For months, North Idaho College's Gender and Sexuality Alliance had been preparing for its only annual event, a drag show fundraiser. Scheduled for April 19 on campus, it was set to be a night of entertaining drag performances, with people either buying tickets to benefit the club or donating food for local food banks to get in.
But a week before the event was scheduled to be held, it was canceled by the college's administration because it was promoted as open to guests of all ages.
The club's faculty adviser, Kyle Serrott, says that NIC President Nick Swayne told him the optics of an all-ages drag show would be detrimental to the school's ongoing accreditation issues. Serrott says he thinks the club became a scapegoat for the school's struggling image.
Despite the event's cancellation, about 20 people gathered at Coeur d'Alene's Emerge art studio on Friday night to ensure that food would still be collected.
"I'm so disappointed that this cancellation happened," Gender and Sexuality Alliance President Raine Cino says, adding that the club has a long history of community involvement through the drag show.
This isn't the first time the event has been canceled in the 15-plus years it's been held. In October 2022, the college also canceled the club's drag show due to its all-ages designation on advertisements.
Swayne didn't respond to emailed questions about the cancellation or his conversation with Serrott. Instead, NIC spokesman Tom Greene replied, noting that in the wake of the 2022 cancellation, the administration determined that a drag show was not appropriate for all ages and would be against the college's standards. This was verbally communicated to the club's leadership at the time. However, no written policy exists, and neither Cino nor Serrott were at the college when the policy was verbalized.
"I would have more respect for the decision if there was a policy written down," Serrott says. "But there's no policy [for the administration] to point to and say exactly what we violated."
The issue wasn't flagged earlier in part because the flyer that the club submitted to the college's marketing office for this year's event did not have "all ages" on it, Greene says by email.
But when the event was posted online for the campus community, that language said "all ages welcome," Greene says. Additionally, the post said, "There will be no profanity or excessive nudity, so children and adults are both welcome."
Greene says that violated the policy set by the college last year, so the event was canceled.
Part of the issue comes from how easy it is to put an event description up on the college's website without any vetting, according to the club's leaders. When a club wants to reserve a room, they need to upload a description of the event they plan to hold, which is then automatically uploaded to the website without any oversight.
"I don't think it's any one person's fault, this is a system process failure," Serrott says. "To me though, it felt like [Swayne] was trying to find somebody to pin this on."
Serrott tells the Inlander he didn't understand Swayne's argument that the event could negatively impact the college's ongoing accreditation issues.
"I absolutely would not want to be in his position, but I cannot respect scapegoating queer students and faculty to try to save the college," Serrott says.
Greene says the decision to cancel the event would have happened regardless of the college's accreditation woes.
A source with the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities — the college's accrediting body — could not comment on this specific situation, but confirmed that NIC's only accreditation issues are with its governance: the Board of Trustees.
While the Gender and Sexuality Alliance is a student group, Serrott says it's become a safe community space for all queer folks at the college, not just the students — which is why it was especially painful for the club's sole annual event to be canceled.
To Serrott, the cancellation is indicative of the larger anti-queer rhetoric that's growing in North Idaho. It's become more common, especially online, to baselessly accuse LGBTQ+ people of being "groomers" or pedophiles.
"We have allowed a certain political group, or certain political ideologies, to define what it means to be queer in a way that is not true," Serrott says. "I see us bowing to these political pressures as giving fire to those definitions. We're not groomers. We are not obscene. It's almost unfathomable to me to think otherwise."
Serrott says that just underscores the importance of the event for NIC's queer community.
"For some students and faculty, it's their first time ever getting to experience or play with ... not only drag, but gender expression, too," he explains. "It's really a space for creativity, expression and belonging."
Now, the Alliance is working with the college to ensure that this doesn't happen again.
"We are optimistic about putting forward ideas that will prevent future cancellations," club president Cino says. "In the unlikely event that it does happen again, there will hopefully be consequences in place to hold both sides accountable." ♦
