RuPaul, pop culture icon
Drag Race is bringing drag mainstream, finally.
Sitting on Twitter during an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race these days, it’s hard to imagine the show once debuted to a niche audience.
The social-media friendly competition show, lead by Mama Ru, as RuPaul is known by his girls, has had quite a month.
There was the triumphant Season 3 finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars, which concluded as the No. 1 original cable program in its time slot with its March 15 finale, the highest ever for the series. The next day, the new album from All Stars’ newly crowned winner Trixie Mattel, One Stone, debuted at the top of Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. A week later, the Season 10 premiere featured a guest appearance from Christina Aguilera.
Now, it seems that main- stream pop culture is catching up to drag, with Drag Race enjoying a new level of exposureas it celebrates its 10th season. Between the ballooning ratings, thanks to the shows’ new home on VH1 ( where it jumped from LGBT cable channel Logo for Season 9), episode recaps posted all over mainstream media and the show’s notoriously vocal social media fanbase, audiences seem more receptive than ever to the cheekily transgressive art form that has sashayed from underground clubs and drag balls onto basic cable.
And considering the history of drag is one of struggle, of the queens of decades past risking their lives to perform a thenpersecuted art, it’s even more culturally significant that Drag Race isn’t just surviving, but thriving after a decade of shows.
“I think one of the most important parts of mainstreaming is a safety that can come with doing drag now,” said Aquaria, who at 22 years old is one of Season 10’s younger cast members. “Being a drag queen out on the subway or out on the street is still not the most safe thing you can be doing. So I think, I know, the normalization of drag and drag culture has definitely opened up people’s minds in some parts of the world.”
With Season 10, Drag Race has been around long enough to see young viewers who grew up watching RuPaul go on to compete as contestants.
“This season has queens who literally grew up watching the show,” 57-year-old RuPaul told USA TODAY via email. “In fact, two of them were 11 years old when the show first premiered.”
Another one of Season 10’s younger queens is The Vixen,
26, who cited the political elements of RuPaul’s early drag performances as a major inspiration.
“I’ve grown up with drag,” she said. “It’s been nearly 10 years of Drag Race. I was 17 when it started. So for me, it’s all I know, really, as far as gay culture. Of course I did my homework, I learned my history, but Drag Race is a very big part of my adult queer culture. I think a lot of Millennials have grown up almost with RuPaul as like a guide.”
Yet, for all the benefits the mainstreaming of drag can have on younger generations’ exposure to the art form, straight culture is painfully late to the movement, according to Mattel.
“Drag is the best-kept secret,” Mattel said. “Because drag has been amazing, drag has been cool, and by nature, drag has been for everyone. But everyone hasn’t tuned in until now. There’s this idea that you have to be gay to like drag, or you have to be a woman to like drag. It’s like, ‘ Do you like the movie Mrs. Doubtfire, do you like White Chicks? Then yes, you do like drag.’ “
“Enjoying something from another culture and visiting another art form, it’s just called being open-minded,” she continues. “You don’t have to go to art school to enjoy the art museum. It’s funny watching the world catch up with this thing.”
The dark side of mainstream culture’s “enjoying” of drag is how it can double as appropriation, from queens’ vocabulary of “yass” and “shade” becoming popular parlance to shows like Lip Sync Battle stealing Drag Race‘ s schtick and stripping away its queer elements.
Before Vanessa Vanjie Mateo — aka Miss Vanjie — became a viral sensation when she was eliminated on Season
10’s first episode, she shared her own characteristically feisty thoughts about the appropriation of drag.
“Drag has been going on, and y’all are just now catching up,” she said. “You know, the queens, we’re innovators, and they always steal our style. So this is something that’s been going on underground, they’re just now figuring it out and getting with the program, and that’s why they’re stealing everything we do, the way we talk, the way we dress, everything.”
RuPaul lands somewhere in the middle of this debate about whether drag has achieved its rightful place in society, or whether mainstream culture has just swallowed it whole, saying his show represents a shifting societal perspective.
“The great cultural divide that we’re experiencing worldwide is made up of two groups, people who accept a global view and those who don’t,” RuPaul said. “Our show represents an open global attitude that forward thinkers are attracted to, and more viewers of our show would mean the conversation is being pushed forward.”
And amid such a tumultuous political climate, a little compassion — by way of a sixfoot-tall queen cartwheeling across the stage in a floorlength gown — may be just what pop culture needs, argues Mattel.
“We support each other, we double down and with everything that’s going on. It’s a great time for people to turn on the TV and see a show like Drag Race,” she says. “Because not only does it showcase us as artists, it humanizes us, more than many people have seen before.”
All-Stars winner Trixie Mattel says, “Drag is the best-kept secret.”