During the 2025 legislative session, Oklahoma lawmakers voted to prohibit many drag performances—shows in which men dress as extreme and often offensive caricatures of women—on public property.

But the OU Queer Student Association insists it will nonetheless host the Crimson & Queens drag show at the University of Oklahoma.

In a statement provided to the OU Daily, a student newspaper, officials with the OU Queer Student Association declared, “Crimson & Queens is a long-standing student-led event that celebrates performance, inclusion, and artistic expression. At this time, Crimson & Queens is still expected to take place as planned.”

The OU Marketing and Communications division told the OU Daily that the university “follows all applicable state and federal laws,” but did not explicitly say if the Crimson & Queens drag show will be conducted on campus this year.

House Bill 1217, by state Rep. Kevin West and state Sen. David Bullard, states, “It shall be unlawful for a person to engage in an adult performance which contains obscene material, or for any political subdivision of this state to allow, permit, organize, or authorize the viewing of an adult performance which contains obscene material, on public property or in a public place where a minor, as part of the general public, will be exposed to view such adult performance.”

The bill was signed into law by Gov. Kevin Stitt on May 9.

In recent years, OU officials have spent tens of thousands of dollars on multiple drag-queen performers. Those payments have come from mandatory student fees, and students are not given the ability to opt out of paying any portion of their fees that goes to drag shows.

In 2023, OU officials identified a Crimson & Queens drag show sponsorship as a portion of the funding the school had dedicated to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programming.

As part of Camp Crimson, described as “an orientation experience designed to assist undergraduate students as they transition into their first year at the University of Oklahoma,” students could attend Drag Bingo on Aug. 15, 2023, which the university described as “a signature event during Camp Crimson.”

Even if the Crimson & Queens drag show does not violate state law, OU officials still face potential legal problems because the production may run afoul of federal law.

‘A Hostile Environment for Women’

In February, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents passed a resolution banning drag performances on its 11 university campuses. The resolution noted that drag shows “are likely to create or contribute to a hostile environment for women contrary to System anti-discrimination policy and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX), as these events often involve unwelcome and objectively offensive conduct based on sex for many members of the respective communities of the Universities, particularly when they involve the mockery or objectification of women.”

The resolution noted that drag shows typically involve “biological males dressing in women’s clothing, wearing exaggerated female makeup and/or exaggerated prosthetics meant to parody the female body type” as well as “conduct that demeans women.”

Critics from across the political spectrum have long criticized drag shows for the male performers’ demeaning portrayal of women.

In 2014, feminist writer Meghan Murphy wrote, “To me it seems equivalent to cultural appropriation or the way in which white people have mocked black people, Asian people, Indigenous people, and pretty much every other race/ethnicity that isn’t theirs, under the guise of ‘performance’ or ‘satire.’ Why is it cute or funny or entertaining for men to mock women via drag?”

She also noted that “it feels as though drag queens are given free rein to insult women and adopt over-the-top sexist language (bitch, ho, etc.)” and to engage in “objectified depictions of women in ways that women don’t even get away with.”

In a 2006 column, Kirsten Anderberg wrote of her experience as a woman comedian performing in comedy clubs that often included drag acts, saying, “When men dress in drag and supposedly imitate women, it is most often very sexist in a remarkably similar way to the whites imitating racial minorities thing.”

She called drag acts “offensive and sexist as hell,” noting that “these men in drag who were supposedly acting like women, also acted giddy, stupid, shallow,” and declared it hard to view that “as anything but blatant sexism.”

In April 2023, Sherry Sylvester, a distinguished senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, wrote, “Drag shows are essentially the same as blackface. It’s not even a close call.”

Sylvester noted that male drag-queen performers engage in “obvious and vicious sexism” that includes “hateful and belittling stereotypes of women,” such as portraying women as “catty, bitchy, dumb and obsessed with sex.”

A performer who goes by the stage name Yvie Oddly was the headliner for the University of Oklahoma’s annual Crimson & Queens drag show on April 28, 2023, and was paid $18,000.

Online, Oddly has engaged in the type of language and behavior critics decry, including the use of sexist pejoratives.

For example, in a March 11, 2023, tweet reviewing a drag-queen show, Oddly described two participants as performing “two of the C—NTIEST lip syncs in the whole franchise” [message not hyphenated in the original].

 

[Photo via @Plasma_NYC on X. This performer, who goes by the stage name Plasma, was paid $11,500 to perform two songs at the “Crimson & Queens” drag show on Oct. 17, 2024. For more stories about higher education in Oklahoma, visit AimHigherOK.com.]