By John Plue
Fitchburg State University’s, Gay-Straight Alliance, held their fourteenth annual drag show on Mar. 28, 2019. The event is used to raise money for the LGBTQ+ scholarship fund, where all proceeds would go towards. In the fourteen years of doing the show, they had raised between $25,000 and $30,000. Jason Henriksen, a senior and also president of the Gay-Straight Alliance said the main reason of the drag show is “to celebrate and bring visibility to the LGBTQ+ community on campus.”
The night consisted of the drag show, with eight drag queens performing, a drag race which was between six male students/staff members, as well as other small ways to get students involved with the show.
The eight drag queens of the night were Destiny, Roxy Brooks, G Licious G, Raquel Blake who was also the host, Lady Sabrina, Vita Summers, Miss Kris, and Fantasia.
Each performance was unique. Throughout the night, all the queens were lip-syncing or singing on their own and interacted with the crowd. Some of the interaction with the crowd was a little on the adult-entertainment side, with lap dances, pulling clothes off, and one queen even putting crowd members onto the table and lifting their legs into the air while she sang. It was all well received with the crowd cheering and laughing each time.
Out of all the drag queens, two people said that Destiny was their favorite. Suzanne Karioki, a senior at Fitchburg State, said, “The first time they brought her [Destiny] they loved her. Everyone went crazy when she came on stage.”
The drag queens, however, were not the only performers of the night. The drag race had six males going against each other in raising money. They were Eddie Brown, Peter Jack, Joe Flanagan, Nathan Emery, Parker Gates, and Jem Alicea Morales. During the week before the drag show people had the chance to put money in respective jars for each contestant. This continued until the night of the show. When everything was counted the top four men who raised the most money were all pulled on stage to be dressed in drag by the drag queens.
Brown, Jack, Flanagan, and Emery were the four who raised the most money for the evening. They were taken backstage and given to the drag queens, letting them dress them up like dolls. Blake said before sending them backstage, “these handsome gentlemen will just be more handsome women.”
They came back out one by one about 45 minutes later. Each contestant put on a small show, walking down the stage into the crowd before going back up. In the end, it was a split decision.
Jack had won and it was clear he was going to win when, towards the end of his strut, he dropped into the splits. When he hit the ground, the crowd jumped up and started cheering as loudly as they could. Blake called him back out onto the stage after Jack had run off and told him to do the splits again. She took off her wig and tossed it at him when he did it again.
The night was full of fun and different kinds of performances. The importance of the show is to raise money for the scholarship, but it also stands for something else. “I think it really exposes them [students] to something that they normally wouldn’t go out to. Especially someone who came from a smaller community. It’s a way for outside of the community to see some of the really amazing things we can do. Drag has a long history that people don’t really realize” said Karioki.
Two $25 bookstore gift cards were given to whoever could guess the amount of cookies that were in a jar. In addition, send a Snapchat photo, using the filter made for the night to the Gay-Straight Alliance Snapchat.
GSA’s next event will be “Stop the Hate Week,” which begins Apr. 8, 2019, and ends Apr. 12, 2019.
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GSA Hosts Fourteenth Annual Drag Show
April 7, 2019
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