Although films like “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar” and “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” have made drag queens a permanent part of pop culture, having grown up in Chesapeake, VA, I have to say that I went quite some time without ever seeing one live and in person…and, frankly, I had no particular complaints about that. A few years ago, however, my wife and I were up in Washington, DC, and attended a Sunday brunch – with fellow Bullz-Eye / Premium Hollywood contributor David Medsker, as a matter of fact – which featured a drag show, and I’ll never forget it.
Ever.
But, you know, it also gave me an appreciation for the amount of effort involved for a man to transform himself into a woman and pull it off without making it feel like a complete cliche…and by that, I mean that some of these guys were gorgeous. Seriously, there’s no other way to put it. There were a couple of them where, if you weren’t actively looking for their Adam’s apple, you’d never have known they were dudes.
Now, I’m not saying I’m going to be actively watching Logo’s new reality series, “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” but as soon as I heard about it, I had no hesitation whatsoever about thinking, “Yeah, okay, I can totally see the potential here.”
Unfortunately, the panel for the show wasn’t entirely as illuminating as one might’ve hoped. When the impossibly tall RuPaul emerged onto the stage, I admit to disappointment that he was not, in fact, in drag himself (though he was, however, in an impeccably tailored suit), and the disappointment continued when he seemed intent on just being a smart-ass rather than really pimping his series.
He did, however, have a trio of the contestants – in full drag, of course – wandering through the audience, providing microphones to the various critics so that they might ask questions about the show.
“This is a somber lot, isn’t it?” he asked. “Boy, oh, boy. Are you American? Do you speak English? Is there booze in your cups? Ladies, give them booze.”
They did not give us booze. RuPaul, however, gave us a very, very testy answer when one of the critics asked him what his show owed to Tyra Banks.
“Nothing!” he shouted. “And don’t you ever bring that name up again!” Looking around the audience, he then asked, “Where is his car? Shannel, key his car. Actually, security, get him out of this room now. Now! Tyra Banks? She learned everything from me, darling.” A pause. “No, that’s not true: I let her borrow all my used wigs. There, I said it.”
“But if I say it reminds me of ‘America’s Next Top Model’…” tried the critic.
“Then you are retarded,” declared RuPaul. “That’s it. Enough said. Don’t give me no Tyra shit.”
Attempts to get an answer about the origins of the series received an equally unenlightening response.
“You know, I think the universe called and we answered that call,” RuPaul claimed. “This was a show that had to be made. Whether it was come up with in a toilet stall at Illusions on Santa Monica Boulevard or…actually, yeah, that is what it was. It was a toilet stall at Illusions on Santa Monica Boulevard. That’s where the idea came from. I mean, really, it doesn’t matter. The fact is, we have this show that is going to turn television upside down. Listen, the whole world loves drag, whether they admit it or not. We live in this culture where we have this hypocritical thing where on one hand people are ashamed of drag and they think it’s misogynist or it’s this or that. On the other hand, we all love it because it’s sparkly, it’s shiny, it’s gorgeous. Look at these gowns and these outfits that these gorgeous girls are wearing. This is a show that had to be made, darling. Does it matter where it came from? You know, the egg, the chicken? Well, it’s here. Eat up. It’s here. The egg, the chicken. The chicken, the egg. What came first? I don’t care. Give me my breakfast.”
RuPaul did, however, step up to the plate and offer a legitimately serious response to one question. When he was asked to define the greatest misconception about drag artists, I think he surprised us all with his response, but I guess it was something that was close to his heart.
“You know, drag over the years has been thought of as a subversive activity by people in a seedy back alley or something,” he said. “The biggest misconception is that drag queens want to be women or they want to make fun of women. Drag queens throughout the ages, shamans, witch doctors, have always reminded a culture to not — this is important — not take yourself so seriously. My 10th grade teacher told me that years ago, and I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I do. This is all an illusion. It’s all illusion. I think it rubs against people the wrong way, drag does, because it reminds them that you aren’t who you think you are. And that blows people’s minds. They can’t deal with that. Because, in essence, they’d have to reconstruct or deconstruct their whole belief system. So, unfortunately, a lot of people can’t take drag because they don’t want to be reminded that this is all an illusion and that this stuff is not really real. It’s just vibrating at a really high level. It’s not really real, the way you think it is. That’s the biggest misconception: that we’re out to sort of turn the world dark or something. It’s crazy.”
“RuPaul’s Drag Race” premieres Feb. 2 on Logo.
