drag race to the bottom
Latrice Royale, a favourite from my first Drag Race season
I first watched RuPaul’s Drag Race (season 4, because I’m old) on a subway train somewhere beneath Manhattan — one earbud for the person I was crashing with, one earbud for me. The train ride wasn’t really long enough to get us through a whole episode. Still, I was compelled. I must have been newly 20 at the time, and I was a latecomer to my own history; I understood a thing or two about modern conceptions of transness and of gender, but my sole exposure to drag had been a childhood glimpse or two of Lily Savage before my parents changed the TV channel.
I’ve never been a reality TV guy. My parents came out strongly against shows like Big Brother when I was growing up, and it’s actually a stance I have always respected them for taking — not least because when its first season aired, they were fans. They watched the very first season, only to be put off when its second season (apparently; I’ve never seen it) doubled down on its exploitation of contestants’ instability. They didn’t want me to have any part of that, and their reasoning always felt clear enough to satisfy me. If I couldn’t join in with the chatter about Big Brother over lunch at school, I could at least feel smug about taking the moral high ground over my peers — for a certain kind of teen, that bloated sense of superiority is at least as good as being part of the group.
But Drag Race stuck with me. The glitter, the drama, the wink-nudge blatancy of its reality-TV stylings — it all made the ego-driven melodrama of the format feel like an inside joke. I couldn’t stop thinking about it after I came back to England; I ended up finding ways to watch it (shh) once I’d gone back for my final year of university. I burned through season 4, and then I followed along with season 5 while it aired. I’ve been watching, on and off, ever since.
It’s hard to pinpoint when Drag Race really hit the big time. Part of me wants to say season 6, whose winner has been selling out stadium tours for her brand of insult comedy; part of me wants to say season 8 or season 9, when the show started casting ‘social media queens’ who built audiences on Instagram instead of coming up through the clubs. Queens finding success in that kind of mainstream-accessible space would have felt unthinkable, I don’t doubt, to the girls who took a gamble on a brand new format and showed up for season 1.
Back then, the show’s target audience was clear: it was a show for gays, for queens, and maybe for the rest of the acronym as well. Certainly the earlier seasons of Drag Race are dissonant, now, in the way they approach the question of trans womanhood. As late as season 6, the show landed in well-deserved hot water for asking contestants to distinguish between photos of trans- and cisgender women. Hell, RuPaul got incredibly weird about a trans woman competing on the show during season 9 – and that was in 2017.
One benefit of the show finding a broader audience: that audience can more easily hold the show to account. RuPaul has since invited trans queens to compete; a trans woman recently won an All Stars season of the show. Season 13 saw the show’s first trans male contestant, and the reconfiguring of a decades-old catchphrase to reflect the show’s newly-discovered gender diversity. Drag Race is a television game show; it was never going to be at the vanguard of queer revolution. But it has been encouraging to watch it respond to changing ideas about what drag can be, and what gender can be. And it’s a joy to see a diversity of performers step into an increasingly brilliant spotlight as a result.
Fandom, of course, is a morally neutral pretend game. It is man that is evil, and the Drag Race fandom can really plumb the depths.
Reality TV viewers, to generalise, have never been great at identifying when they’re being fed a narrative. But as the Drag Race fandom grows – and grows younger – its willingness to buy into a villain edit has followed suit. Jaremi Carey, formerly known as Phi Phi O’Hara, quit drag after her second appearance on the show; she cited the abuse she received from fans after two unfavourable edits. There’s no denying that Carey came off badly on the show. But fans were eager to leap to conclusions about her character and talent, based purely on the way the show presented her. (And they didn’t seem to consider the enjoyment they derived from watching Carey and the conflict she generated, either.)
Asia O’Hara appeared in a series of looks referencing the threats she received, after her season aired
And it isn’t just about the editing, either. Queens like (and by no means limited to) Ra’jah Davenport O’Hara, Silky Nutmeg Ganache and Asia O’Hara have faced online abuse and threats of outright violence; fans famously threatened to burn O’Hara alive as her season progressed. Black queens, and other queens of colour, are disproportionately made the targets of racially-charged fan hate – usually regardless of their conduct on the show, or the way the show presents them. And even when they avoid the worst excesses of the fandom, as season 8 winner Bob the Drag Queen points out, they don’t reach the same heights of social media success as white competitors.
