A Reading with Royalty event at Calgary’s Signal Hill Library resulted in a pair of arrests, police confirmed Wednesday.
The Calgary Police Service said they took an adult female protester into custody after she pulled the fire alarm. An adult male was arrested for breaching bail conditions, police said. Both arrests happened at around 2 p.m.
Charges are pending under the Criminal Code and police said no charges on Wednesday were under the city’s new Safe and Inclusive Entry Bylaw, passed on Tuesday.
Videos on social media appeared to show Derek Reimer being arrested by police.
On Feb. 25, 36-year-old Reimer was arrested at another Reading with Royalty event at the Seton Library, after police received reports that several people had aggressively entered a library classroom, shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs at the children and parents in attendance.
Reimer received a total of eight charges in a hate-motivated crime, Calgary police and bylaw officers said at the time.
On Tuesday outside city hall, Reimer told Global News he was released from police custody on bail conditions of not being within 200 metres of an LGBTQ2 event and was prohibited from any contact with the LGBTQ2 community.
The city’s new bylaw puts a 100-metre gap between any specified protest — protests that object to or disapprove of any race, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, disability, age, place of origin, marital or family status, sexual orientation or income source — and entrances to a public library, city rec centre or pool.
City council also added the word “intimidation” to the definition of harassment in the Public Behaviour Bylaw on Tuesday.
Calgary Public Libraries have been hosting Reading with Royalty events in partnership with Calgary Pride for the past five years. The March 4 event at Southwood Library was postponed for safety reasons.
Libraries across Canada — including Moncton, Halifax and Coquitlam, B.C. — have faced similar protests this year.
There have also been anti-drag protests outside the Tate Britain art gallery in London, as well as several bookstores and libraries in the United States.
Across the United States, conservative activists and politicians have complained that drag contributes to the “sexualization” or “grooming” of children.
The efforts seek to smother popular “drag story hours,” at which drag queens read to kids.
“We haven’t seen this kind of direct rhetoric in probably 20 or 30 years. And so it’s come back full circle and it’s come back more aggressive and more violent than ever,” Kristopher Wells, Canada Research Chair for the public understanding of sexual and gender minority youth and associate professor at MacEwan University in Edmonton, previously told Global News.
“This is not just about trying to silence individuals, but many feel it’s about trying to eradicate entire communities.”
— with files from The Canadian Press
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