RuPaul's Drag Race and Philosophy: Sissy That Thought

By Kate Bornstein

Season 11 started in February 2019, with Britney Spears as a guest judge (overlapping with Season Four of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, which premiered in December 2018).

The latest RuPaul’s Drag Race World Tour “Werq the World” in 2019 (not in US, but in many other countries, and will be reported in the US)

Franchised national versions of RuPaul’s Drag Race to begin in other countries including Britain and Australia (will be reported in the US as part of the newsworthy phenomenon of the “mainstreaming” of RuPaul’s Drag Race).

RuPaul has won two Emmys for Best Moderation.

RuPaul’s Drag Race has won numerous Emmys, including for Best Reality-Competition Program in 2018 and more than once for Best Host of a Reality or Reality-Competition Program.

The “comedy disaster” movie Drag Queens on a Plane, starring RuPaul is in production, but no word yet of a release date.

The third RuPaul’s DragCon will be held in May 2019 in Los Angeles. The previous two DragCons were big successes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Court
• Release date: Dec 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812694826

Book preview

Category Is …

Speak, Think, Read, Werk

1

RuPaul Is a Better Warhol

MEGAN VOLPERT

Before the main contest in each episode, RuPaul’s Drag Race generally begins with a mini-challenge where contestants race to accomplish a precise task in about fifteen minutes.

These challenges are less a matter of creative vision and more about the instinct for basic drag skills that are developed by experience. More experienced queens do tend to win them. Imagine that the queens are given a mini-challenge where they have a short amount of time to do their face up in quick drag—using only black and white makeup. Seems like the judging would be pretty black and white, too, right? I mean, spare us your mime look, okay?

But watch the queens race to transform their faces with this minimalist, two-color palette. One is doing a splashy spot thing, like Dusty Ray Bottoms. Another is working on some type of animal print. Is she hoping to serve up a Dalmatian doggy style, or is it more Monique Heart’s idea of black cow stunning? We’ve got a clown face over here, a gothic scream queen over there, and fifty shades of gray.

The more they contour, the more varieties of gray we see. In the end, there are so many kinds of gray that every viewer must admit: white and black are not real, but are themselves just extreme ends of an entirely fluid spectrum.

And that’s post-structuralism in a nut sack! What appears at first to be an objective, black and white situation ultimately reveals itself as subjective and quite colorful. All the girls were given the same tools, yet no two of their faces turned up alike. How do we pick a winner? Isn’t any pick going to be totally arbitrary and therefore meaningless? Imagine that among our dozen truly gorg, wild, and alien faces, RuPaul declares that the winner is … girl with the mime face! Wha …? For serving absolute mime realness.

RuPaul’s Drag Race is a reality television competition that purports to pass its judgments on the basis of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. And it is. But among these nouns that Her RuNess is fond of applying as standards to the contest, there is this other one: realness. What is realness? Spoiler alert: it’s nothing. Let’s untuck one of my fave post-structuralists so we can learn more about it.

Category Is: Old Testament

You know Ecclesiastes? Not your trap house runner; the book of the Bible or Torah where Kohelet (government name: King Solomon) is saying that each of our lives is a glass that is half empty and also half full. That lives must be lived because we know of nothing else to do. Or you may know it better as Pete Seeger’s song Turn! Turn! Turn! We should eat, drink, and wear stiletto heels because to every queen there is a season—except for Shangela, who’s had three seasons thus far. So, in this religious book about how there is nothing new under the sun and how all is vanity, is there any commentary on realness?

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) invented one. He was a sickeningly famous French philosopher who was rather queeny in his own way. Baudrillard would have slayed at Snatch Game; he had brutally nonchalant retorts for his critics and in addition to always keeping the Library open, he had a legendary proficiency for saying things in the most complicated possible way.

Bitch was wordy, okay? Catchy, but wordy. So catching him in a contradiction involves a lot of deciphering (that I will be doing for you for the low, low price of whatever you paid for this book), but he was at least easily caught making this joke of attributing a quote to Ecclesiastes that was not actually in there.

Remember 1981? In 1981, Baudrillard published his essay, Simulacra and Simulation, which opens with a faux quote from the good book concluding that the simulacrum is true. Simulacrum sounds like the world’s most expensive under-eye de-puffer, but it isn’t. It’s a word Baudrillard invented to convey that there are different levels of reality. Four levels, to be exact. He used simulation to describe what we do all day and simulacra to describe how we appear to others. How we appear becomes a thing that is true—a thing that is real. So werk that Instagram, ’cause you are what you post. Are you posting at level-four realness, or are you basic?

