part0019

T he segment, by now, is familiar. It’s the penultimate episode of a RuPaul’s Drag Race season; the top four queens stand before the judging panel, eager and sweating under the main-stage lights; and, as plaintive synths swell along with the suspense, RuPaul pauses the proceedings to pull out a photograph of a young kid. “What would you say,” she prods the icy aesthete Aquaria, “to little Giovanni?” Or little Jason (Violet Chachki), or little Jaren (Shea Coulée).

One by one, down the line, each glammed-out finalist must offer a heartfelt appeal to her own former image—an “It Gets Better”-style aria on the people they’ll meet, the looks they’ll turn. Eyes mist; voices wobble; Ru’s lips purse in stage-motherly pride. And then, like that, it’s over, and we’re back to our regularly scheduled pre-finale shenanigans—that is, until next season, when the photos rear their adorable little heads once more.

Call it what you will: affecting, affected; inspiration, exploitation. Still, eye-roll or no, it’s easy to recognize these scenes as expertly crafted television—aiming for, as the best of Drag Race does, that sweet-spot at the intersection of raw feeling and bombastic costumes. (If nothing else, RuPaul has helped us all realize that, however fun it might be to watch two tipsy people with an inflated sense of self-importance shout at one another across couches, it’s about eight hundred times better when they’re doing so in towering wigs and stage make-up.) More importantly, however, these talk-to-your-child-self sequences also provide viewers with a perfect microcosm of what Drag Race ’s producers have come to expect of their contestants, and what we viewers have therefore come to expect from our queens: at once a high-fashion illusioneer and a well-spring of genuine emotion.

To succeed on Drag Race , each performer has to achieve a whole new level of “realness”—that legendary metric borrowed from the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning , which borrowed it in turn from the queer and trans people of color who built the ball scene in New York City. At a ball, to achieve “realness” was to look utterly believable—to “blend,” to “pass the untrained eye” on any given street—whether that be as a diva, a businesswoman, or a construction worker.

Our modern-day Ru girl, however, must do more than present an unclockable strut down the runway; she must also sell a compelling performance of her stripped-down day-to-day self. After all, it’s the queens’ un-glam personas that make up more than two thirds of any given episode—clomping around the workroom in daywear as if there aren’t cameras in their faces; sitting opposite a producer in the interview room and pretending to react in real time to things that happened hours if not days before—all the while referring to themselves and others by stage names only. Which is to say nothing of the upkeep this hybrid self-drag persona demands after the show airs: once introduced to their adoring public, queens are obliged to perpetuate the same attitudes and catchphrases on their verified social media channels, in person for hours on end at the pricey meet-and-greets that have become a staple of the newly minted Drag Race–Industrial Complex, and so on, to the last syllable of recorded time.

Given the show’s massive and ever-skyrocketing mainstream success, as well as RuPaul’s ever-increasing emphasis on her own self-help credos (see: her latest book, GuRu , now available at a bookstore near you), these moments in which the queens are encouraged to collapse their on- and off-stage personas start to seem increasingly significant in our understanding of the state of our drag union. As Ru said flat-out while chiding a reticent Kameron Michaels toward the end of Season Ten, “Until you reveal something really honest, the audience can’t fall in love with you.” Longtime viewers likely understood what this meant without even trying: Ru was asking Kameron to be vulnerable ; to offer up a moment of human fallibility we could recognize and root for; to tell the audience something achingly, pitiably true. But it’s perhaps worth pausing here and asking ourselves: what, in Drag Race ’s vortex of self-fragmentation meets self-promotion, would “something really honest” even look like?

