The rock group Hinder sings that "our homecoming queen was a lot like you and me ... just somebody's daughter." But that was before George Mason University elected a drag queen to reign over homecoming.
Ryan Allen, known professionally as Reann Ballslee, wearing a gold sequined top, black skirt and pumps (size 12), beat out two authentic women. Some students called it a drag (pun intended), others called it a triumph of diversity. You've come a long way, Mr. Baby.
But choosing homecoming queens has never been an exercise in equity. Life is not always fair on campus, either. Many a queen was chosen because she was the girlfriend of the quarterback. Beauty counted more than grades.
The Chi Omega girls had a lock on the crown when I was a student at George Washington University simply because they were blonde and beautiful. But even then, diversity was calling, and the administration was forced to give the student body the vote. I was "the sweetheart of Phi Alpha," a Jewish fraternity, and my boyfriend persuaded his fraternity brothers to nominate me for homecoming queen. I was the diversity token of my day.
I was also a very long shot. I was an exile from the University of Wisconsin, a radical campus that even boasted of a campus chapter of the Communist Party. I wore my hair long and uncoiffed, no make up and affected black turtleneck sweaters in class, adopting the pose of a beatnik who could cite the poetry of Allen Ginsberg.
When I wasn't hanging out at the library, I was in the Student Union drinking coffee with the foreign exchange students, often with Indians from Bombay before it was Mumbai, arguing about the status of Kashmir and deploring the evil V.K. Krishna Menon, the fiercely anti-American ambassador of India to the United Nations.
Phi Alpha and I hardly suggested a winning combination. I was never a cheerleader, and Phi Alpha had more men on the dean's list than on the football squad. But mine was the first year of elected queens (an interesting oxymoron), and nobody knew what to expect. After each girl's required interview with three professors, the students would choose from among five candidates, all female.