Well, the war on drag continues. This time a student drag show in benefit to The Trevor Project at West Texas A&M University has been canceled by the school’s President because I guess he ran out of puppies to kick and this was the next best thing. Per CNN:
In an email to the school community, university President Walter V. Wendler said drag shows “discriminate against womanhood,” compared them to blackface and said there was “no such thing” as a harmless drag show.
“A harmless drag show? Not possible. I will not appear to condone the diminishment of any group at the expense of impertinent gestures toward another group for any reason, even when the law of the land appears to require it,” the email read.
For once I am speechless—where to begin? First and foremost, for a man standing up to womanhood, surely this is a topic near and dear to his heart, so away to the President’s blog we must go, yes? A quick search of it must surely yield many posts where he passionately advocates for causes that promote equality and gender parity, clearly.
LOL, of course not! A search for the phrase “misogyny” only yields one blog post, the one where he bans the drag show. Huh. Funny that! (I did also search for “blackface” and thankfully only the one blog post showed up as well. I’ve never been more relieved in my life.) You know what’s fun though, he does have a post from June 2021 where he outlines, proudly, how WTAMU is unabashedly conservative in the blog post titled: “Texas’ Most Conservative 21st-Century Public University.” That’s your tax dollars at work, y’all. My favorite pull quote from this particular article is:
Whether people who work and study here are Republican or Democrat or support any or all of the planks of any partisan platform is immaterial. […] Parroting or mimicking an “enlightened view” espoused by others is duty’s dereliction. Who would we save from whom? We must offer regional exceptionality: Regional identity percolating up through the Caprock creating self-reliance, independent thinking and exercised freewill.
So if I’m reading that right, he believes it’s the University’s job to save the liberals from themselves, because West Texas is conservative, so that’s that. Gotcha. I guess blaming “misogyny” is his incredibly offensive way to achieve his actual goal? Cool. Glad getting paid eighty-three cents to his dollar could be useful to him.
The student body is not taking the asinine reasoning and general prejudice BS lying down, and students have launched a Change.org petition to get the drag show reinstated, and other outside groups are involved. Per CNN:
The petition said the president’s comparison of blackface and drag performances was a “gross and abhorrent comparison of two completely different topics” and “an extremely distorted and incorrect definition of drag as a culture and form of performance art.”
In a letter to Wendler, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group focused on freedom of speech and religion in academia, wrote it was “seriously concerned” by his decision and asked that he reinstate the performance.
“The First Amendment and Texas law protect student expression from administrative censorship,” FIRE said in a later statement.
I’m no legal scholar, but a man who runs a public university in Texas, who proudly posts a blog post like the one I linked above, I’m pretty sure he’s not going to be swayed by strongly worded letters. These bigots are empowered right now, and unfortunately, the judicial branch is stacked with these backward hateful dinosaurs all the way up to the Supreme Court. Something tells me he enjoys upsetting people, and feels he’s holding on to the tradition of being a conservative bigot because he can, and he has the power to do so. What a bigoted turd.
The drag show was scheduled to take place on March 31st, so there’s still time to make this right. Good luck to the students of West Texas A&M University fighting the good fight, here.
(featured image: NBC)
