In China, the community of LGBTQ+ remains misunderstood, defamed, discriminated against, underrepresented, overshadowed, and marginalized. Governmental scrutiny over the public opinions and events ensures everything in the promotion of the LGBTQ+ rights and voice is suppressed and canceled. Back in high school, I was a member of our school’s Colorscope club, an organization committed to educating our peer students and the public about sexuality and gender fluidity and promoting LGBTQ+ human rights. Colorscope had been banned for years due to its confrontation with the governmental and societal forces against LGBTQ+ rights, and when it came back during the time of my membership, we had to stay underground to prevent backfire from the scrutinizing school leaders, government officials, and parents.
Seeing the various forms of activism of LGBTQ+ activism and public acceptance of them (especially among the college students community) in the US is thus eyeopening for me. Recently, there was a drag show at Rusk that I explored with friends out of curiosity. Although quite confused initially, I have started to understand this form of artistic personal/communal/political expression. While drag show has been a long-established tradition of performance where performers would cross-dress to impersonate the other gender (initially out of the absence of female performers on stage in England), it has been recently adapted to become a stage for the queer people to express their identities and sexualities, as well as a form of underground socio-political activism. Like in the video posted, male performers dressed in female garments lip-syncs a pre-recorded tape of a female’s speech about political issues pertaining to her experience of alienation in the country. Besides of it, there were cross-dressed performers performing