Fandom pressure has pushed the show to new heights of gender inclusivity, for which it should be applauded. But the same trick also works in reverse. The racial tensions between Drag Race and the history of drag came to a head on season 10, when the Vixen – a Black queen and activist from Chicago’s South Side – protested the racialised dynamics of her treatment on the show at the hands of a white competitor. RuPaul herself accused the Vixen of playing the victim, despite the competitor in question admitting to goading the Vixen into a confrontation. The Vixen recognised a lost cause, and walked off the set. RuPaul dismissed her departure as a rejection of the support the season’s cast had offered her, and Asia O’Hara – who the fandom doesn’t deserve, by the way – did the unthinkable by arguing back:
“It’s ridiculous that our thought process about people is so self-centred that if it’s hard to help somebody, well just let them struggle. We’re not just drag queens, we’re people, and now we’ve got one of our people outside. Here we are filming through Pride season and we let one of our sisters walk out the fucking room because no one wants to fucking help her. And we are the first people — we are the first people to say that people aren’t treating us right.”
RuPaul proceeded to miss the entire point:
“But look at me, goddamn it. I come from the same goddamn place she comes from, and here I am. You see me walking out? No, I’m not walking out! I fucking learn how to act around people and how to deal with shit. I’m not fucking walking out and saying ‘fuck all y’all,’ you know? That’s disrespectful to each of you. […] I have been discriminated against by white people for being Black, by Black people for being gay, by gay people for being too fem. Did I let that stop me from getting to this chair?”
RuPaul, of course, is not walking out because she has learned how to make herself – and her show – palatable to a mainstream white audience. There is visibility in that, and naturally there is also profit. But drag has been pioneered, over the years, by Black artists who actively transgressed against authority. As the show is so fond of pointing out, Marsha P. Johnson identified herself as a drag queen. By allowing the biggest platform for drag artists in the world to present white racism as an issue with two sides, one that can be resolved by Black activists ‘learning how to act,’ RuPaul took the side of respectability over solidarity. In speaking up on behalf of her friend, O’Hara – a queen whose presence on that platform came courtesy of RuPaul’s approval, and who has not returned to the show since – showed the kind of fearlessness that the franchise only rarely presents to the world.
Those self-aware reality-show trappings I mentioned earlier? They’re getting less self-aware by the episode.
A promotional image for Paris is Burning
The show’s favourite documentary Paris is Burning features drag artists discussing the performance of opulence – the impossible, thrilling fantasy of walking a ball as the kind of person who actually could ‘own everything.’ For the predominantly Black, highly marginalised members of the ballroom scene depicted in the movie, opulence was an unattainable dream. For RuPaul, the mainstream face of drag expertise and excellence, it’s life. Her net worth is estimated at around $60 million. She owns a ranch, and she is probably fracking on it. She has the authority to decide who gets to participate in a competition game show called ‘the Olympics of drag.’ Drag queens who appear on her show have a meaningful shot at mainstream success, to the point where girls audition year on year for a shot at turning their art form into a sustainable career.
Drag Race began life with its tongue firmly in its cheek. It was a good-natured parody of shows like Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model, with RuPaul plugging sponsors for the camera with a very literal wink. The teary-eyed emotional moments backstage could not have been more obviously prompted by producers. The budget was low, and the levels of camp were through the roof. And – crucially – the show’s overblown veneration of RuPaul felt like an inside joke. Didn’t Tyra Banks get to be treated like the last word in fashion on her TV show? RuPaul’s word, for all the ceremony with which it was presented, was not actually a matter of life or death.
It’s hard to pin down a watershed moment, but I’m going to try: in season 7, the top four queens were each asked to address a photo of their childhood selves on the main stage. This was a new element introduced to the show, and it was very clearly introduced as a result of a queen named Pearl. The show had been scratching like a starved cat at the locked door of Pearl’s childhood trauma since the beginning of the season; Pearl, uncharacteristically for a Drag Race contestant, had remained reticent on the subject. In fact, when RuPaul tried to coach her through a low moment, Pearl pushed back; the moment that resulted has since become one of the show’s most iconic.
(If you really want to go on a journey, watch this video of Pearl reacting to RuPaul’s unvarnished take on that confrontation, as aired on her podcast with regular judge Michelle Visage.)
