to AFP on Thursday that he initiated this campaign after criticism by the Democrats of Sweden (far right) against drag queens who read for the children in libraries or guiding visits to the Royal Drama Theater in Stockholm.

Animations of this type have been held in the country since 2017.

“I make myself a kind of canvas for drag artists (..) to be able to say that everyone should be free to express themselves,” he said.

“Some political parties try to restrict the freedoms of others and especially drag queens. With this stance, I hope others can say Ok, enough is enough. Sweden must be a free country,” he said. -he adds.

In a televised debate in early May, the leader of Sweden’s Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, said it was “insane” that taxpayers’ money was being spent on children’s reading sessions by drag queens.

In particular, he attacked an artist known as “Shameless Whinehore” (“Bitch drunk without shame”) who renamed herself “Miss Shameless” (“Mademoiselle without embarrassment”) during the readings.

In a video clip on Twitter, Jan Jönsson appears in dapper drag, under a puffy blond wig, false eyelashes, a light blue dress with flowers and stiletto heels.

On a chair, surrounded by children seated on the ground, he reads a passage from “Les Frères Coeur-de-Lion”, a novel by the famous Swedish children’s author Astrid Lindgren, which invites you to stand up straight in your boots on behalf of his ideas, even in the face of danger.

“Stories are not dangerous for children. Neither are drag queens. But populism and intolerance are dangerous for children and for adults,” he says to the camera.

Jan Jönsson has in the past been the face of a Liberal Party campaign against the scourge of gang crime in Sweden: the rather slender leader in a floral shirt and blue blazer called “the number one enemy of gangs”.