One of the newest performance groups on campus, the Jumbo Drag Collective, began as a senior capstone project in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department in 2022. Initially, the club was mostly made up of students from Critical Drag — a Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies course offered by Professor Kareem Khubchandani in fall 2022. After a successful end-of-semester showcase for their class, the students channeled their passion for drag performance into a new on-campus club.
Senior Ashton Gerber, who took the Critical Drag course and has been a part of the club since its founding, says the club was an incredible opportunity to channel their love of drag into an on-campus activity.
“I had always been involved in drag as a fan, but certainly not a participant,” Gerber said. “I was really excited to have that opportunity to transition into performing when I got to Tufts. It was part of the reason I came to Tufts. The Critical Drag class was a huge deal to me, so I was very lucky to have taken that class so early in my Tufts career and continue building community around it.”
The group meets in the Performance Hangar once a week to plan upcoming events, workshops and performances. The Jumbo Drag Collective typically has two performances per semester, and frequently organizes events in collaboration with the university’s LGBT Center. The meetings’ agendas vary from week to week, depending on whatever the group wants to put their energy into on any given day.
The club is open to all students with any level of drag experience, and there are no rules when it comes to putting together a performance.
“It’s largely self-directed,” Gerber said. “It’s just a space to build whatever character in whatever direction that you want to be going. Drag is inherently a very diverse art form, and we want to support people in whatever creative expression that they are interested in … we’ve had live singers, we’ve had people who are just doing lip syncs, we’ve had people who are more focused on dance. It really is whatever you want to be bringing into the space.”
The club’s biggest event of the year is Drag Me to Tufts, a performance held every March in honor of Trans Day of Visibility. The first show, held in the spring of 2023, featured four student performers alongside “Drag Race” stars Kerri Colby and Raja Gemini to an audience of hundreds in Cohen Auditorium. This show gave the group the publicity they needed to grow, allowing them to continue collaborating with performers from “Drag Race” and the Boston area. The Jumbo Drag Collective has collaborated with Boston-area drag performers at STRUT, a first-year orientation event, which has allowed members to make connections in the local drag community.
“Breaking into the drag scene is extremely difficult and can be very, very daunting, so to have the support of the group, but also Tufts as an institution, has been quite helpful,” Gerber said.
For many students, drag is a cathartic experience that allows them to express themselves creatively and step outside of their comfort zones. According to Gerber, the excitement of performing is more than worth all of the hard work that goes into it.
“You put a lot into it, but the thrill of performing and the opportunity for self-expression and creative expression is so rich and so valuable to me,” Gerber said. “We have a lot of people who were never performers. We’ve had people who are like, ‘I did sports in high school, and now I’m doing this.’”
Although Jumbo Drag Collective is primarily a performance group, it is also a valuable shared space for queer, trans and gender non-conforming students at Tufts. Gerber expressed their gratitude for the incredible community they’ve found in the group over the last two years.
“The collective has been like a major source of just community for me,” Gerber said. “[You can] express yourself in a multitude of ways without fear of judgment, and with a shared understanding that you can be whoever you need to be and want to be in that space. That’s been immensely valuable to me.”