I cite this moment because it marked the point at which the show’s attempts to wring narratives out of its contestants became both uncomfortably avid and substantially less tongue-in-cheek. It stopped laughing behind its hands about the melodrama of the storylines it was trying to write. Its fandom now leans young enough that Drag Race has become a reality TV formula in its own right; the kids didn’t get the references, so the references became a formula of their own, and then they hit the global mainstream in a way that codified them. The faux-high stakes of an absurd game show format have become acutely real. Girls who go home early are earnestly devastated to have blown their shot. Girls who get into conflicts on the show spend their season’s airing period terrified of the fandom and the edit. The show changes lives; it doesn’t always change them for the better.
I call O’Hara’s argument fearlessness because, in context, that’s precisely what it is. Drag Race is a monument to RuPaul – RuPaul admits as much in her reply to O’Hara, referring to the biggest global platform for drag as ‘my home,’ a place in which she deserves respect. It’s hard to deny RuPaul’s contributions to the art form. It’s equally hard to deny her interest, whether personal or financial, in her own unquestionable primacy within it.
Drag Race is, increasingly, a mandatory step for any queen who wants to achieve mainstream success. Before you write off ‘mainstream success’ as a luxury, consider the precarity in which queer performers so often live. Drag doesn’t come with health insurance benefits or a retirement plan. Contestants have appeared on the show facing bankruptcy (rest in power, Chi Chi DeVayne), seeing the $100,000 prize and the subsequent career boost as a last-ditch lifeline. It’s no exaggeration to say that the kind of money you can make as a successful ‘Ru girl’ can be life-changing.
But as the stakes of the show – the size of the prize pot, the standards of runway fashion considered acceptable – have risen, so has the financial burden of attempting to participate. I can’t outdo Rachel Miller’s fantastic deep-dive piece into the costs of appearing on Drag Race, so I won’t try. The show has not historically provided any financial assistance for contestants (I believe the recent All Stars All-Winners season offered returning queens a stipend – though given that all that season’s contestants had previously won the show’s grand prize, I wonder how they decided that this was the moment to introduce financial aid). On Drag Race UK season 3, this actually became a prohibitive factor for a massive demographic of potential contestants. Vanity Milan became the sole Black queen to appear on her season – filmed right after lockdown, which brought the UK’s nightlife scene screeching to a halt for months at a time – in significant part because the other Black queens approached by production didn’t have the resources to compete.
When Drag Race is the beginning and end of young fans’ understanding of drag, that’s a problem. Not only does it limit their perspective of what drag is or can be; it leaves queens who are working on a budget with limited avenues to build a more sustainable career. ‘Being successful,’ said season 5 winner Jinkx Monsoon on her recent return for All Stars All-Winners, ‘begets better drag.’ It’s true! And it’s equally true that success as attained via Drag Race – a game show – is heavily gatekept, and far from guaranteed.
I started watching Drag Race again shortly after I arrived in Canada. Moving internationally is, it turns out, stressful and difficult; this seemed like the least dubious self-soothing behaviour to fall back on.
In fact, it’s been interesting to get up to speed with the recent spate of international spin-offs. While Drag Race UK and Drag Race Down Under have kept RuPaul as host, most of the new iterations of the show are hosted by local queens, instead – and it kind of changes the game. In a burst of new-arrival quasi-patriotism, I’ve found myself really enjoying the light-hearted, lower-budget feel of Canada’s Drag Race – hosted by former contestant Brooke Lynn Hytes, who is a peer to most of the contestants, and whose interactions with them feel much less fraught as a result. The whole thing feels less like an exercise in sustaining one person’s legend, and more like a platform (if, admittedly, a heavily gamified one) for performance and art.
Art Arya and Pangina Heals, in Thai colours
My favourite, though, has been Drag Race Thailand. Thai queens Art Arya and Pangina Heals co-host, and tend to share the judging panel with local performers – including other drag artists, which has never happened on the original US series – rather than mega-celebrities. This diversity of perspectives, combined with a more rigorously-scored approach to judging, goes an extremely long way. I don’t doubt that the invisible hand of the production team is still at work; in fact, since it’s harder to observe, I have to assume it’s getting away with more. But I feel like I’m watching a competition, when I watch Drag Race Thailand, not a Colosseum spectacle.
Part of me will always love Drag Race, moral high ground be damned. I don’t necessarily trust it to do its contestants justice; I don’t necessarily feel good about being complicit, as a viewer, when it inevitably fails to do so. I don’t believe it should be such a monopolising force on the art of drag. But God damn it, it showed me new ways to be queer when I needed them the most. Imperfect ways, sure; messy ways, absolutely. But we could use more space for imperfection and mess in the queer world. RuPaul, VH1, please take note.