part0027

The guy who started it all, Socrates, already saw death as a challenge for which philosophy was the only remedy. According to his even more famous student, Plato, he said, “Philosophy is training for death.” The ancient Greeks thought that if you were successful, you would eventually enter the ranks of gods and live with them. If you were a mere commoner, you would cross the Styx and enter the underworld, something people would call Hades or Hell.

Philosophy, in Plato’s and Socrates’s understanding, was a means to come to terms with the fact that everyone has to die eventually. However, in their lifetimes the main belief about death had shifted towards thinking that once you’re dead, it partly depends on whether your peers would remember you well to be allowed entrance into the “Elysium,” some sort of post-show career for the dead.

Socrates, ultimately, was sentenced to death for arguably the same thing every queen is guilty of on a Sunday at drag brunch: impiety and corrupting the youth. From the perspective of a history of philosophy, this fate can only be described as bittersweet: Bitter, because obviously he would die by the verdict of public authority, endangering his legacy. Sweet, however, because he could prove whether he, as the first philosopher, had learned to die properly; and Socrates did. While his body was getting numb from the poison, the last thing he made sure of was that his debt for a rooster was paid off by a friend. His very last thoughts being concerned with a cock, Socrates could truly have been the drag mom of Miss Fame.

Drag Race is filled to the brim with playful or stern references to death. Most notably, there is the metaphorical “death-drop” during a lip-sync. And while the theatrics of a death-drop have saved an otherwise doomed queen before, it makes you wonder why Laganja chose to “die” right at the entrance of the show. However, there are also more conceptual approaches to death, like actual runway categories imagining how your drag character would die (Season Seven, Episode 6) or in acting challenges, where a surprising number of characters die (from Scream Queens in Season Six to RuCo’s Empire in Season Eight to Good God Girl, Get Out in Season Eleven). The exaggeration, overacting and irreverence of drag characters translates well to a similar attitude towards death.

Yet, there is a great capacity on Drag Race to remember the dead and give the grieving an adequate venue to air their feelings. Personal stories of loss, like the death of former contender Sahara Davenport, are being presented with a serious and empathetic tone. Detox’s real moment in the otherwise irreverent mini-challenge of the grieving housewife was not treated as an aberration, but as part of the show and was answered with the love and compassion of the other contestants. There are similar moments in the confessional videos of queens like Thorgy or Sasha. It shows a commitment to follow up on Ru’s promise that love is as equally a part of the show as is irreverence.

For better or worse, death is everywhere on Drag Race .

Socrates’s student Plato actually provided a helpful definition of love that goes beyond mere romantic love or sexual lust, oriented towards truth and a “connection of the souls.” Today this is well known as “platonic love” and is mostly used to describe a substantial, deep connection between two people without romantic connotations.

On Drag Race , however, “love” goes even beyond that, with RuPaul consistently pushing for everybody to understand love as a state of mind. While in the beginning of Drag Race this love seemed to be oriented inward with terms like “chosen family” and “sisterhood” among drag queens, it now has become the universal message Ru wants to be known for: “Everybody say love!” Drag Race shows time and again that love is the driving factor for, well, anything. It’s both an almost religious message, expressing Ru’s eclectic beliefs from many different spiritual backgrounds, and a non-negotiable premise of her thinking and expectancy of others.

On the other hand, there’s irreverence. This is the lack of respect for anything and anybody that wants to be taken seriously, especially when overstepping boundaries of “taste” created by the heteronormative majority. It is no surprise that queens with the capacity for being “a total fucking monster” (as Katya says about herself on All Stars 2 ) are usually rewarded with recognition of their art. And if you look closely, almost every successful queen on Drag Race has something severely irreverent about her. Sometimes it’s in the form of acting like a straight up crazy and unpredictable person on the runway like Katya, Alaska or Manila. Other times it’s by demonstrating political irreverence of being loud and outspoken about racial or economic injustices like The Vixen and Bob the Drag Queen. And sometimes, it is just enough to be at harsh odds with society’s overarching expectations that one’s mere presence as a drag queen is considered offensive by some conservative folks. Examples here would be Latrice, Trixie, or Ongina. Irreverence is the key to success, it seems, because it takes a lack of respect for limits in order to cross them.

