By Ashton Calo
Correspondent
Amidst the looming chaos of finals season, everyone is scrambling to end the semester with a bang, including the school’s various clubs and residential halls around campus.
The College’s LGBTQ+ organization, PRISM, is no exception. As an epic finale to Queer Awareness Month, PRISM hosted its annual Queerball as a celebration of queer joy.
“It was a nice way for people to sort of come together and just forget about anything going on and just focus on having fun,” said Noah Gajewski, a sophomore sociology major and the membership engagement chair of PRISM.
Since this year’s Queerball fell in October, it was a Halloween-themed event where guests dressed in spooky costumes with dance music, beverages and, of course, candy.
Queerball was held in the Intercultural Center at Roscoe L. West. To get in the spooky season, E-board members adorned the tables with orange and black, along with cotton cobwebs and trick-or-treat baskets, holding sweet treats for those who dared show their faces.
The dance kicked off on Oct. 27. The lights went out, and it wasn’t long before students began trickling in with an array of costumes.
Some of the iconic faces among them were Jason Todd of DC comics, Velma from “Scooby Doo,” Ellie from “The Last of Us” and an inflatable dinosaur costume.
The most beloved of them all was none other than Dr. Robotnik Eggman from the Sonic franchise, which garnered widespread attention and no shortage of photos from partygoers.
As announced by PRISM’s president Meg Socas, this year’s Queerball was also hosted to honor the memory of O’Shae Sibley, a 28-year-old dancer who was fatally stabbed at a Brooklyn gas station.
O’Shae Sibley was a gay man known for his talents in art and choreography. He was especially revered for his talent for Voguing, which is a style of dance meant to imitate models on a catwalk.
The event featured vogue music as a tribute to his life and career in voguing.
The night quickly sparked with energy, and soon, most of the guests were on their feet, dancing the night away.
In addition to vogue music, there were also notable dances like the Macarena and the Cupid Shuffle, where everyone got on the dance floor single file if they weren’t already.
“Whether you’re great at dancing or you’re really bad, it’s nice to just have a good time,” said Gajewski.
This year, Queerball featured a new event: Karaoke, where guests could choose any song with a backing track and sing their hearts out. People covered tracks by an array of artists, including the Crane Wives, Lovejoy, Modern Baseball and Radiohead.
If you couldn’t make it to Queerball this year, don’t be too bummed. PRISM is host to numerous events over the academic year, like Drag Bingo, the Coming Out Monologues and the Drag Show.
