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Photos by McKenna Ferguson and Hannah Beckwith
Strobe lights, gender inclusivity and Britney Spears. That was just a small part of what was featured at “DRAGged Through the Decades.”
Hundreds of students and community members gathered in the Lory Student Center North Ballroom Sunday night for the drag show put on by SOGLBT at Colorado State University.
Drag queens from around Colorado performed with drag kings, fellow queens and individuals who chose to gender bend.
“It doesn’t matter how you identify, it is just a good time,” said Haley Wilson, a senior biology and psychology major, who performed as a drag king at the show. “It’s a fun part of the culture that we have.”
Audience participation and interaction was encouraged. Money was thrown onstage at the performers, and collected as donations for Northern Colorado AIDS Project (NCAP), a Fort Collins based organization that supports individuals living with HIV and AIDS.
Altogether, this event raised $1,931.
This was the first drag show Myk’l Malaika, a junior poetry major from Kenya, has attended. According to him, the gender hierarchy in Africa is much more unbalanced than it is in America, and holding these kinds of events shows how progressive America is as a country.
“The drag show shows we are going forward as a society,” Malaika said.
The drag show at CSU has been going on for eight years, the first show taking place in the Ramskeller with a small audience, according to Daniel Wakefield, one of the show’s directors.
“Now we are putting on two shows a year with about 1,000 people in attendance,” Wakefield, a junior journalism major, said. “I am just proud of the amount of people who showed up on a Sunday night.”
Jessica L’Whor is a drag queen and a student at CSU, but does not disclose her real name. She co-directed and performed in the show.
“I think there is a misunderstanding that drag is gay men in dresses, and it is really a spectrum of anybody regardless of sexual orientation, dressing up to represent another gender,” L’Whor said. “And gender itself is a spectrum, so looking at it being androgynous, this mash-up of male and female attributes and this hyper-feminine, hyper-masculine thing is something that people need to be exposed to, so that they understand that we are not in a binary society.”
Collegian A&E Writer Zara DeGroot can be reached at entertainment@collegian.com or on Twitter @zar_degroot.