The art of drag appears to offer an inherent contradiction when it comes to self-conception—modeling an identity deconstruction that can also serve as a kind of identity confirmation. For a classic rehash of the “deconstruction” half of that equation, we can turn to Judith Butler, whose book Gender Trouble explores the rift between “sex” and “gender” in which drag has traditionally thrived. Working from Simone de Beauvoir’s eminently quotable assertion that “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” Butler posits that “sexed bodies can be the occasion for a number of different genders,” and ultimately, “[the fact that] the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.” Our commonly held notion of “gender,” she says, is a chimera; not only can “sex” and “gender” diverge from one another, but moreover, the “words, acts, [and] gestures” we take to represent femininity are not the result of some core, biologically-gifted womanhood, but rather exist in a vacuum of self-perpetuation. She even cites drag as a prime example of this phenomenon, because “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself,” and therefore, “Drag is an example that is meant to establish that ‘reality’ is not as fixed as we generally assume it to be.”

Still, though the cornerstone of drag is this destabilizing performance—a real-time cleaving of gender signifier from gender signified—it’s worth noting that this same performance might also provide an important source of affirmation and liberation for the performer (say, for little boys caught playing around in their mothers’ pumps). In short, a drag queen might be most “herself” while onstage in clothes she wouldn’t otherwise wear, using a name she wouldn’t otherwise prefer, moving her mouth along to a song she didn’t write. Think Latrice Royale during the “Natural Woman” lip-sync, tenderly cupping her padded faux-pregnant belly while Kenya Michaels struts and pirouettes around her. Kenya’s the one who rips off her wig, but Latrice is the one who comes across as authentic: her deeply felt performance, though understated, imbues an old song with new meaning, complicates our perception of what a “natural woman” might be, and even challenges our desire for “naturalness” at all.

Positioned as it is between self-faking and self-actualization, drag serves as a prime example of how artifice, even at its highest levels, can be a vehicle for truth, or even a necessary gatekeeper to it—how some truths require a slog through glitter and back again to attain. Consider how many transgender queens note that drag played a crucial part in coming to realize their gender identity—how Monica Beverly Hillz, Peppermint, and Gia Gunn (plus, retroactively, Sonique, Carmen Carrera, Jiggly Caliente, Kenya Michaels, and Lashauwn Beyond) model for audiences how one might be, as Gia put it during her All Stars 4 run, “a woman who participates in the art of drag.” Of course, it should go without saying that trans queens, like “faux queens” (i.e., cisgender female drag participants), don’t call their womanhood into question by engaging in the performance of heightened femininity for an audience. Rather, they help underline how gender, despite being a social construct composed of tiny daily performances, is still no less actual or important to those within a society that perpetuates it. As Edmund Husserl argues, our perceptual experience instills in us expectations that shape the seemingly objective material truths around us—such that, to live in an empathic shared reality (what he calls “intersubjectivity”) means accepting that there is more to human experience than meets the eye. In short, just because you can’t look at gender under a microscope doesn’t make it any less real . Call it the difference between the “naturalistic” and the “personalistic”—the empirical and the experiential—the same tension within which the best drag performances operate.

Perhaps my favorite description of how drag might function in relation to self-conception comes from Season 7 darling and All Stars 2 finalist Katya, in a 2017 interview with Now Toronto :

Delightful imagery aside, I’m interested here in the word emboldened —implying, as it does, that drag offers the opportunity to perform an enhancement of yourself, a version with certain qualities turned up to eleven, and thereby proposing a somewhat less binary assessment than “real” or “fake.” However, I think it’s also vital to underline the temporariness inherent in Katya’s description—her implicit respect for the context of a costume, a performance space—if only because RuPaul seems intent on eroding those very boundaries.

Think back, if you will, to Drag U , a fascinating train wreck of a show that purported to “help biological women release their inner diva” by dressing them up in bargain-basement gowns and subjecting them to drag queen tutelage—a project Ru believed in so sincerely that she couldn’t help but bristle when a group of Season Seven queens dared poke fun at it in a parody song. “Well, that was one of my favorite jobs,” she mumbles, miffed. “Did change people’s lives, you know.” Though it’s entirely possible that Ru’s indignation is overplayed for dramatic effect—later, when the queens’ final performance airs for the judging panel with the joke still included, she acts perfectly pleased—her passion for Drag U seems real enough. Discussing the spinoff in a 2012 interview with Time Magazine , she crows about drag’s capacity to “help [cis women] find their inner Superman,” because ultimately, “there’s a hero in all of us!” Drag, in Ru’s mind, need not be limited to stage and screen. It’s a lifestyle choice—“a miracle”—just waiting to be franchised. The question is, at what cost?

