Back in March of 2023, West Texas A&M University President Dr. Walter Wendler blocked Spectrum WT, the university’s LGBTQ+ Straight Alliance student organization, from hosting a drag show. And now in October 2025, the struggle continues.

On Aug. 18, 2025, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Wendler from enforcing a ban on drag shows being put on at the school. According to the Texas Tribune, “The 2-1 ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a lower court’s decision upholding Wendler’s 2023 cancellation of a drag show, which he argued was demeaning to women and compared to blackface.”

Whether or not Spectrum can host drag shows though, is still up in the air.

“Spectrum is the queer-straight alliance.” Spectrum president, Jonathan Jace, said. “Here on campus, we are just a very social club. We do a lot of different social events and things like that. It’s a safe place for anyone, queer or not. You don’t have to be gay, but most people that are in spectrum are gay, but yeah, it’s just a safe place for students.”

Though Spectrum is actively fighting this ongoing court case, many students were not attending the University when it originally started.

“So obviously the big topic issue is drag show performances,” Jace said. “Spectrum used to host drag performances. I’m not sure how often they did them, because I was not here when that was happening, but they hosted drag performances on campus. And around the time that Wendler became president, obviously, you know, he had a couple of different arguments [against it], including one, that drag shows demean women in the same way that black face demeans black people. Which is not true. So, you know, it is currently still an ongoing case. But it’s really just a difference of political opinion.”

While the federal appeals court did block the enforcement of the ban, the legal battle is far from over. And until it is, that means no drag show.

“Technically, we’re still fighting for it,” Jace said. “A higher circuit court voted to lift the ban, but it kind of came back down to a lower court and is going to get sent back up to the higher court again. So the ban is still not lifted yet. And until that’s the case, you know, no drag shows. But it’s an ongoing fight to be able to maintain that right of free speech and free expression in general for all students.”

The decision to block students from hosting and performing in a drag show goes beyond the performance itself. It is a blocking of their freedoms of expression and speech.

“Gay people are a hot topic right now,” Jace said. “So it’s definitely hard. I know I’ve had a lot of people in the org express their fear of being on campus just due to, obviously, the president of the university’s opinion on something that’s really intrinsic to queer culture. It’s something that we’re not going to stop fighting for. It’s just very slow, very tedious, but it’ll hopefully be worth it if we can find some sort of compromise to some degree.”

And while the issue is representative of many people’s freedoms being infringed upon, not all students are upset at WT.

“And there’s a lot of queer people that go to WT, and there’s a lot of those queer people that love it at WT, me included,” Jace said. “So it sucks, you know, because this is my home school, I’m gonna graduate from here and stuff like that. And it just sucks, you know, carrying this fear that maybe there’s people also here that don’t really like people like me. The whole situation kind of sends a message in a way, that intrinsic things like drag shows and gender expression and things like that, which are important to the queer community and queer people, are being shut down. So it just sucks that we’re not allowed to do something that kind of celebrates who we are as people and something that brings people together.”

And that’s not even mentioning the loss in numbers that Spectrum suffered after the drag show was shut down.

“We had a really large loss in numbers that were getting back now, which is awesome,” Jace said. “But for that first, like, my freshman year, there were not very many people at meetings, you could tell like officers were really tired, not as enthusiastic as they probably once were. It definitely felt like a shell of what it used to be, but now you know, kind of going forward and getting new leadership and things like that, we’re just trying to find different positives moving forward.”

The fight for the drag ban is ongoing, but Spectrum has no plans to stop fighting for the freedom to express themselves safely at WT.