By: Santiago Leon Torres
On Oct 30, PRISM, Dominican’s Queer-Straight Alliance club, put on their eighth annual drag show. The show was held in Dominican University’s Lund Auditorium and Dominican alumnus Andre Easton, who performs drag as Rachel Slurrz, MC’d the event.
After eight years of successful shows, the PRISM drag show has cemented itself as a Dominican tradition, but it was not always that way. In 2018, when Easton was still a student, he took the stage for Dominican’s very first drag show, A Thousand Ways to Drag, which he was instrumental in planning and executing.
“Not to toot my own horn, but it was mostly me,” Easton said.
The tradition began when Easton attended a large-scale Midwestern LGBTQ conference.
“I went to a large drag show at a Midwest LGBTQ conference, and when I saw that show at full scale, I was like, ‘We need to bring this to Dominican,’” Easton said. “I was already doing drag at that point, and I started talking to people around campus and planning it.”
As to why drag was so alluring for him, Easton describes the act of performing as a transformation.
“Even from the beginning, it’s always been about the ability to disconnect from everyday life and not have to worry about the mundaneness of adulthood and responsibility.” He said.
He added that putting on makeup, hair, and costumes creates a “glitz and glam” that “feels like an out-of-body experience.”
However, the glitz and glamor comes with a downside.
“With any creative outlet, there’s always a downside,” Easton said. “You put yourself at risk of burnout and of working too hard or pushing yourself to limits you don’t always need to.”
Launching A Thousand Ways to Drag did not come without its challenges. “It was honestly very difficult at first,” Easton said.
“There were concerns about what drag would look like, about Catholic Identity, and about donor reactions. It was difficult for the first couple weeks, but once we got past the rules and expectations they wanted in place, it got easier.”
Despite those challenges, the show was a success. 14 queens performed to a packed out social hall. Easton has returned yearly ever since.
Putting on the show annually requires effort and planning by student leaders in PRISM for months ahead of the event. To accommodate growing interest, student organizers moved the event from the social hall to Lund Auditorium.
“We wanted to take up a little bit more space because we feel like this is a really big production and we wanted it to be a bigger event,” PRISM vice president Emily Gonzalez said.
Although the event was expected to draw in a larger crowd, it was actually much smaller than expected. Andre Easton explains how he deals with small crowds.
“It’s the name of the game. In drag spaces, sometimes you have packed houses and sometimes you have light crowds, but you still have to do the same job because that’s what you’re there to get paid for,” he said. “It’s about how you flip that and still have a great time. Crowd work, pointing things out, making people laugh–it’s honestly like being a comedian..”
Tressa Scanlon, a senior sports management major and former student-athlete who runs Prism’s Instagram account, says joining PRISM was about expanding representation across campus.
“In high school we never really had…an organization that represented the queer community,” Scanlon said. “I also feel like…I’d never heard any or saw any queer representation from student athletes. So, I also wanted to break that stereotype.
For PRISM president Eli Caron, the event is meant to signify a safe, welcoming space for students.
“I very much believe that community is the most important thing you can have…for queer people,” they said. “So if I can help foster a community wherever I am, that’s what I think is most important.
Caron added that the event is particularly important at a school like Dominican. “We’re a small college. We’re a Catholic University,” Caron said. “But I think it’s important to show that we can have events of…mass queer joy.”
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