Philly kicks off LGBTQ Pride Month by setting a Guinness world record for largest drag story time

How do you set a Guinness world record for something new? First, you have to convince Guinness it’s a record worth recording.

“It’s quite a long process. We’ve been working on it for about eight months,” said Neil Frauenglass, chief marketing officer of the tourism agency Visit Philadelphia. “When we suggested drag story time, we had a lot of back and forth about whether it should be the largest story time, rather than qualify it with drag.”

Eventually, Guinness came around, and on Saturday morning, Philadelphia set the record for the largest drag queen story time, with 263 people attending an event at the National Constitution Center organized by the Philadelphia Gay News.

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Frauenglass said he won over Guinness by articulating why story time with drag queens is a unique cultural phenomenon.

“A drag story time is different from any other type of story time, from the books that they read to the entertainment factor to the education for these kids beyond what the stories are saying,” he said.

For Mark Segal, longtime LGBTQ activist and editor of Philadelphia Gay News, setting the record on the first day of Pride Month was an important statement at a time when such states as Texas and Montana are trying to ban drag story hours.

“We’re being visible. In a world that is trying to close us down, we’re refusing to be in our closet,” Segal said. “Why shut down something that’s never created any problems? It’s just a way to try to make people invisible again.”

But getting the green light from Guinness was just the first step. Guinness tracks about 65,000 world records, and it sets standards for newly created ones, said Michael Empric, a New York-based Guinness adjudicator who oversaw Saturday’s event.

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“We want it to be challenging and significant, so in this case based on prior similar records, we set the minimum at 250,” he said, “and today they ended up with 263, so it was very close.”

Five drag artists performed at the event, including Brittany Lynn, who read Hello, Philadelphia! by Martha Day Zschock, and Miss Aurora, who read Twas the Night Before Pride by Joanna McClintick. It was critical that the families and supporters who gathered at the Constitution Center stayed put throughout the program.

“Everybody needs to stay for at least 10 minutes, so that’s why people were not allowed to go to the bathroom,” Empric said. “I had a couple who said they had to go to a wedding, and [the organizers] said, ‘Can you stay for 2½ more minutes?’ because they needed those numbers.”

Empric said he is a member of the LGBTQ community — but he wasn’t going to let that interfere with his professional duties.

“As an adjudicator, you have to be able to separate yourself from the event because you need to be objective,” he said. “So while I was certainly pulling for them, in the end I was fully prepared to go on stage and say, ‘You had 248 people. This is not successful.’ And that’s part of the job.”