Queens of the Castro: Serving LGBT Youth in San Francisco High Schools

• In Event: Reading (to) the Children: Drag Pedagogy and Queer Performance at School

Abstract

Queens of the Castro is a 501c3 non-profit that was founded in 2010 in San Francisco by four drag queens in order to disrupt the gender binary and celebrate the LGBTQ+ community in local high schools and universities. We have worked closely with LGBTQ+ youth and drag performers to organize and implement drag shows as school-wide assemblies, which showcase students’ drag fashion and dance moves, knowledge of queer history, and coming out stories in addition to empowering on-campus LGBTQ+ students to educate their peers and teachers about the vast spectrum of gender and sexuality. We have also established a scholarship fund, which has awarded over $100,000 in scholarships, that gives LGBTQ+ youth in California the financial freedom to pursue a variety of post-secondary opportunities.


Queens of the Castro has been featured in The Castro District News (2013), SFist (Kukura, 2016), and the quarterly publication of the American Federation of Teachers (Hsu, 2017)for their innovative and transformational work in schools. At Mission High School in particular, our work has made a significant impact. For example, in 2008, a student survey reported that fewer than 50% of the LGBTQ+ students felt safe at Mission and only about 60% of students heard an adult intervene when an anti-LGBTQ+ slur was made on campus. In 2015, five years after the first, school-wide drag show, over 70% of the LGBTQ+ students felt safe at Mission and almost 90% had heard an adult intervene when they heard an anti-LGBTQ+ remark. As a community-based organization that is rooted in public schools, Queens of the Castro is poised to work with researchers in an attempt to better understand the impact of our work on the culture of schools and districts – not only the extent to which our work improves safety and learning conditions for LGBTQ+ students, but how we fundamentally shift the social construction of gender and sexuality during the school day. 


In this session, we will share the ways we have worked with students and teachers to successfully plan and implement a school-wide drag assembly, which includes how we empower students to: facilitate Queer Student Alliance meetings, choose a clear theme and learning goal for the assembly, recruit student and adult participants, work with the larger drag community in San Francisco, run an hour-long assembly for 1100+ audience members, and prepare students via advisory workshops before the assembly. One of our Board members, who is also a professional drag queen, will demonstrate how to “paint a face” (i.e., do drag makeup) while explaining the cultural importance of drag and how it can be used to shift the culture of a school. She will also explain how our summer program, Dragtivism, is introducing more youth to the art of drag and matching LGTBQ+ youth with drag mentors. Through this, we hope participants will learn how drag can be used to create safer and more joyful learning environments for LGBTQ+ students.

Author

• Taica Hsu, Mission High School