Drag Race itself is built on the credo of tearing down everything that seems holy to people and leaving nothing standing. The show offers product placements ranging from blatantly obvious to cheekily plugged as a comment on the rampant consumerism on TV (while exploiting it at the same time). Drag Race ridicules its very own genre of competition-based reality TV by making it about sheer silliness and competitions that are barely recognizable as such. It’s a downward spiral of lustful irreverence and thereby bottomless. Burn everything down with loving disrespect.

Following the first Greek philosophers, two influential schools of thought emerged that still reverberate in the way Western culture approaches the concept of a “good life” today: Stoicism and Epicureanism. Those two could not agree on much in regard to what a good life is supposed to entail.

Stoics recommend the reduction of passions. If you don’t feel anything, you can’t be hurt and you have the mind free to concentrate on the more virtuous or reasonable things in life. While this sounds boring at best and self-destructive at worst, those ideas did have plenty of followers. First, self-control enables us to do great things. Drag queens like Violet Chachki show how we can withstand tremendous pain by being self-possessed and “Stoic” about the pain of wearing a tiny corset. And while it would be interesting to see whether some elements of toxic masculinity stem from this overexaggerated self-denial of Stoicism, that is a question for a different time. However, it seems even drag queens can learn from a healthy portion of Stoicism, mainly in the form of self-possession, poise and clearheadedness. As Ru herself says, “unless they paying your rent, pay them bitches no mind”—that only works for you if you can, in fact, disregard some passions, mostly of those of caring about the opinion of others.

Epicurus, who literally spent most of his time in his Mediterranean garden, claimed quite the opposite: it is pleasure and enjoyment that is the key to a good life. Whether you are laughing or crying, eating food or eating ass—if it contributes to your overall joy, it is generally good. However, it was not a headless eleganza extravaganza as one might think, since “Epicureanism” and its non-brand version hedonism (coming from the Greek term for “delight”) today are often shorthand for unreasonable and superficial approaches of the “live hard, die young” sort of life. Epicurus recognized that some moderation is necessary to stretch the enjoyment for a long period of time. An eleganza moderata.

Despite these two fundamentally different approaches to life both the Stoics and Epicurians did agree on a recommendation for how to deal with death: don’t worry about it. Considering that death is in fact a top-shelf worry for most people (because death-drops are even more scary off-stage and unplanned), this seems like a stunning conclusion to arrive at whether you start with joy or with self-control. However, this well-known quote by Epicurus himself illustrates the point:

The Stoics might interrupt Epicurus right at the start by yelling “Nurse!”, because to them, fearing anything at all, and thereby asking the question of what to fear, is already misguided. However, without being such a booger, you might want to argue that “death” and “I am not there” are pretty much the same. If that’s the case, you can indeed fear it, since it seems reasonable that you would fear not being there anymore.

Maybe RuPaul said it even better in her 2016 Vice interview: “I really don’t care how history remembers me—I won’t be here.”

Here it becomes clear that Ru’s point (and Epicurus’s) is not solved by merely discussing the precision of the words to describe what death is. In fact, it is about something else: the point is that once you are done, you are gone, and thereby once death arrives, the person who could complain -you- is no more. You can either worry about death but not be dead, or be dead, but not able to worry anymore. Then, why worry in the first place?

Imagine you’re a drag queen on RuPaul’s Drag Race . Certainly, a high point in your career as a drag performer so far. You are full of life, willing to show the world your talents, both tucked and untucked, having waited for this opportunity for years, with oh so many videos submitted to be in the next season. After a surprisingly disappointing week, you land in the bottom two, possibly for something you would not even consider your fault (the challenge was silly, your teammates not supportive, the sewing machine not working properly, who knows!). And before you realize it, you’re standing up there, on stage, after being reprimanded for your style, your well-planned appearance on stage, your meager performance. Then, Ru says those crucial words initiating the inevitable: “It’s time to lip-sync for your life!” You gave it your all, yet, after a moment of uncertainty, Ru becomes the reaper in drag: she claps her hands and has made her decision. “And now, sashay away.” Staying within the metaphor, you just lost the lip-sync for your life. Thereby, you died.

