Throughout an evening of drag kings and queens, students were entertained by dance routines, poetic rapping and lip sync battles.

The LGBTQA Pride Center and Nu Alpha Kappa (NAK), a fraternity at CSUSM, collaborated to host their sixth annual drag show competition at the USU Ballroom on Nov.8 from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Director of the Pride center, Robert Aiello-Hauser, and Nu Alpha Kappa hosted their first drag show competition here at CSUSM back in 2014.
The show has gained more participants and a larger crowd with each year that it’s been held. NAK said that the main purpose of the drag show is to educate students about the LGBTQA+ community.

Participants from different sororities and fraternities competed for the winning title of Drag King and Drag Queen.

For the first portion of the competition, each contestant showcased their talents many of them choreographed elaborate dance numbers while some performed poetic rapping.

The second portion of  the competition consisted of a Q&A segment that allowed each contestant to talk about their journey of creating a character and embodying that person as the gender that they do not normally live as.

Contestants were asked, “What is something about the ally training you want to share with the audience? What have you learned by participating in this experience from the moment you volunteered to your experience onstage?”

Many of the contestants revealed that the most significant lesson they have learned throughout this experience was how important it is to be an ally for the LGBTQA+ community.

Drag queen Carina Asada, aka Christian Ramirez, gave his point of view of what it was like to step into the shoes of a woman as a man.

As a cisgender male who comes from a traditional Mexican household, he said that this journey allowed him to understand more of what it was like to be a member of the LGBTQA+ community. “I was greeted with confused and disgusted looks, but what really got me was that I was also greeted with smiles and acceptance,” recalled Ramirez.

A new segment that the competition added to this year’s drag show was the “Lip Sync For Your Life” segment. To show appreciation for the inspiration behind this segment, a couple of videos from RuPaul’s Drag Race were played for the audience.

Based on the best performance in the talent portion and best answer from the Q&A portion, the judges pulled the top three drag kings and queens to compete in a lip sync battle to see which one will be crowned as the final winner in their category.

Anita Marg, aka Alex Villa of Alpha Sigma Phi, stood out to the judges because of his extravagant performance with backup dancers and lip syncing, while Buttery Jack, aka Kylie Castano of alpha Chi Omega, towered over the audience and judges’ expectations with her confidence in everything she performed on stage.

At the end of the competition, both Anita Marg and Buttery Jack were crowned Drag Queen and Drag King for their emphasis on the importance of being an ally to people of the LGBTQA+ community.