For this year’s CEU Spring Ball, I decided I would dress in drag. Why? Maybe in order to stage a silent peaceful protest, maybe just as some mockery of gender representation, maybe as a way to express some part of myself. But becoming a drag queen is not as easy as some might suspect. First and foremost I had to build up courage. The easiest way for me to gain enough self-confidence was to go to friends, to discuss with them, to ask them for advice. Unfortunately for me, it seemed that the CEU community was not very enthusiastic about such an idea. Besides a few close people, I did not get any sort of feedback about my initiative. The next step had to do with researching what type of clothes I need. That’s when the questions started: how do I buy clothes in the women’s section, how do I try them on, will I find a shoe large enough to fit my foot, where do I find a wig, what kind of makeup do I need, etc? Suffice to say that it took me a few days and many trips throughout Budapest to find everything I needed. Somehow, the wig was more difficult to find and I ended up having to get one from an old Syrian selling all sorts of stuff at the Nyugati train station. When I started putting on the stockings, the lipstick, the flowery dress, I noticed how easy it can be for someone to fake femininity and how artificial are the social cues we use to signal our gender. I had done drag before, but this time felt different. In the past I participated in “drag shows” at school, in which most students dressed up. This time it was going to be me against the world. The doubts had not stopped there, the fear combined with excitement. I believe I was lucky because I was able to gather a group of people around me, good friends who represented, in a way, both a source ofsupport and a shield against transphobia. The fear was persistent, although, Will anyone shout something at me? Will the taxi driver figure out I wasn’t a woman and refuse to drive me to the boat? How will the CEU students react to my transformation? Which bathroom should I use on the boat? These questions kept haunting me.
Once I got to the boat, the feelings were mixed, ranging from people not even recognizing who I was to hateful looks and surprised faces.
I am not sure how my actions changed people’s minds about drag, about homosexuality or about being transgender. I am not claiming any sort of rights over what I did and I am not claiming my drag “performance” represented more than a simple game. However, the reality is that the majority of people present at the CEU Spring Ball have never seen a drag queen. Maybe back in their home countries they do not have access to the underground world where drag happens or maybe they do not want to access that world. My humble opinion is that even for human rights activists, seeing a person in drag might be quite novel. Fortunately, the majority of students present at the CEU Spring Ball were able to see me, thanks to the Latina dancers who thought it might be fun to make me go up on the stage to dance with them! Overall, my experience was one of self discovery and the reactions I got from my classmates and colleagues were quite positive. As much as there is a discussion that CEU is a bubble and practices some sort of inflexible political correctness, I believe that this university is home to elevated and intelligent people, able to understand their role in shaping future public opinion. In that sense, we are one step forward compared to the realities outside the walls on Nador utca.
In Eastern Europe the exposure to trangenderism and drag is much more limited than in Western countries. The reasons for this are multiple and we can discuss them some other time. Exposure is probably the first step towards tolerance, towards acceptance. Now that we started on this path, maybe we should continue and host CEU’s first Drag Show!
Vlad Levente Viski, Romania, Political Science
Photos provided by the author
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