“Vulnerability,” as displayed on RuPaul’s Drag Race , tends to look pretty painful. Often it involves a good cry—sometimes preceded by the (transparently producer-prompted) recalling of a personal tragedy, other times by a tear-jerking video missive from a loved-one. Sometimes it does feel spontaneous—a runway meltdown, a backstage shouting match—but even these incidents can be understood as steam released from the unprecedented pressure-cooker that is a sequestered reality TV shoot: your only interaction with people you’re competing against, your every action conducted with cameras in your face. Perhaps it’s no accident that the Interior Illusions Lounge—or whatever they’re calling it these days—lines up so nicely with Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of Hell in No Exit : windowless, sparsely furnished with ornate pieces, fraught with the unending threat of observation (though I doubt even the existentialists could dream up the psychosocial quagmire of watered-down cocktails and wheeled-in TVs that comprises a typical Untucked ).

That said, it’s worth examining what kinds of “vulnerability” get the synth swells going. Judging by what we’ve seen so far, the producers have a yen for family-of-origin drama, especially if it can appear resolved in the length of a Skype message; LGBTQ+ issues with well-established rubrics for reaction (for example, the Pulse tragedy, HIV status); and self-sabotage stories that end in triumph. They have less sympathy reserved for, say, the Nina Bo’Nina Browns of the world, whose manifest struggles to cope are reduced, come judgment time, to a lost fight with her “inner saboteur”—as if it’s her fault for failing to pull herself up by her own mental health bootstraps.

Producers and judges are also prone to praise shows of “vulnerability” that aren’t really—moments that are cannily orchestrated to play “vulnerable” on TV without risking any of the actual exposure the term is, at least theoretically, supposed to entail. I’m thinking here of Shannel’s Season One lip sync to “The Greatest Love of All,” in which her elaborate Medusa-style headdress topples off—complete with a slow-motion oh no edit—as she jumps into the climactic chorus, but she manages to catch it and throw it down and keep right on faux-belting. Shantay, she stayed that night—and provided us with the show’s first-ever dramatic wig-doffing—but come the Season One reunion, she admits that she shook the costume piece off on purpose. “I had just been told that I had not shown any vulnerability,” she explains, “and I figured that the only way for me to show any level of vulnerability, to perform a song like that in an outfit like that, would be to let it go.”

“Well, it worked,” Ru responds, grinning. “’Cause it’s quite a dramatic moment on the show.” Here, we can start to understand a key dimension of Drag Race ’s brand of “vulnerability”: that honesty can become inconsequential in the face of something spectacular.

It’s also worth questioning the ethics of fueling a media empire on visible human suffering—which are, spoiler alert, murky at best. Yes, everyone is doing it (hi, Hoarders ); yes, this is what the contestants signed up for; yes, a successfully “vulnerable” moment could garner a queen scads of fan support, which could then translate into a windfall of bookings and merch sales; but at a certain point, doesn’t repeatedly coaxing an isolated, underslept, over-stressed drag queen to rip off a bit of her own emotional skin start to seem cruel? And what happens when, try as she might, a contestant just can’t deliver?

Consider Willam. Willam, the enigma of Season Four; Willam, the name-dropper, the hustler, the on- and off-camera provocateur, who worked her way from early-aughts TV extra to parody songstress to American Apparel campaign headliner, published author, and most recently, true and only star of 2018’s A Star Is Born (with the possible exception of Shangela). Willam, oh Willam. Say it with me, ladies: What did Willam do ? Well, let’s see. She put her face on a boat. She asked Milan whether the carpet was comfortable. She puked off the side of the stage. And then—in a moment I’m sure most of us have forgotten (or, Willam would probably like us to forget)—she cried.

