An Evening With Naomi Smalls

CCSC’s Drag Bingo 2025: Hosted by Naomi Smalls; and the importance of queer spaces. 

By Rocky Rūb

Illustration by Em Bennet

A drag queen defines the scene. Her authenticity and audacity is contagious. She lip-syncs to a number by Lady Gaga or Diana Ross and I become less conscious of my vocal fry every time she jerks her wig or hits the floor. I was 18 when I entered my first gay bar, the (in)famous Playhouse in the West Village. It was before they adopted a TSA-grade ID scanner and began charging a $10 cover to enter; back when it felt like underage accessibility was a blessing and not a privilege. 

As Jermey Atherton Lin documents in his historical memoir Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, queer spaces act as conduits for this odd state between seeking permission and conscious social contumacy. It’s wanting to be accepted versus rejecting the heteronormative. Lavender lasers touch each member of the congregation like it’s one body: a collective of individual muscles contracting together after the inhale of poppers and the exhale of instant fervor. It’s a collective made of the “alternative”—alternative being queer.

On April 29, 2025, there were no lavender laser lights and no poppers (to my knowledge), but, as an attendee chuckled to their friend before Columbia College Student Council’s Drag Bingo 2025 began, “Everything is very Club 96.” I didn’t realize it until later, after I had written down the quote as a laughable diagnosis of the so-not-gay-bar atmosphere of the Wang Pavilion in Alfred Lerner Hall, that the comment was a nod to the fictional venue created by the woman-of-the-hour’s run on RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars 4. My failed judgement aside, drag has always been prone to that wink wink, nod nod kind of referential indulgence. The same sensibility that Susan Sontag writes about in “Notes on Camp.” In her words, “Camp rests on innocence. That means Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it.” The drag queen opens the space to possibility, and the innocent learn to take advantage of it. The act of corruption is voluntary, and it shouldn’t be misinterpreted for a collapse of morals; it’s a collapse of expectation. It’s the same reason that Sontag also includes homosexuals as a “self-elected class … who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste.” And the proof is often in the pudding; Drag Bingo was a sold-out event. 

The Wang Pavillion was buzzing to the beat of RuPaul’s 2014 hit, “Sissy That Walk.” It was the second year that CCSC had hosted its now eagerly anticipated CU exclusive event, Drag Bingo. So far, the hosts have been nothing short of drag royalty. Both are “Ru Girls,” a term referring to past and present contestants of the fourteen-time Emmy winning TV show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, hosted and executive produced by (obviously) RuPaul herself. In fact, last year’s Drag Bingo host, Nymphia Wind, stepped onto our campus just days before the finale of Season 16 aired. On Wednesday, April 17, 2024, Wind performed for Columbia students. On Friday, April 19, 2024, Wind was crowned as America’s Next Drag Superstar. 

This is a very plausible reason for the success of the event and why it returned a year later—topicality and anticipation. RuPaul’s Drag Race is regarded as a revolutionary media giant that has spearheaded accessibility, awareness, and visibility for queer and trans people across the world. Sometimes, contestants win thousands of dollars from the reality show’s challenges—which in recent seasons can be as high as $10,000 an episode—or, for the queen who has showcased the most uniqueness, charisma, nerve, and talent at the end of the season, the $200,000 prize pot. But the real prize can be simply getting on the show. It’s a platform for queer entertainers to kickstart their careers, or, in many cases, to introduce a wide audience to the illustrious careers they’ve already established. 

This year’s host, Naomi Smalls, despite having never won the crown, is one of the most popular queens to come out of the competition. As a runner up on Season 8 and again on All Stars 4 (a spinoff show with returning contestants) she has accumulated 1.4 million followers on Instagram, hosted countless PRIDE and queer philanthropic events, and has guest appeared on all your favorite gay person’s favorite podcasts. Booking a queen of this status to perform for an event can run thousands of dollars. So, for the drag enthusiast, seeing Naomi Smalls for free is a big deal. 

Though I wouldn’t call it Club 96, Wang Pavilion looked about as gay as it could have. Round tables covered the floor, each filled with eager bingo-ers examining their many cards and conversing with friends and familiar looking strangers. A large spotlight shone on the stage where the host would soon take her place to call numbers and hand out prizes. Along the back of the stage, shades of red and blue lights mingled together so that the surrounding walls became a spotty violet mixture. I arrived five minutes before the show was supposed to begin and took one of the few open chairs left near the back of the room, just in front of the lighting technician who assumed that funny focus DJs have while spinning old Britney tracks along Christopher Street. 