Your Medium Has Four Messages

RuPaul’s Drag Race is a reality television show. We commonly understand this type of reality as somewhat non-fictional in the sense that it involves actual humans doing actions that maybe are framed as their real life or maybe are framed as a competition. Yet we know that these humans are never quite being themselves. Often their best and worst qualities are amplified deliberately, by both their natural instinct to perform for cameras and by what later gets edited in or out. We wonder how much they’re faking reality.

And we don’t know these humans in actual life anyway, so, as based in reality as they might be, we’re watching their show and they may as well be fictional characters. That’s until your fave queen’s Christmas Special tours through town and you pay $32 to realize that the lighting in your local gay bar is not at all as classy as the lighting provided by Logo or VH1. She don’t look as good, and you know it. But you’re right there in the room with her and isn’t that sickening? Sometimes it is, but other times a two-drink minimum will not rev you up to that level.

Baudrillard would have been snapping his I told you so all over RuPaul’s Drag Race, but it premiered two years after he died. The show exhibits all four kinds of realness that he identified in Simulacra and Simulation, and understanding these four types can help us better interpret what does and doesn’t make the cut on the show.

At the first level of Baudrillard’s realness, we try to make a properly faithful copy of reality. That’s when you put on Mommy’s high heels because you want to be just like Mommy.

At the second level, we make a somewhat distorted copy of reality. That’s when you put on Mommy’s lipstick, but way more layered and with a thicker lip line so that your look falls somewhere between Barbie and corner whore, compared to the relatively conservative way Mommy defines her own lip.

Third, we make a copy that has no reality. That’s when you start doing your eyebrows, gluing over them and then drawing fresh ones above with a space and placement and ultimate perfection that you never saw on nobody’s Mommy in actual life.

And finally, we make a copy of another copy, without any relationship to reality whatsoever. That’s when you start trolling eBay for #dragrace hoping to buy a knockoff of Manila Luzon’s pineapple dress from Season Three but maybe you instead end up spending twenty bucks for a T-shirt on which an image of her wearing said dress has been silk-screened, which you can wear to root for her victory in a later season of All Stars.

Now call in the Pit Crew because each of these four levels of realness deserves a deep drilling.

Level One, Reality Is: Sacrament

Baudrillard says the first thing we try to do is make an image that reflects our basic reality. An essential challenge at the heart of being a drag queen is that you’re a man remaking your body until it is perceivable as a woman’s body. Queers who are not queens will relate to this as a type of passing. Do I conform to the mainstream imagery of normal reality enough that I will not stand out in a crowd, but instead glide gracefully through the crowd unnoticed despite my inherently fabulous and unconventional nature? Can I look like a person who has a vagina, even though I’m a person who has a penis?

But these questions also feel straight basic and pretty rude because there’s no reason to assume that it’s easier for a vagina-carrying person to look like a woman. RuPaul once caught shit for thinking out loud that trans women who have been gifted vagina-carrier status via surgical procedures were not doing real drag. When that tired notion of realness jumped up and bit her right quick with the teeth of her own enormous fan base, RuPaul had to walk it back and eventually let in a smattering of trans competitors like Gia Gunn, who’s fresh bag for All Stars Season Four did not ultimately mean she had the competition in the bag. Whereas Peppermint, who served much more than simply her trans woman’s body, placed second in Season Nine.

Because stop relying on that body! Over and over again, the judges of RuPaul’s Drag Race admonish the girls who show up in nothing but skimpy scraps that they’ve got to do better than just showing off every last inch of skin. How nice that ninety-six percent of your body is naked and the other four percent you tucked away is the only part that’s doing drag. Gia Gunn got to hundred-percent lady body with no tuck required and she still had to sashay away because simply presenting your actual flesh—give or take some strategic makeup and duct tape—doesn’t bring the realness. Body queens never win without some talent upstairs and viewers often assume that a queen giving constant body must be rather stupid.

But on the other hand, the judges do respect a severe tuck. Just ask Trinity the Tuck, who once gave a sing-along tutorial on how to do it right. Tucking is one thing. Padding and body contouring are other things. All three of these things are talents and the underlying notion of all three is that you’re creating the illusion of a stereotypically feminine body. This is also why showing up in all-in-one-piece body suits doesn’t win either. The more of a stretch it is between your actual body and that feminine, created body, the greater your personal challenge in doing it. If you overcome great obstacles in your physique in order to give a feminine look, the judges will praise you for femme realness. It also creates opportunities for policing. Ask any jiggly girl or a muscle queen like Kameron Michaels how hard it is to beat the girls who serve traditionalist fish.