To jog our collective memory: It’s Season Four, Episode 5. Challenge: Snatch Game. Runway: Best Drag. Willam—wearing, as she’s keen to point out, the same outfit she wore in Rihanna’s “S&M” music video—has performed her Jessica Simpson impression A-OK, and is therefore, predictably, deemed “safe.” Less predictably, as the news breaks, her face crumples, her glossy blue lips curl into something like a sob, and she turns bashfully from the judging panel. When she wheels back around, cheeks dry, she delivers the following monologue, voice halting and thick:

I’ve never had, like, girlfriends. I’ve never really been friends with other drag queens. I’ve always been an actor, on TV. I was on Boston Public with you [points to guest judge Loretta Devine]. And, um, I’m getting to know these girls, and they’re awesome. And it sucks to know that one of them is going to have to go home so I can win. So yeah, that’s it. And I’m not acting. Swear to God.

I was on Boston Public with you . It’s the kind of line that sticks out, if only for its singular cringeworthiness—a line that works, if it does at all, as a euphemism for pure, delicious insincerity in your local queer group-chat. (May we all be so enterprising as to remember to list our credits mid-breakdown!) Still, what’s perhaps most remarkable about Willam’s outburst is how fantastically it fails at its ostensible purpose—that is, to combat the judges’ concerns, expressed in episodes prior, that she might be walled-off or hyper-performative. By giving us what we’re supposed to want—a burst of emotion, a supposed peek behind the curtain—Willam only ends up distancing herself further from the holy grail of “vulnerability.” I’m not acting , she insists, and like that, we’re convinced she is. (A stark reminder, if ever there was one, that the function of language isn’t always so straightforward: sometimes belaboring a point is the fastest way to unmake it.)

What’s interesting is that, according to Willam, her tears actually began when she first took the stage; the fact that her misty-eyed speech follows the “safe” verdict is apparently all thanks to a cut-and-paste on the part of the producers. “You can’t make everything flow the way it should for a forty-two-minute show without some editing,” she said of the deceptive splice in a 2012 Entertainment Weekly interview. “I totally understand, and I applaud them for that, and it’s helped to mold me as great reality TV fodder.”

So, to recap: a man in an elaborate feminine costume stands on a stage and says “I’m not acting,” then an editor jockeys those words around to give them new implicit significance. Could you keep track? Was she right? Where was the lie?

To be fair, in the nineteen years since Survivor premiered on CBS, we’ve come to expect a certain amount of unreality from our reality television. We’re aware, on some level, that there are “producers,” that there is an “edit.” Drag Race , in fact, has made delightful tongue-in-cheek references to the tropes of mainstream, cis-het competition shows—say, by giving Vivacious’s infamous headpiece “Ornacia” her own cutaways and name-chyron; coining explicit catchphrases like “Don’t fuck it up” and “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent,” demanding contestants “lip sync for their life” with all the deathly gravitas of a Bachelor rose ceremony; not to mention self-promoting and product-plugging at every turn, often with a literal wink at the camera (“Available on iTunes!”). There’s an argument to be made that Drag Race itself, at least at its inception, was performing its own kind of meta-drag—commenting upon the inherent and delightful absurdity of reality TV by embodying it.

And still, throughout its run, the show has exhibited a surprising allergy to any perceived “inauthenticity” in its contestants. Early on, for example, queens who were uninterested in “fishiness”—that is, looking like a traditional glamorous woman—tended to receive some degree of skepticism. (Watch Ru chide Ongina in the series pilot for her baldness, her boyishness.) Later, queens who took to the runway with the uncrackable camp of a fully formed character—say, BenDeLaCrème in Season Six, perky to a fault—often got tutted at for not giving enough, for refusing to go there . Even queens without much inner turmoil to offer (Oh, sweet Kameron Michaels) are treated, come judging, as if they’re failing the implicit assignment of appearing on TV: to bare your (palatable, heartstring-tweaking) trauma for our entertainment; to make the audience “fall in love with you.”

Put another way: Willam—who excoriated producers on social media for their emotional exploitation of Monica Beverly Hillz in her coming-out arc; who, according to a now-deleted 2016 Twitter exchange with Phi Phi O’Hara, recommended smiling always while on set lest the editors snag any negative reaction shots they could wield against you—is incapable of, or at least uninterested in, the kind of “vulnerability” that Drag Race champions. Blame it on Boston Public .

