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.