As bystanders, our survival assured, we perceive this moment very differently from what the queens on stage must experience. For us, it is the moment after the elimination where we gag: Sending her home? Now? We yell. We mourn the proverbial death of our favorite Drag Race queen. For them, it’s a fight for their life on the show. The moments before the verdict is announced are the most tense. But once you hear “sashay away,” it’s abundantly clear that your time on the show has ended (Shangela-conditions apply). Why worry about being on the show any longer? It almost seems silly to phrase it like this: once you’re eliminated, why would you worry about your elimination? It’s done. You cannot get eliminated twice. Then, why worry in the first place?

The worry for drag queens should be doing so badly that your legacy will be tainted, not the worry about being eliminated. You don’t want to be a Magnolia Crawford, remembered for your harsh nose contouring and pretty much nothing else. You should worry about the way you carry yourself on the show, not your death.

Irreverence is easy to spot in this case, since ancient philosophy and Drag Race blow the same horn here. There is a pre-philosophical understanding of us all for why we fear death: it is scary, it is overwhelming, it is patently unknowable what comes after, and you grow up losing the most important people in your life to it. And even worse: if nothing comes after, then every moment you waste alive is lost forever. The stakes could not be higher, and turning to Epicurus, he just shrugs it off while eating a peach in his garden. And Drag Race ? Portrays it as a playful lip-sync for your life, where after you lose, you are asked to dance away. Drag Race denies death the power to creep into your mind before you’re even close to it.

On the other side, love is there to catch every queen that is eliminated: a hug here, a sincere tear there, a lipstick mirror message (or Willam’s ass print) usually used to encourage the remaining participants and as a mini-memorial in the next episode, when the remaining queens gather in front of the mirror to discuss the role the ‘deceased’ has played in their fateful mini-community. The entire elimination process is overloaded with subtle symbolism of death, but mainly in tones of irreverence and love. Drag Race is scoffing about the notion of death: “But can you make it fashion?”

To come back to Socrates here: with all the lighthearted death symbolism, it seems like an exercise—if philosophy is training for death, then Drag Race is a perfect workout video. So, do it like Stacy Layne Matthews and enjoy some chicken wings while working out.

Jumping a few thousand years forward, a different approach to death has developed in philosophy. Most people will have heard in one way or another of the existentialist philosophy, and if only because in All Stars 4 Valentina sported the French existentialist philosopher’s look in her confessionals: a black turtle-neck, a beret, a sense for drama, and missing eyebrows fashioning an existential-crisis-invoking stare. However, existentialism makes some terrifyingly well-justified points about life. Without getting into too much detail about how it started with Kierkegaard, things certainly took off with Heidegger, and were put into overdrive by the writings of Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir. A real bunch of Heathers.

Heidegger started in his 1927 Being and Time with a somber observation: we are all thrown into life without being asked first. The nerve! This fact, what he fittingly calls “thrownness,” is the beginning of most of our philosophical thinking about existence. There is simply no reason to believe that we specifically are meant or wished to be here, and we did not receive any preparation. Your parents might have wanted to have you for a long time and could not wait to meet you, but the fact remains that your conscious self, the stream of consciousness that you refer to when talking about yourself, is thrown into this place like everybody else. No auditioning required.

If this were not enough, Heidegger stated that life can only be understood from the end, when it is way too late to change anything about it; the mode of our existence is “being-towards-death”—a certainty of death without knowing when it will come, or as Heidegger says himself, “the being factually dies, as long as it exists.” How ironic: we come into the world without being asked and all we have is the certainty that we will die and disappear again not too far in the future. This has led Heidegger to ask a fundamental question: Why is there anything, at all, and not merely nothing? Party.

At this point, Sartre looked at this philosophical program and must have thought, “Absolutely.” Because as he states in his book, Being and Nothingness , those two ingredients—that you are born without your consent and most of your life has to be understood with your death in mind—are enough to render the entire search for meaning pointless. There is no hopeful answer to Heidegger’s question. Existence is meaningless, your death is part of your laughably short time on earth, and nobody asked you to be here in the first place. That’s the T.