The concept of Drag Bingo, according to TIME magazine, started in Seattle in the early 1990s. It was a way to liven up a boring but lucrative form of community gathering to raise money for people living with AIDS, and was run in collaboration with the HIV/AIDS humanitarian organization, Chicken Soup Brigade. Since then, the popularity of Drag Bingo has soared, like drag itself, into the mainstream. However, its philanthropic mission hasn’t been lost: The article says that “the biggest games, though, are still AIDS fundraisers,” and the Alliance of AIDS Services – Carolina continues to host many Drag Bingo fundraisers today. 

The only philanthropic aspect of CCSC’s Drag Bingo was that it was a free, on-campus celebration of queer culture and visibility for all students who could register quickly enough. In fact, some irony lingers given the University’s ongoing gentrification of the Harlem neighborhoods that birthed Ballroom culture on the back of which platforms like RuPaul’s Drag Race were built. This parasitic relationship–raising housing prices and displacing residents–has undoubtedly contributed to the decline of drag spaces in upper Manhattan. But then, a friend from Texas reminds me that drag has been banned outright at some schools like the University of Texas (both UT Austin and UT Dallas) and Texas A&M, and I’m reminded of our circumstances, again. Drag Bingo is a privilege that Columbia students shouldn’t take for granted.

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Naomi strutted onto the stage with a confidence I’ve been aspiring to since I hit puberty. Each step she took in her silver pumps, sparkles clad, aqua-colored one-piece bodysuit and matching leg wrap, with plushy hoop earrings made of the same fabric as her dress, demanded an attention that I’m sure you can only learn from almost 13 years of practicing the art. “Do you think she’s a flip queen,” I overheard from a nearby table, “Or, does she do a lot of death drops?” If I wasn’t so in awe of Naomi’s shiny (and blinding) neck-to-toe body oil coverage, I would’ve rolled my eyes. But before I could mull over whether I reserved the right to be judgmental in a judgement-free space, the goddess onstage began shooting off Bingo numbers, assisted by Cenker Camci, CC ’25, VP Equity of the 2024-25 CCSC Executive Board, who also spearheaded the organization of the event. The two took command of the stage, filling dead air with cheeky banter and as innocent as possible lewd quips to and from the audience. “I only want to do Drag Bingo at Columbia,” Smalls shouted from the stage, laughing, “Clock it, quote it.” 

After what seemed like a hundred rounds of rigged games, in the Drag Bingo finale, two students simultaneously called out their winning cards. So, the final prize was decided by a lip sync for your bingo to Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra,” and eventually one was sent sashaying back to their seat. 

But that wouldn’t be the only performance students were blessed with. Smalls quickly showed the dancing amateurs a real lip sync in her second act of the night. In her sparkled, high-fashion uniform, Smalls hit a pose and worked the floor to an intoxicating rendition of “Real Groove” and “Last Chance” from Kylie Minogue’s DISCO, with, of course, those famously long legs revealed somewhere around the lyrics, “Fashion and Attitude / Right on the money.” Leg kicks, splits, seduction, oh my! Even as she stepped atop chairs and tables, her congregants worshiping under her nose, not an ounce of grace or control was lost. 

The razzle dazzle concluded as she shouted to the crowd, “Elevate, educate, and make your dreams come true.” 

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Illustration by Em Bennet

When I chatted with Smalls after the event, I was struck by the pride that she seemed to radiate. It was a kind of self-elected pride endemic to an aristocrat of taste. Throughout the event, she made Columbia students seem cool. It could’ve been that she was paid $7,000 by CCSC to perform, but for someone who has traveled around the world over the last decade, engaging with audiences that I can only assume would have a much deeper understanding of drag’s history, her humility was generous considering the roughly twenty-two and under crowd that she had. It was a crowd that only knew of Naomi through Drag Race, now that it’s become mainstream, and I didn’t expect her to be particularly excited to perform for them.

The drag that Naomi grew up with has changed. She laughed, “I never thought I would be this bitch talking like this, but when I first started, it was definitely a lot more like punk rock underground as far as like, not everyone and their mom in the club had done drag at that point.” The urge to critique this shift to mainstream lingered between us. It was something that I’d entered the conversation expecting us to dissect together: that the mainstream leads to appropriation, which leads to oversaturation which, for example, leads to gay slang like “slay” becoming a little bit gauche. But instead, she continued, “I’m actually very impressed and excited with the way drag is going because it is more mainstream, it is more accessible. It’s not even so much that drag is more accessible—it’s like that feeling you get when you are in drag, that power that you get is accessible to everyone.” 

Her words flipped my expectations on its head. She represents not an unattainable power, but an aspirational one, and this aspiration isn’t supposed to be gatekept. And this was as important now—even when the Drag Race franchise can rack up 99 Emmy nominations since premiering—as it was during the Compton’s Cafeteria and Stonewall riots of the late sixties. “Drag is like your armor in a way, and especially right now—like the fact that we can be strong in a world where [the U.S. government is] trying to take away the wigs, take away the passports, take away all of that. It’s nice to have that armor.” The metaphor is especially fitting because, as Smalls told me, she drew on references from superheroes and supervillains from the manga series Sailor Moon when she was first starting drag. The heroine of the show, Usagi Tsukino, transforms from a kind and awkward girl into a Sailor Guardian tasked with protecting the universe from evil forces.

