By JEREMY DU RIVAGE 

Saturday night at 7-7:30 the doors opened for the 20th consecutive Beloit College student hosted drag show. Organized by LV; Latinx Voice, SAGA; Sexuiltaty And Gender Alliance along with BSY; Black Student Union. The show began at 8pm and was staffed by various queens from the area as well as student performers. The lineup included HCTR Brooklyn, Miranda Kherr, Apollo Venom Summers, Mahogany, Raiya and Venus all of them incredibly talented performers putting their own unique spin on the roaring 20s theme of the night. I don’t have a particular eye for fashion nor do I think a play by play of the night would do anyone any good to read as the drag show is an experience not easily captured in words. Instead I’ll share my thoughts from throughout the night’s events, watching a drag show is something any truly open minded individual should do at least once. Words can’t articulate the levels of creative freedom and expression that it takes to do drag and yet so many people are afraid, or turned off or just uninterested in drag, a lot of people don’t know and some people just don’t want to experience the magic you can feel in one of these shows. Anyone who’s taken a CRIS class on this campus has been talked to over and over again about delinking from the system but those words take on physical form when drag is on the table. It is a raw form of human expression like music, it is the act of removing yourself from the boxes our society has placed on you. The drag show is a place where people have always been told they are too much can be just enough, it is a gathering space for people who have on where else to gather. To be anti-drag is to be a person who is anti-self expression. It is to climb willingly into a cage your society has made for you and lock yourself inside of it. In simpler terms; if you didn’t go you seriously missed out! Like seriously! We are living in a society that is constantly trying to force conformity on the people living in it but you don’t need to be just like everyone else to be like, to be loved, to enjoy what life has to offer. The current administration and current political climate is anti-drag, they are against us pushing the boundaries established by people who were only ever trying to protect their own self interests. The act of doing drag in our current world is not just an act of expression but an act of defiance against something much bigger and scarier than ourselves. The same goes for the act of visiting a drag show, patroning something that has been deemed abnormal by those in power is resistance against oppression. Making these spaces on campus where resistance can happen and the beauty of unhindered creative human expression can flow free like a river, is more important now than ever. We have to be the change we want to see in our community.

_{Featured image: Jeremy Du Rivage’27}