Library Grooming (It's not just Drag Queen Story Hour)

The beautiful and entertaining YooToober Shoe0nHead, in the context of the Balenciaga business, adds another entry to her long-running rear-guard, heroic, and ultimately doomed effort to police the boundaries of Alphabetitude from the "P"s. You know who you are.

Shoe's contention that thus extending the Alphabet represents an inauthentic infiltration requires a constrained knowledge of history (which should be forgiven; is she even old enough to drink), even the history during my own lifetime. In her autobiography The Last Closet, Moira Greyland gives chapter-and-verse of how our post-1970s characterization of modal LGBTQ behavior as being between adult peers ignores how the sexualization of children was always part of its agenda. It may have been expedient to suppress this history during the push for gay marriage, but we are watching the withdrawal of that suppression in real time.

The other night, it idly occurred to me that while I had seen many references to it, at the time and over the years, I had never seen the 1985 Michael J. Fox movie Teen Wolf. So I went looking for it on Kanopy. Kanopy is a movie streaming service usually made available for free through local public libraries. (Full disclosure: I subscribe to exactly none of the paid movie streaming services and have not resubscribed to cable).

As it happens, Kanopy doesn't currently stream Teen Wolf, but it's algorithm was happy to offer me alternatives:

If it's not obvious from their cover art, every single one of these movies is LGBTQ-themed. Let that sink in for a second. The movie recommendation algorithm of a movie streaming service offered, without any age filtering, through your public library, upon receiving a request for Teen Wolf, decides to ignore the "wolf" part of the request and interpret "teen" to mean that the viewer must want to watch half-naked young boys sexually cavort with each other in thinly-veiled p***-bait. So, yes, your children are being groomed, and by no less than taxpayer-funded organs of culture.

To be fair, our library also offers a second streaming service, Hoopla, that apparently doesn't have this problem:

Granted, I didn't search read the description for every movie, but the cover art suggests the first page of results leans heavily into wolfishness, while I could only find one LGBTQ-themed recommendation on the second page. So, Hoopla is less gay.