Around 20 students and community members protested on the sidewalk outside Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School Feb. 6 following the Rainbow District School Board’s cancellation of a drag event that was to take place at the school this week.
The show in question is called the Courage Across Canada Tour, and features Icesis Couture, winner of Canada’s Drag Race, along with other drag performers. It is presented by the International Day of Pink.
The tour will be visiting 10 communities, sharing drag and stories at local schools by day, and celebrating with free performances at local venues by night.
The Sudbury stop is on Feb. 10, with a show set to take place at Zig’s that evening.
The Courage Tour was also supposed to put on a show at Lo-Ellen on Feb. 10, but the board put the brakes on the show last month. Instead, an all-ages show is now being held at Collège Boréal on the afternoon of Feb. 10.
Grade 11 Lo-Ellen student Ra’Jah Mohamed, who started an online petition last month in an attempt to have the event at his high school reinstated, also organized this week’s protest.
Mohamed said during the protest the decision to cancel the drag event is “coming from a board that claims to have inclusion and equity at the centre of its operation.
“Rainbow doesn't deserve to call itself Rainbow,” he said. “Rainbow is ironic.”
He said he held today’s protest as the next step in voicing the students’ concerns about the situation. Mohamed said he’d also like to meet further with Rainbow board officials, “and if they’re not willing to listen to us, there will be more protests.”
“I want an apology because the Rainbow District School Board has negatively affected their queer students,” he said. “They have damaged their relationship with queer students.”
Mohamed previously told Sudbury.com that upon discussing the reasoning behind the board’s decision to cancel the event, officials claimed the speakers were “hypersexual.”
He said this claim is “unfounded considering there was no talk of sex in the script and all clothing to be worn was modest, the clothing being a blazer and a long dress with a cape.”
Mohamed said in an interview during the Monday protest the board is “using an age-old stereotype about queer people that we are deviants, that we are sexually hypersexual. It is truly discriminatory, and we will not stand for it. So that's why we are here, because we want an apology for that reason.”
The student said the event was planned by a Lo-Ellen staff member, and everyone had been under the impression that it had been approved.
However, the board put the brakes on the show in January, saying it had not gone through the proper board approval process, and was gathering more information on the proposed show.
The Rainbow board announced last week that the Lo-Ellen show was officially cancelled, stating that the board planned to instead focus on existing efforts supporting the 2S-LGBTQ+ community.
When we reached out to the Rainbow board in advance of today’s protest, the board issued a written statement with much the same content as previous statements issued by the board on the topic of the cancelled drag show.
However, when asked about Mohamed’s request for an apology, a Rainbow board spokesperson issued the following written response: “In two meetings with the student, there was an acknowledgement that work had been done at the school level and an apology that this had occurred before the event had been properly reviewed.”
Another student who attended Monday’s protest, Lily Rose Lachance, said she was disappointed and angered when she heard about the Lo-Ellen drag show’s cancellation.
“I was angry that this hadn't been cancelled because of a scheduling conflict, which is what I first assumed,” she said. “It had been cancelled because of bigotry and prejudice towards this community.”
The Grade 10 Lo-Ellen student said she’s always wanted to see a drag show, and wanted to speak to the performers about her own experiences of exploring her queer identity in recent years. Lachance said she’ll be attending the Collège Boréal show with her mother.
Besides students, Monday’s protest was attended by several members of the larger Sudbury community.
Cory Gaudette, a local drag queen, said he was there to support the queer students at Lo-Ellen. “I just knew I needed to show up,” said Gaudette, adding that as a drag queen, “I feel very personally attacked right now.”
Sudbury.com also spoke last week to Icesis Couture, the star of the drag show tour in question. She said she doesn’t agree with the Rainbow board’s decision on the matter.
Couture said the Courage Across Canada Tour “is a celebration of the resiliency of queer, trans and non-binary folks,” and provides youth with queer representation in communities where they might not otherwise have it.
“I feel like the message of our tour is not to hurt anybody,” she said. “I don't think it's detrimental to anybody … I don't know why you have to feel the need to fight with a message of love. That's all it is. It's not about anything other than that.”
Couture said the show, which has been two years in the planning, is “not hypersexual at all,” adding that the performers are “all covered from head to toe,” and age-appropriate music is used.
“All of our speeches have gone through countless school boards, countless teachers,” she said. “So that comment isn't true.”
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s associate content editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.