However, there is one upside to this. You might even have seen the slogan “existence precedes essence,” which basically means that anything’s existence is more fundamental than any property this “anything” could have. Of course, this applies to humans as well: there is no more fundamental feature about us than the fact that we are in existence. For example, the fact that Naomi Smalls exists is more fundamental about her than the fact that she has legs for days. Even if the legs are the most important thing about Naomi’s essence, existence precedes essence. Sartre then followed that if there is no fundamental feature about humans (at least not more fundamental than just being here), then we must be absolutely free. Nothing binds us to anything since we came into the world, because coming into the world is our most relevant feature.

So our lives are basically empty canvasses and we are free to draw whatever we want. Unfortunately, what sounds like a great idea claps back at you fast: if we are absolutely free because nothing is predetermined, then everything that promises you differently is a lie. Religions claiming to know what life is about, philosophies recommending certain ways to conduct yourself (remember the Stoics?), these are all false. If we want meaning in our lives, we have to build it ourselves—so we better work! Sartre encourages us to do that. One thing Sartre might endorse is becoming or cheering on a drag queen. Drag queens represent his purpose-building approach perfectly. Nothing about a drag character is more fundamental than its conception, rendering the drag persona fundamentally free to be whatever we want it to be without the whiff of meaninglessness and death in mind. It gives us a certain illusion of sense and yet it still is very much the absurdity of a man in a wig. Any form of art, in fact, is a good place to cover for the absurdity. Why shouldn’t it be drag?

Now, ladies, hold on to your wigs, because it gets worse. While Sartre declared us all doomed to be free while simultaneously noting that there are ways of creating sense for ourselves, Camus went even further down the road of absurdity. If all is meaningless and life ends in death, then, he notes in The Myth of Sisyphus , the only philosophical problem we have is whether we are required to perform suicide. In a life devoid of meaning, we certainly are tempted to ask, “why keep going?” What is keeping us here? Camus advocated for a solution he called “acceptance without resignation,” which might best be resembled by Chi Chi’s experience on All Stars 3 or Roxxxy’s on All Stars 2 .

It’s safe to assume both Chi Chi and Roxxxy went back to All Stars to prove that they were worthy of the crown. However, after not doing so hot in the first third of the competition, nobody would have bet that either of them would win their season. Yet they still gave it their all, being happy just to be there – accepting without resigning. And that is the somewhat awkward message Camus gives, too: It is all pretty much pointless, and there will never be this warm sense of purpose, but keep trying! He even went so far to declare Sisyphus a happy man. Sisyphus, doomed by the Greek gods to an eternal life, has one purpose: to roll a very heavy rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down every time once he has accomplished his exhausting task. Day in, day out.

It’s a little bit like a never-ending season of Drag Race , only Chi Chi can never go home but also never win. She will always be around, having to pointlessly compete. With Camus, we have to imagine Chi Chi as a happy drag queen. But, why? Because both Sisyphus and Chi Chi have a task. And having a task means that you can extract purpose by the virtue of having a task. And in the face of an anonymous, darkly senseless existence, isn’t even the smallest regular task and purpose a great way to live?

The idea here is that happiness is purpose-driven, and without purpose we cannot be happy. So, having an ever so small purpose will, in fact, lead to existential happiness. One might interject here: rolling a stone up a hill? Competing in a competition with no chance of winning, just knowing that eventually you die? How does this provide purpose, and by extent happiness? And it does seem a bit odd to assume that a pointless task is able to provide a sense of purpose. But in a meaningless world, the smallest sources of purpose multiply to something that can spark happiness. Better a pointless task than the existential dread of knowing that life is profoundly absurd.

What is not part of Camus’s or Sartre’s recommendation for how to deal with meaninglessness is suicide. Sartre is especially clear on this: killing yourself is not a solution, and thereby not an acceptable option. You might think that if you are radically free as Sartre claims, then certainly choosing your own death is part of that, too. But using your radical freedom to end yourself is, according to Sartre, a misunderstanding. You will never be in a position to have all ends tied up, all plans finished. Your life is always, despite the certainty of death, focused future-ward.