Baudrillard’s idea of the sacramental is also evident in any talent for impersonation. The diva is holy and that is why we worship her by means of imitation. No credit is given for an off-the-rack Cher costume. Seventies Variety Cher is not Eighties Movie Star Cher—and is Monet X Change really sporting a Native American headdress? On top of the look, which requires background knowledge of all the plausibly recognizable kinds of Cher looks you can replicate, you’ve also got to dance and sing—and you better get that warble down if it’s not a lip sync battle. If you can do the warble, you get high marks for realness.

The specificity of the Cher challenge in Season Ten was a course correction based on lessons learned from the Madonna challenge in Seasons Eight and Nine. In Season Eight the theme was Night of 1,000 Madonnas. Left to their own interpretations without the guidance of era or songs to sing, four of the queens sadly turned out the same kimono look. Kim Chi, Thorgy Thor, Naomi Smalls, and Derrick Barry each were decent copies of Madonna’s late Nineties red Gaultier kimono get-up, but any realness they happened to serve was defeated by their collective lack of originality. If the judges were only looking for fidelity to the reality of Madonna’s look, Naomi wouldn’t have had to lipsync for her life. So next-level realness requires some degree of originality.

Level Two, Reality Is: Perversion

Whereas a queen is considered talented for her reflection of a basic reality, it takes nerve to distort or pervert your reflection of that same basic reality. We’re moving now from the naive goodness involved in the sheer imitation of icons to a more bravely malevolent position of iconoclasm, where we kill our darlings. Doesn’t everyone want a little death? Why bring that level-one realness to the pink Halston pillbox hat and Chanel suit when you could put some fake blood and hot-glued macaroni noodles on it to look like brains for next-level action? That’s Parker Posey late Nineties film realness.

This is why queens whose only talent lies in proper impersonation are also ridiculed on RuPaul’s Drag Race. If you make a living off of doing Britney’s show or Madonna’s show, good for you. Certainly beats hooking, but it’s not going to beat any queens who can think outside that one brand-name box you’ve been perfecting. Even though pretty much every season features an impersonation challenge, judges do not appreciate contestants who consistently hide behind a singularly glossy character. Fortune favors the bold. Sometimes it even favors the bald, like Sasha Velour, winner of Season Nine.

Or like Eureka, who ventured where few big girls have gone before. She and her knee went splitsville in Season Nine and she had to bow out in order to heal, but then returned to successfully hit that death drop while lipsyncing for her life in Season Ten. She bounced back from Eleventh Place to Runner-Up, in part because she had the nerve to get back on that horse and ride. She successfully distorted what we understood as the maximum capability of a big girl. Eureka pushed her own limit and it worked.

But unless you’re Sharon Needles, nerve is not always rewarded as such. If Michelle Visage tells you to get over your gigantic breast plate and your next look nevertheless serves Pam Anderson realness, you have a hell of a lot of nerve and you will also be ranked as one of the bottom two contestants. Nerve sometimes means turning convention on its head, like if you pull off your feathery fly blond wig and under it’s a totally stunning neon orange wig and then reveal still more your own brown hair styled nicely close to your head, your double-reveal will likely be rewarded because two reveals show nerve where a singular reveal has become standard.

This is one problem with nerve, because thanks to all the simulacra served on the weekly through RuPaul’s Drag Race, some things that were once nervy no longer are. Starting drama in the werkroom isn’t nervy; it’s tired. It’s the most stereotypical, least original way for a queen to behave. On All Stars, where the contestants themselves mostly choose who’s going home, any queen who stirs too much shit up is absolutely going home. Yet any queen who cannot work up a good read on a fellow contestant when the Library is open is also going home, because that’s a proper venue for display of such nerve. A wig reveal has become standard practice. A death drop has become standard practice.

Disobeying Michelle Visage has not become standard practice. Clapping back on judges to make excuses for a tired performance has not become standard practice. Yet when it is done with self-awareness—and it seldom is because for the most parts it’s true that only a legitimate idiot would say boo to Ru—the results of such nerve can be fascinating the way a full speed car crash is fascinating. I mean, in Season Seven, how did Pearl not literally die in the staring contest she provoked with RuPaul in the werkroom? Why didn’t Pearl burst literally into flames after she broke a full minute of silent scrutiny by dead-panning, Do I have something on my face? We do not speak to Mother that way, no matter how much we believe we have a great personality. Pearl somehow ended up Runner-Up, which speaks to a realness beyond nerve.

