Drag queen Coco D Baucherry opened the night yelling into a microphone, “What’s up bitch!” on April 12. “Fuck you bitch!” the audience of nearly 800 students and staff yelled back — a chant used as an energy check for the rest of the show.
Shengyu Zhang / Daily Nexus
The Associated Students Trans & Queer Commission (TQC) hosted its finale drag show in Campbell Hall to conclude its annual Pride Week. Attendees with LGBTQIA+ flags packed the hall for a night of comedy, lip sync performances and original songs.
“Pride Across America” is the theme of this year’s Pride Week in response to a trend of anti-transgender and queer legislation sweeping the nation under the current Trump administration. Kylie Sonique Love was a contestant on the second season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and winner of the sixth season of “All Stars,” becoming the first transgender woman to win the competition in the U.S. Love said drag must be protected to preserve “love and community” in the current political climate.
The show began at 7 p.m. with a lip sync performance to “Hush Hush; Hush Hush / I Will Survive (Medley)” by The Pussycat Dolls from the show’s third-time host and UC Santa Barbara alum Coco D Baucherry. She led another energy check before introducing drag artist SNJV, whose performance combined traditional Indian attire, music and dance with drag makeup and performance.
Then, drag queen and member of the San Francisco nonprofit, Queens of the Castro, Lotus joined the stage with a Britney Spears mashup. Love sang two original songs, including “Do it like Dolly” and “Lost Angel.”
Bob the Drag Queen, winner of the eighth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, headlined the night with an hour-long comedy set. Received with the loudest ovation of the night, Bob said, “I gotta be honest, I deserve that.” Bob’s set included a variety of topics including their fixation on foreign accents by telling a story from when they were in Belfast, Ireland and misheard the driver’s name, which was Michael, as “bagel.”
The set ended with Bob giving family, financial and career advice to UCSB students. One student asked Bob, “How do I get my very Christian mom to be nice to my trans girlfriend?”
“When your mom is sleeping, you need to record your voice, and you will say, ‘Hi Susan, I’m you, and let me tell you what you love: trans people, you love trans people. You also love Venmoing your daughter 150 bucks everyday. You need to put this into AI, change it to her voice, put it by her bed and play it every single night. In her dreams, she will start to believe it’s real. If they will not be allies, we will fucking force them to,” Bob said.
Second-year music composition major and show attendee Zeren Davis said they were first introduced to gender queerness and saw their identity represented through watching drag.
“It was how I got introduced to gender fuckery. It was the first time I ever heard of what being nonbinary was and hearing people express differences with the traditional gender binary,” Zeren Davis said. “It was a way to kind of explore my queerness, even if I didn’t have people around me that I could do that with.”
Zeren Davis grew up in a part of Arizona they described as conservative and said that having access to drag was lifesaving when they couldn’t see themselves represented in daily life.
“I was fortunate enough where I had the resources like drag to see myself represented. In many ways, it really did save my life. I don’t think I would be the person that I am today in terms of emotional maturity or general appreciation for life if it weren’t for seeing queer and trans people living their own authentic lives,” Zeren Davis said.
The show comes in light of some universities’ attempts to ban drag queen performances from their campuses. In February, the Texas A&M University system passed a resolution that would have effectively banned drag performances across its 11 campuses, which was temporarily blocked by a federal judge in March.
First-year biology major Dominic Baker says that drag show bans are a form of queer cultural erasure.
“Banning shows like this says, ‘We don’t care about your culture and the things you care about,’ and kind of exiles you. So I think UCSB supporting these types of groups is saying, ‘Hey, we see you, be gay, that’s fine,’” Baker said.
Third-year writing & literature major Belle Davis opposes attempts to ban drag, saying that college campuses have historically been a “nexus for change” and a place to “push things forward.”
“It’s really important that UCSB stands against the fascism of the current administration that doesn’t support different gender identities and welcomes people and shows everyone that they have a spot here,” Belle Davis said.
Doctoral candidate in quantitative biosciences and one of the founders of the UCSB Drag Club, Sam Rosen, also known as Linda on stage, works to “create a space for queer students to explore drag and gender performance” through Drag Club.
“Drag is about self-expression. I think that’s what people are afraid of, is the fact that we go beyond the traditional gender binary. Or we play with our gender in such a free-form manner that it’s sort of like a threat to that status quo,” Rosen said. “It’s important for UCSB to defend that because we’re not doing anything wrong. We’re just having a fun time and expressing ourselves and living our most authentic queer lives.”
Despite the rise in anti-queer legislation, Rosen said now is the time to both fight and party by quoting author and queer activist Dan Savage, who said, “during the darkest days of the A.I.D.S. crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon and we danced all night.”
“Activism is always important. We always need to show up. But we need to remember that joy is an essential part in keeping our community together and making sure that we’re able to fight another day. So it’s important just sometimes to throw on a wig and, you know, wiggle and giggle,” Rosen said.
Belle Davis stressed that drag embodies the spirit of queer culture that should be celebrated and preserved.
“Drag, specifically, is such an expression of joy; it’s such an unabashed explosion of color and fun, and it’s inherently so campy. It just preserves this spirit that I think has always been pretty inherent to queer culture,” Belle Davis said.
A version of this article appeared on p. 4 of the April 17, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.
