Geoff Knell, a lone activist, took matters into his own hands when he heard Drag Queen Story Hour had come to his town.
Armed with facts about DQSH, Knell was relentless in getting local official to hear what he had to say. Putting the media spin aside, he exposed what the story hours really were.
Between November 2019 and January 2020 Knell appeared before the Churchill County Commissioners, the Fallon City Council, the School Board, and even the Youth Board meetings.
“Most public officials and candidates didn’t want to talk about it,” reports MassResistance, the nationwide pro-family organization.
“They didn’t want to get involved. Some even supported ‘Drag Queens’ in libraries. Geoff would push hard anyway, and he did not mince words. That usually irritated them considerably, but Geoff didn’t care. They needed to do their job and protect the public, he told them…”
Knell says that privately, officials agreed with him but couldn’t say so publicly because it wasn’t politically correct.
Eventually he got an open letter about the danger posed by DQSH published in Reno’s Nevada Appeal newspaper. It was his public testimony from the previous week before the Churchill County Commission. It got a lot of people’s attention.
Officially, the county has not scrapped the plans for DQSH, but officials told Knell privately that they got the message. One county commissioner told Knell, for example, that the county library director, which they described as a “big liberal,” said they would “absolutely not” have a DQSH because “it’s not a good fit for here.”