What do you get when you mix poetry on human attraction and drag queens?

The eighth annual Gender Bender, designed to challenge social gender roles, showcased a variety of acts from the lighthearted and comical to the more serious and down-to-earth. The acts offered members of the gay community at Sacramento State a safe place to explore different avenues of bending gender perceptions in society.

“It gives the students on campus a chance to express themselves in a safe place,” said Rachel Pearman, a graduate student in gender equity in education who was involved with the PRIDE Center and the Queer-Straight Alliance as an undergraduate.

Diane Francis said the event was created to “make people question not only their own gender stereotypes, but society’s.” She said in general that gender role issues aren’t related to the gay community, but they do coincide with one another.

Sociology professor Todd Migliaccio believes perceptions about women have changed, but there hasn’t been a movement in the way perceive men.

He said men who are afraid of crying is an example of this. “Men still define themselves different as women; they try to maintain that dichotomy. Males control the dynamics and therefore control society,” Migliaccio said.

Although the event centered around acts like drag queens and poetry about gay sex, Migliaccio expressed that the way people think about gender in the workplace still needs to change.

“A woman walks into an interview and she not only has to prove that she can do this job, but also prove that she’s not letting her gender get in the way,” Migliaccio said. Employers still may be subconsciously concerned about traditional women stereotypes such as having children and being more in touch with their emotional side.

“We need to disassociate behaviors, jobs, and roles with genders,” Migliaccio said. He expressed that when we make this association, we segregate the two genders.

Alexa Harris, junior business major, hoped the event would show “that masculinity and femininity can flow together.” She explained that so often in society, men and women are believed to have their place and there always seems to be a line separating the genders from what they can and can’t do. Harris hopes that this event will show that the line isn’t so definite; she wants to show that it is not something set in stone, but rather a perception put on genders through society.

Different acts challenged different roles.

One man came up to sing a seventies’ classic, but had a bit of a hard time getting into the abnormally high Bee Gee’s-style voice. A friend in the audience popped up and offered him a purple can of “super-fabu-gay juice”, and after that, he had no problem getting into the voice range he needed. Lighthearted performances like these were mixed in with other acts such as dance routines and poetry ranging from soft and delicate descriptions about the curves of a body and the gentleness of kissing a neck, to the coarse and rough poems using phrases like “F— me.”

Each of the acts in the show were separated out by facts about gender such as “Gender is a social construction defined by the society which the person lives in,” read off by the hosts, Francisco Hernandez, sophomore environmental studies major, and senior English major Diane Francis.

Hernandez and Francis led the show in full drag, Francis dressed as a 1940’s mobster in a black button down with a white tie, complete with a hat – hair tied back, of course – and some facial hair painted on under her lip. Hernandez put on a slinky green dress that glistened when he moved awkwardly across stage in two-inch platform heels. His black wig complemented his red lipstick and black elbow-length gloves.

The two officers of the QSA lip-synced to a Frank Sinatra lounge-esque style song and flirted with each other while they were dressed in opposites.

Although no one throughout the night came out and blatantly said that they were trying to change perceptions about gender, acts like these and others challenge common gender roles in our society by switching the roles. Having the girl play the manly man who begs the sultry woman – played by a man – in the curvaceous dress to come home with him.

One of the dances consisted of four dancers – three guys and one girl – paired up translating intimate sex positions into feather-light movements across the stage to the Counting Crows song, “Colorblind.” And although no one dressed in opposites, the sexual and emotional tension was evident in the movements that pulled both the male couple and the male and female couple into body-contouring movements.

Justin Williams, junior graphic design and recreation, parks and tourism administration double major, was volunteering at the event through Unique, one of 10 co-sponsors for the week.

“It kind of lets you see it from a different perspective,” Williams said after the show. “Unless you know these people, you’re not going to see that side of their personality.”

Francis and Hernandez felt that everyone differs from what the stereotypical norm is, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation.

“People just don’t know how to relate to them,” Francis said. “They’re just a person; it doesn’t matter who they go home with at night.”

Luke Miller, junior business marketing major and member of the QSA, has hosted the show in the past two years and said the show was a lot different this year. In previous years, it’s been “lip-syncing and the standard drag show repertoire,” but this year was different. The show hosted some more serious acts.

One of Miller’s friends, Edward Nelson, a creative writing student at Sacramento City College, performed a couple songs, and danced in two dances. Nelson was lighthearted on stage, cracking jokes and laughing with his friends in the audience. When he performed, he seemed to have a serious, focused tension about his performances that demanded attention and there was nothing funny about them.

Before he performed his two songs, Nelson cracked a joke about his “sensitive singer songwriter bulls—.”

Nicole Scanlan, senior English and psychology double major and one of the event’s coordinators, mentioned that a few of the acts dropped out, so it ran a little shorter than she would have liked, but the show ran smoothly from 6 to around 7:30 p.m.

Anne Morrison can be reached at [email protected].