“This is a serious question,” she tells host Johnny McGovern. “When did it start to be a bad thing that a drag queen is bitchy?”

“I don’t know,” McGovern hedges. “I think it’s always been in the culture of drag, darling—”

“I mean, hello!” Katya pauses here to gawp like a thoroughly bewildered walleye. “Hasn’t it always been the anomaly that a drag queen is nice?”

I bring up this exchange not to raise doubt about the inherent benevolence of your friendly neighborhood drag queen, but rather because I think it’s important to consider that what the Drag Race audience understands a “drag queen” to be might differ, in some significant ways, from what a “drag queen” historically has been or could be. Let’s not forget that the massive variety-show-style tours (such as “Battle of the Seasons”) with their meet-and-greet package deals, the explosive preteen fan-base, the unwieldy behemoth of DragCon at which queens act as both merch-hawkers and Disney-World-style photo-posing characters—these are all advents of a “drag” culture cultivated and propagated in the image and wake of one particular television show. But with great power comes great responsibility—or rather, with this great new reach comes great pressure to be palatable.

Which is why I return now to Katya and her very serious question—When did it start to be a bad thing that a drag queen is bitchy ?—and offer up one potential answer: when we decided to turn them into “great reality TV fodder.” By incorporating the queens’ offstage personas into its narrative arcs, the show asks its viewers to root for its contestants not just as artisans or performers but as people , which introduces a whole new set of parameters for both contestant and judge. For example, on Drag Race , when a queen rips off her wig mid-performance—as, say, Milan was prone to do in her lip-syncs—the traditional dynamic of a “reveal,” as a show of intensity, authenticity, is blunted. It’s just a return to the same character we’ve been watching for the previous forty minutes.

Katya herself, in fact, serves as an interesting case study. In her eleven-episode arc on Season Seven, she charmed viewers with her offbeat outfits and endlessly quotable talking-head interviews (“The Snatch Game is when we all dress up in latex frog costumes and go through a fiery obstacle course …”), but perhaps most importantly—at least according to anecdotal commentary on Twitter and various fan forums—with her absolute raw-nerve levels of anxiety. Katya shone, by her own admission, in the confessionals—that is, when speaking directly to camera (in effect, directly to the viewer), often about her crippling fear of failure. One memorable Season Seven scene shows Katya collapsing into an impromptu mini-twelve-step meeting with her fellow recovering addict Ms. Fame—publicizing, by necessity, a social construct premised on its anonymity. Then, on her All Stars run—when queens are encouraged, if not seemingly required, to trot out a reference to some popular aspect of their prior appearance (see: Alaska’s “Lil’ Poundcake” runway look and accompanying album; Monique Heart’s “brown cow” ubiquity)—Katya got in her callback by devoting a merch-based challenge to “Katya’s Krisis Kontrol,” an anti-anxiety spray, as if tacitly admitting that her nervousness was her most memorable, and most marketable, trait. A few episodes later, her final-four podcast interview with Ru and Michelle focuses almost entirely on her mental health struggles, including a classic Katya catchphrase for warding off one’s self-critical inner voice: “You know what, Brenda? Shut the fuck up!”

This phenomenon of reinforcing and capitalizing on one’s particular verbal and behavioral quirks is what the modern-day marketing aficionado (or, preteen with Internet access) might call a “personal brand.” Katya’s is a classic underdog story—a #relatable narrative into which viewers might copy-paste their own day-to-day struggles—and therefore, especially lucrative. As she quips on Hey Qween , “I was waiting for the critique of, like, ‘We need to see the fake you. You’re showing too much vulnerability’”—but, as McGovern points out, that critique would never come, because her over-sharing was the key to her connection with the audience. What all of this means in practice, however, is that “Katya” has become a walking amalgamation of the bewigged, bedazzled showstopper and all of the personal information we’ve learned about the man underneath. To watch Katya onstage, both during and after her Drag Race debut, is to understand her as someone who is overcoming self-doubt right now, in real time, before your very eyes, and with a jump-split to boot (which, to be fair, is quite compelling).

