There’s not going to be a Drag Ball at Hampshire College this spring. There have been a number of meetings this year to discuss the event’s shortcomings. But it seems that finding a solution was not as easy as canceling the event altogether.

This makes me sad. Drag Ball has been around for many years. It’s one of the few Hampshire events that can say that. It’s low-key in a nice way; it’s held in our god damned cafeteria. It was one of the only times all year when you could get upperclassmen to leave their precious mods and venture over to the Merrill Quad.

I understand why students were concerned about the event; what had been created as a queer-positive event became just another big party, where, in many cases, straight guys put on dresses to get laughs, and straight girls put on miniskirts to get laid.

But is it better to cancel it? Far too often at Hampshire, we get worried about not doing something perfectly right, so we do nothing at all. We are PC paralyzed.

The part that bums me out the most is that we won’t get to see Hexter and Manfred dress up. Ralph Hexter is our college president, and Manfred Kollmeier is his husband. Hexter has a lot of enemies among the student body, for very valid reasons. But Drag Ball and Halloween are probably the times Hexter makes the greatest effort to get into the school spirit. Last Halloween, he dressed up as the devil. (The man has a sense of humor, we must give him that.) At Drag Ball two years ago, he and Manfred dressed up as Queens Elizabeth and I and II. How many other college presidents and their spouses do that?

(Photo by Peter Moskowitz)

It was during the fall of my second year here that Hexter and Manfred were married. Hexter was the first openly gay college president in U.S. history. And he could get married because Massachusetts is one of the states that now lets you do that. No matter what your Hampshire politics, it’s a big deal. It’s bigger than Hexter as an individual; it’s bigger than any of us as individuals. Hexter was kind enough to hold a wedding reception on campus. There’s no reason he had to do this; even though his wedding was a news item, it was still his wedding, and he could’ve kept it personal if he wanted to. But he didn’t; he held a reception that was open to all students.

Before the reception began, some of the more radical members of Hampshire’s Queer Community Alliance went to the reception site with buckets of chalk and scrawled angry messages on the sidewalk outside. Things like “Why can’t I marry my four gay boyfriends?” and “White Man + White Man = Consolidation of Power.”

I’m not sure if someone managed to wash away the chalk messages before Hexter got there, but he certainly heard about them. And that makes me sad. The event was about celebrating his marriage, not dissecting politics.

Moments like that make me wonder if these “radical” students have any sense of history. I mean, not to make light of how far we still have to come–obviously, many things about the world are still very shitty. But you have to celebrate the accomplishments, too. I think Hexter’s marriage is an accomplishment. Ten years ago, it would not have been possible! Fifty years ago, it would’ve been unthinkable.

I don’t think that it’s possible to be both radical and PC at the same time. And I don’t think it’s possible to be radical if you are judgmental of everything (I’m talking to you, hipsters and sub-free kids). I’m not arguing that Drag Ball was perfect. It wasn’t. But I don’t think that the solution to the imperfections of Drag Ball is to cancel Drag Ball.