Even the smallest things, like having an unfinished box of eyeshadow at home, constitute a future-oriented plan for Sartre. If you knew your moment of death, you would not make plans for the day after, of course. But if you don’t make plans for the day after your death, small plans for the day before your death wouldn’t make much sense, either. When would you do your last laundry? Or buy the last bottle of shampoo? Buy a house, or a car? Ultimately, most of your plans would eventually unravel, leaving you with an empty life, in which “working towards” death means having no plans at all. Suicide, as the only action that is not future-oriented, is not a real plan. This does not mean, neither for Sartre nor any existentialist, there is a reason to judge those who have chosen to go that way. The considerations are based on whether from an existentialist perspective suicide solves the problem of meaninglessness. And it does not. Only future-ward actions can create Sartre’s subjective sense of meaning.

Drag Race offers plenty of runway moments that can count as show suicide. Arguably, Tammie Brown giving up in her lip-sync and Shannel asking to be eliminated both demonstrated that they wanted to leave the show despite having had plans for an extended stay. BenDeLaCreme’s voluntary exit from the show, however, might have been the most gag-worthy one: after winning yet another lip-sync (for her legacy, nonetheless), thereby being allowed to give one of the bottom queens the “chop,” she stunned everyone by kicking herself off instead. Some call her BenDeLaChrist, as this self-sacrifice prevented another queen from “dying,” but Sartre would not be amused (if not only because he rejected Christianity for making promises it had no business making).

Point being: DeLa had plans for more runways, for more lip-syncs, for more mini- and maxi-challenges. Her self-elimination runs contrary to her other, future-oriented plans. Charlie Hide’s poor lip-sync against Trinity can count as an example, too. Charlie’s lack of performance, a choice not caused by rib pain, we assume, is giving up on any future plans she has made. From an existentialist perspective, they gave up where they were supposed to keep looking forward. However, in Drag Race , the ever-encompassing premise of love elevates those characters to somewhat of a mythical or martyrdom status, by remembering them fondly not because they committed show-suicide, but because they made us gag. Drag Race and the drag community will always reward those standing up or stepping down for their own truths.

RuPaul herself is keenly aware of those existentialist threats to life, and the meaninglessness of life, and has developed her own brand of irreverence and love to counter those threats. Where Sartre merely suggests countering the existential emptiness by building your own purposes, RuPaul is teaching all of us a lesson in how to actually do it. Tearing down everything that needs to be torn down—from gender roles to racial barriers to set-pieces—while always encouraging “everybody [to] say love.” If we follow Ru, and I suggest we do, there is a way of dealing with the immediate, certain and unpleasant awareness that life is meaningless and will eventually end: put on some lipstick and high heels. And work it.

If existentialism is right, then there is not much more to say about death. However, some philosophers have started rejecting the entire notion of death as inevitable and thereby morally neutral. If everybody has to die, then the fact that we have to die is morally neutral. That does not mean specific deaths are not morally relevant: those that could have been reasonably prevented are not neutral. Murders, untreated but treatable diseases, accidents with human errors involved—those are all quite terrible and not morally neutral, not “tragic” in the sense of determined by fate and thereby out of reach for human interference. Alexis Michelle would probably claim her “death” from Drag Race to have been not morally neutral, as she expected her competitors to inform her if the outfit she created was off. With several of her competitors being some of the strongest fashion-aware queens on Drag Race herstory (mainly Shea and Sasha), she certainly could have learned and improved her outfit, especially her last, the “turquoise” Native American fantasy. Without any comment from her competitors, however, she assumed her outfit was great. It was not.

But what if we assume that any bad runway could be prevented by all queens working together? Or coming back to the topic at hand: what if death could be prevented if we tried hard enough?