Presumably, like the queens speechifying to their childhood selves, the show’s focus on Katya’s psychological woes is something we’re meant to nod at, hand on heart, then leave behind in favor of the next spectacle. But I think that, by offering up the ever-coveted “vulnerability,” this performer has fused herself to her performance. She can’t afford to be “bitchy,” because in a post-Drag Race interactive marketplace, that “bitchiness” would contravene the character she’s supposed to be selling us. (Bianca Del Rio, meanwhile, has turned her flavor of “bitchiness” into a thriving career—and even then, she’s still expected to pose for selfies.) By encouraging us to watch these contestants “untuck”—and then demanding they bare all—Drag Race has changed, or at least complicated, the game. In short: we no longer let Katya take off her chicken suit.

By now, the infamous RuPaulism “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag” has been canonized as a mainstay genderfuck credo. Whether emblazoned on T-shirts or bopped to by contestants as the episode credits roll, the phrase ostensibly serves as a reminder that any choice we make about our appearance (from clothing to posture to manner of speech, even in our most banal, daily moments) is ours to wield as we see fit. Down with the shoulds and musts of gendered presentation; up with freedom and creativity !, and so on.

However, the “born naked” refrain also ends up serving as the cornerstone of RuPaul’s slowly-but-surely congealing self-help philosophy—a sort of giddy nihilism by way of capitalist shrewdness and one too many Zen koans. Ru is fond of explaining her outlook by bringing up the climactic scene in The Wizard of Oz , in which Dorothy pulls back the Wizard’s curtain and realizes he’s a mere mortal; she also tosses around references to The Matrix . For example, from a 2016 interview with ABC News: “You know, The Matrix says, ‘Pick an identity and stick with it.’ … Drag is the opposite. Drag says, ‘Identity is a joke’.”

Her point seems to be that, because every aspect of our self-presentation is acting as a sort of signifier (of who we imagine we are, of whom we hope others perceive us to be), the self is therefore nothing more than a canny arrangement of these signifiers. As a consequence, who you are becomes synonymous with what you can communicate. If identity is a construct, that means you’re required to construct it—so why wouldn’t you do so to your utmost advantage? Because if nothing is naturalistically, empirically real , then nothing really matters. This, we imagine, is how Ru has arrived at some of her more grating public relations incidents in the past few years—say, poopooing the very notion of trans identity as passé and overly rigid; comparing trans contestants’ gender-affirming surgeries to athletes on steroids; or telling The Vixen during the Season Ten reunion that, in short, her profound political anger means nothing if it isn’t palatable. By jumping straight from “gender is performative” to “identity is a joke,” Ru has created a universe in which all aspects of selfhood can and should be mediated and capitalized on. “Vulnerability,” then, has little to do with “truth” or “rawness” as classically understood; rather, it spells the creation of a new persona—one that looks confusingly, even troublingly, like ourselves.

“These girls,” Katya quips in her Hey Qween interview, describing the Sartrean hellishness of being cut off, during filming, from any aspect of the world outside production, “they look like they’re having so much fun, but they’re dying inside.” Her invocation of the “look” versus the “inside” feels poignant here—if only because it begs the question: would this inside, if brought outside, read as anything but a synth-swell “dramatic moment”? Because in the age of the “personal brand,” Drag Race tells us, even your deepest, most fiercely protected emotional wound—say, your Roxxxy Andrews sobbing mascara down her cheeks while recounting how her mother abandoned her at a bus stop—might boil down, when revealed, to little more than a token to trade in for the “love” of others.

It’s a dark vision of humanity that the show offers, though it’s certainly not a new one: we were all born naked, yes, but then we panicked and popped on a fig leaf and started faking desperately at one another, and now we’re never allowed to stop. So yes, Ru says, give us everything you’ve got; be “honest,” be “vulnerable”; put on your very best self-drag, and don’t you dare remove your wig—unless, of course, you have another wig on underneath.