On May 20, Out on Campus (OOC) screened their first movie of the summer with The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. OOC is a student organization “dedicated to supporting SFU’s 2SLGBTQIA+ students and allies.” This 1994 road trip movie follows three drag queens touring Australia. It is based on the lives of three real drag queens — Cindy Pastel, Strykermeyer, and Lady Bump — portrayed by Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp. The film highlights the harms of deadnaming and portrays a cast who support one another in the face of violence. The Peak attended the event and spoke with Constantin Lozitsky, interim OOC coordinator, to talk about why its messages are relevant today.
Classics club is a movie night series run by OOC, focused on queer content “for, by, and about the community.” Lozitsky chose this movie to start the series because they heard it was influential at the time of release.
The movie centers on drag queens Anthony “Tick” Belrose (drag name Mitzi Del Bra), Adam Whitely (Felicia Jollygoodfellow), and Bernadette, an older, recently bereaved trans woman. Their bus, Priscilla, is vandalized with homophobic messages after their first stopover, and the trio continues to face verbal and physical abuse throughout their journey.
Speaking with Lozitsky, they noted that while the movie was full of both honest and tough depictions of queer life, it ultimately has a positive message: the queens demonstrate how perseverance is possible in the face of hate.
At the time of the film’s release, many Australian states and territories still had anti-gay legislation. Same-sex marriage wasn’t legalized until 2017 in Australia.
While drag queens have become much more mainstream since the ‘90s, now with shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, they continue to face conservative backlash as seen with Drag Queen Story Hour in the US, Australia, and Canada. Drag Queen Story Hour “is a program or event featuring drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, or bookstores.” In Kelowna, the first Story Hour event saw 160 children and parents attend, the library’s most successful event. There was pushback from management and social media, but the second event had an even larger turnout, and ultimately, the library board backed the library staff, and management apologized.
Lozitsky found it hard to find another “movie that is as effective at telling its story with such grace and compassion towards 2SLGBTQIA+ characters while also dumping buckets of slurs and insults and everybody’s fighting and everyone hates eachothers’ guts, but at the end they’re all compassionate and taking care of each other.”
On why this movie is still relevant today, Lozitsky said, “It’s not trying to be educational, it’s not trying to be pandering [or] uplifting, and its describing things through a lens that understands the queer community, the trans community, that understands intimately what each character is going through.” They also expressed that “it is incredibly refreshing to see unflinching dedication to show that humanity in ways that might make you uncomfortable, or might make you feel like you’re too much, or you’re too extra, too other — but that dedication to showing those characters as lovable and regular. They’re regular people who are also drag performers.”