This is one of the points of transhumanism. The idea that death is a “conditio humana” (incidentally a decent drag name), that it is one of the human conditions to eventually die, transhumanists claim, is plain false. Transhumanists want us to consider death as a disease we wrongly learned to accept as inevitable, while if we tried hard enough, we might be able to cure this “disease” and abolish death altogether. With that in mind, every single death is no longer morally neutral, but a disaster that we need to work to prevent. If we agree that death is only morally neutral if it cannot be prevented, then why not find out if we can prevent every death? The goal is a theoretically unlimited lifetime. Many philosophers have rejected this idea as something sounding better than it would actually turn out to be once everybody is living forever.

The argument goes like this: If you live forever, you don’t have to organize your life chronologically. Everything you want to do, you can always do at a later date. The future-orientation Sartre spoke of becomes irrelevant, because “future” becomes a relative notion of things you eventually will come around to do. The lack of need to prioritize and organize your time will sour the experience. To demonstrate the blandness of eternity: the logical end of this is an All Stars Hall of Fame in which eventually every single queen from Drag Race will have her picture framed, because there are only so many queens, but no time-limit to stop even Venus D-Lite to enter the Hall of Fame after enough attempts.

Imagine you have one day left alive and you will spend it at DragCon. It’s a rush to see all the queens you always wanted to see. The stress and subsequent reward of waiting and then seeing them is marvelous. Now, imagine you have a week, and every day you go to DragCon. The long lines are less bothersome or adrenaline sparking, as you can come back the next day—except for maybe on the last day, when you realize you might have forgotten something. Meeting the queens for the tenth time is also less exciting. Now, imagine you have ten years, and every single day you go to DragCon. While you might become best friends with some drag queens, nothing in there matters anymore. And now, imagine you have a thousand years—only DragCon. And then, imagine there is no “last day” where things might be relevant again for a hot second. Similarly, the thought goes, eternity changes the attractiveness of the world to those who live forever: just a place where you can do anything at any time. It kills the importance and thereby the enjoyment of doing anything at all.

Ignoring the question of whether our technological progress is in fact capable of ever keeping us alive for longer than 150 years (which would be incredible already), we might want to slow down the transhumanists here. We have no reason to believe that our minds are equipped to live much longer than 120 years. Even if you remain healthy and aware, with no signs of mental deterioration, living for double that long or with no end in sight, small psychic instabilities that we all have will become a much bigger problem. It is not guaranteed that just because you can live forever, you want to live forever. Old people become more conservative, risk-averse and some of them end up pretty nasty.

The episode of All Stars 4 in which the queens are asked to perform the “Roast of Lady Bunny” shows this nicely. True to the premise of irreverence, the roast is a eulogy, playing to the fact that Lady Bunny is old and has been in showbusiness longer than most queens have been alive. Lady Bunny is presented in an open casket and enjoys listening to all the mean things you can only say about someone after they have passed while she is pretending to be dead. With no respect for death whatsoever, every queen gets their go at it. And with Ru joining in, stating that since she has seen Lady Bunny’s apartment, Ru knows that she’s in a better place now. No need to believe in heaven, since even nothingness is better than what Lady Bunny has left in her apartment. Ru’s implicit point here is that death can be a better state to be in than alive.

It cannot be missed that one can only be this irreverent and mean to someone if on a more intimate level everyone involved knows that love abounds. Ru and Lady Bunny share a long and trusting connection, so even a shade-fest in pretending that Lady Bunny has passed is possible. No irreverence without love. Sometimes, as the eulogy of Lady Bunny shows, death (of natural causes, of course) can be a welcome change, even if it’s the final one. The thought here being: better an eternity of nonexistence than an eternity of existence.

Instances of irreverence for death in Drag Race are plentiful. The constant awareness of death is used to scoff at it like the ancient Greeks did. By accepting that nothing matters, drag can be seen as a means to cover the cold existential wind blowing through us all by creating a fantasy that conveys a convincing illusion of purpose. Drag Race , in this regard, is a concentration of such positive forces to build and advance a communal effort to ignore the inevitable nothingness that awaits us.

Yet, the goal is not to surpass death. Death is one of our sisters, and probably the most talented one—since she makes us all gag. While there’s no way of knowing when your time has come, living forever is no option. Both Drag Race and philosophy can help us to gracefully stand on the stage of life and await the inevitable after we have lost our last lip-sync battle.