Today, Ms. Smalls has shown the power of that armor to fans around the world through multiple international tours, including RuPaul’s Drag Race Live!, a residency in Las Vegas, and seven years of performing in Voss Events’ Werq the World tour. When it comes to attacks on queer and trans people in the U.S., government interventions are decided by each individual state. As such, there’s a difference between living in New York and a state like Florida, which over the years has fought hard for legislation like HB 1557, better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Or in the case of Indiana SEA 480, where vanity procedures like liposuction or hair reconstruction are now banned for minors, but only if they are being performed with the patient’s intent to transition genders. Cisgender minors, meanwhile, are more than welcome to these procedures. And on Jan. 20, 2025, Donald Trump’s executive order “the Gender Order” forced federal records, such as state-issued IDs and U.S. Passports, to correspond with their subject’s sex assigned at birth. The national decree has since undergone temporary holds due to federal courts questioning its legality.

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In her travels, Naomi credited an attention to queer spaces to get a sense of queer and trans safety between regions. “Because I think a lot of establishments are shutting down right now, we are going to so many cities where they only have like one gay watering hole—gay experience. Like somewhere that they could actually go and be themselves instead of having to blend into the hetero-space.” Many gay bars have reputations for attracting crowds of specific interests or identity types within the queer community. Looking at the queer space, or the quantity of queer spaces, can tell us a lot about the state of queer culture in a region. If there’s only “one gay watering hole,” then it means that attendees are confined to one umbrella definition of queer entertainment curated in that atmosphere. This further indicates the amount of queer experiences available to the residents of the respective region. And even these spaces are at risk of being dictated by a heteronormative definition of a gay bar. 

In the final essay of Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar, he recalls his experiences in and out of gay bars around the world, and concludes, “If the British Nigerian queen Son of a Tutu leads a sing-along of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads,’ I feel included by the queer concept of home as elusive … Then an overexcited birthday gal attempts to get the homos around her to sing into her hairbrush, and I’m annoyed by it all.” So, based on Smalls’ and Atherton-Lin’s first-hand accounts, there are two polarizing realities that queer culture seems to be caught between. On one hand, the current anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and political agendas are trying to erase the queer identity from America. On the other hand, queerness in the mainstream has galvanized a non-violent, and—to be gracious—unconscious appropriation of queer spaces, “which is really sad,” added Smalls about the issue. “It’s so crazy because gays and queers are never necessarily trying to exclude anyone that’s not them, but I feel like we feel that energy when we go into more of the hetero space. So I’m definitely noticing less safe spaces, and that makes me feel really scared for the future.”

This reality is depressing. How can queer people thrive given both issues of queer violence and queer appropriation? Well, more events like Drag Bingo are a start. Opportunities to speak with queer role models like Naomi Smalls is even better. Maybe more drag queens on campus, in general, could be a great move for the Lions’ Pride. I asked Naomi if she had an answer to this—how do we make the world a better place? And we laughed over how cliché it sounded. “I mean honestly, and this also kinda sounds cliché, but I think it just starts with letting people be who they are. Not judging if they like the same gender as you, or if they dress the same way as you. It really is just, like, accepting people for who they are, knowing you can’t change anybody, and that you absolutely should not want to change anybody.” She laughed and called herself a cliché, again. “God, it’d be so boring if the three of us were just standing here with the same wig and lashes on, you know?” 

But why should Columbia students need queer representation when their campus is located at an epicenter of queer culture, New York City? They take classes like “Lesbian and Gay History” (taught by leading queer history scholar George Chauncey) and read queerness and gender theory in their free time, right? You might say that students from Texas A&M and UT Austin need Naomi’s inspiration more than students at Columbia, and that’s probably true. But Columbia remains an example that other institutions may follow, despite the dangerous consequences of their most recent step into the limelight—whether it be in capitulation or (God forbid) a pursuit for social change that protects its students and faculty. If nothing else, I implore the student body to take up these privileges while they have them. And if we have more events like these, let the sold-out attendance of Drag Bingo last April demonstrate that we will.

I keep returning to the optimism Naomi spoke to me with. The power of the persona. Her advice to fight the proclivity to gatekeep, and hope that more and more people fall in love with the queens we’ve spent years celebrating. Share her wisdom: “Elevate, educate, and make your dreams come true.” And I hope present and future Columbia students return to these words often as they settle down into each new academic year. Find the queer spaces on campus, or, like our drag queens in bedazzled armor, make them yourself, and make them welcoming. That way, like Drag Bingo, they’ll hopefully happen again.