Drag queens have become as common as football and protesters on American college campuses, but they face resistance in red states like Oklahoma.
The Oklahoma Public Affairs Council is on a mission to expose drag spending at the University of Oklahoma, which last week revealed a contract showing drag artist Plasma received $11,500 for a show in October at McCasland Field House during Homecoming Week.
The right-wing think tank previously revealed that the university spent at least $56,000 on three separate drag events in 2023, including $18,000 for a performance by Yvie Oddly, who won season 11 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
“Taxpayers in this red state need to know what their blue universities are doing, especially when the ‘mainstream’ media won’t tell them,” Brandon Dutcher, the council’s senior vice president for public affairs, told the Washington Times .
The university hasn’t exactly kept its annual Crimson & Queens drag show a secret. The OU website boasts that the event has “created a lasting legacy that will continue to create an affirming and welcoming environment for the campus community.”
“Crimson & Queens is one of OU’s most popular events and has quickly become one of the largest collegiate drag shows in the United States, with over 4,500 people attending over the past 7 years” , indicates a page dedicated to Crimson & Queens on the site. OU Student Life Website.
OU is hardly an outlier.
It would be difficult to find a major American university in 2025 that doesn’t host a drag-related event, spurred by the popularity of the long-running series RuPaul and the rise of LGBTQ activism on campus.
Drag queens at the university level have yet to spark the same level of outrage as those in primary and secondary schools or story times in children’s libraries, given that the target audience is over 18s.
At the same time, their rapid rise has raised the question of whether academia’s most important goal is to welcome male performers known for their bawdy humor, sexualized feminine outfits, and exaggerated female physical features.
But at least one university said no.
West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler has canceled a student-sponsored drag show in 2023, calling such performances “ridiculous, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.”
The student group Spectrum WT slapped him with a First Amendment lawsuit, but a district court judge ruled in favor of Mr. Wendler. The case was argued in April before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and is awaiting a decision.
No such lawsuit is on the horizon at the University of Oklahoma, which has fiercely defended the free speech rights of the student group sponsoring Crimson & Queens, a pun on the colors purple and cream of the school’s sports teams.
“This event is one of many hosted by our more than 500 student groups, each determining how to allocate their funds to activities that reflect their interests,” the university told the Washington Times.
“As a university, we respect and defend the constitutional rights of our students, including their rights to free speech and expression, and we cannot – and do not – interfere with these rights,” a the school said.
The 2024 contract for Plasma’s performance is between the University of Oklahoma Board of Trustees and the Warner Talent Agency, but the contract also states that the Queer Student Association will “use its funds to pay for this event.”
“It is also important to clarify that events like this are not publicly funded,” the university said. “Instead, this has been funded by tuition fees, which are intended for student activities and managed independently by student organizations. »
However, the Council said it was no better.
“Mandatory tuition paid for events regardless of whether students support drag shows,” the group said.
The OU website lists other Crimson & Queens sponsors, including the Student Government Association; the OU Department of Women and Gender Studies; the OU Weitzenhoffer School of Musical Theater; the OU LGBTQ Alumni Association and soft drink giant Coca-Cola.
“We remain committed to protecting the constitutional rights of our students and will not compromise those rights,” the university said.
Mr. Dutcher was skeptical, saying the university’s defense of free speech was selective.
He cited a 2015 case in which two fraternity members were expelled for a racist chant. In 2019, a law professor lost two administrative positions over a book on Catholicism expressing what the student newspaper called “homophobic and sexist views.”
“While OU’s stated commitment to constitutional rights is laudable, curiously, it does not extend to every OU student or faculty,” Dutcher said. “Regardless, the journalism arm of OCPA will continue to report on these things. »
College drag shows are so popular that at least one company, Drag Queen Entertainment, markets “entertainment and education formats” specifically to colleges, including a two-hour presentation called Drag 101.
In July, San Francisco’s first “drag laureate,” D’Arcy Drollinger, performed and spoke at a workshop on “allyship, inclusion, and support for the LGBTQ+ community.” at the University of California, San Francisco, as Campus Reform reported.
Some colleges even have drag queens on staff. Harris Kornstein, whose drag name is Lil Miss Hot Mess, is on leave from his job as an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, while the faculty at Tufts University in Massachusetts includes associate professor Kareem Khubchandani , also known as LaWhore Vagistan.
washingtontimes