Level Three, Reality Is: Sorcery

The jury is perhaps still out on whether Pearl has a great personality, but we’re now operating at a level of simulation where it doesn’t matter anyway. Baudrillard describes this form of realness as sorcery, where a queen’s representation masks the absence of any basic reality. This it factor is a large part of why Andy Warhol (1928–1987) declared that in the future everyone would be world famous for fifteen minutes.

It wasn’t just about the proliferation of television as a medium. It was also his fundamental expression of faith that everyone has enough charisma to captivate an audience for fifteen minutes—yet simultaneously a fundamental expression of his cynicism that an audience can be captivated by anything for fifteen minutes, in a glass at once half full and half empty, à la Ecclesiastes. If you want to win a season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, your charisma has got to have more stamina than a mere fifteen minutes’ worth.

Queens are not simply empty vessels of representation. Their wit is their own, and it is not the product of nerve alone. RuPaul’s Drag Race holds bigger auditions every year and the queens who can’t cast a spell on the cameras won’t be appearing in the show. Some queens audition for multiple seasons, repeatedly coming back to screen test again before they click as something special in the view of the judges. A queen is a copy of some idea of femininity, but each queen must also possess an inherent magnetism. You don’t really hear the judges flinging charisma compliments, because this level of realness is most crucial before and after the season, not during. A charismatic queen gets onto the show and a charismatic queen can have a substantive career when she gets eliminated from the show, regardless of whether she ranked highly during it.

Consider the case of Vanessa Vanjie Mateo, who was the first queen eliminated in Season Ten and who nevertheless went lucratively viral for her Miss Vanjie meme. Vanjie is a word that means nothing whatsoever. It’s derived from the word banjee, which is itself a slang term for masculine street aesthetic that has been in low-key circulation since the Eighties. Vanessa sashayed away with so much charisma that she managed to launch a nonsense word that was an homage to a word that is older than Vanessa herself.

Or consider the case of Valentina, which I will tread very lightly on so as not to cause escandalo on social media. In Season Nine, there were a few times where the judges gave her fierce feedback, then she would march into the werkroom and proclaim how great she thought she did. In her sidebar confessional, she was never coy about the judges’ verdict—she just said very frankly that she preferred her fantasy of having successfully performed and was replacing the judges’ reality with her own simulacra of winning.

Hard to argue with that, eh? The other contestants dubbed her Villaintina, yet she nevertheless won Miss Congeniality. That’s the charisma of high-glam realness, which is not altogether unusual. The mothers of most ball houses are essentially required to have it to keep their kids on track. Whatever the mother says is what goes. But how do we kick realness into overdrive? What is maximum realness?

Level Four, Reality Is: Pure Hyper

We have been through talent at level one realness, nerve at level two and charisma at level three. At level four, it’s time to look uniqueness in her very unusual face. For Baudrillard, the ultimate level of realness is the hyperreal, a pure simulation that bears no relation to any reality whatsoever. This is achieved through what he calls the precession of simulacrum, which means that the simulation comes before any reality and has no basis in it. He uses a weird fable to describe how this works.

Imagine a nation has built up a great empire. Then the mapmakers of that nation set out to make a very detailed map of the empire. The map is so detailed that it grows and grows until it is the same size as the empire itself. The map is laid down over the empire so everybody can admire how exacting it is. Meanwhile, all this mapmaking obsession has left the actual empire rather poorly maintained and the nation begins to crumble underneath its glorious map. So the citizens just live in the map now, rather than in their once great empire. The map itself becomes their territory. Underneath it, whatever fragments of the nation remain, Baudrillard calls the desert of the real. (See also: The Matrix.)

Priscilla was queen of the desert, was she not? A hyperreal drag queen exhibits nothing based on actual life. Consider the unique case of Bob the Drag Queen, winner of Season Eight. Bob was constantly trashed by the other contestants for too many ratchet looks that were all function no fashion, having no consistency of aesthetic, appearing or sounding manly, and so on. Bob’s own testimony was that she took no notice of drag until RuPaul’s Drag Race came along, and then she was called in her heart to do it. Bob is purely the product of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and in her thoroughly studied approach, her perfect map of the show’s territory led her to ultimate victory.

Bob completely understood the ins and outs of the rules and repeatedly defied expectation, for example by the unique strategy of portraying both Carol Channing and Uzo Aduba during Snatch Game, winning where nobody had ever played two characters before. In every season, the queens are big believers in stats. They track who has won how many challenges, how many times a girl has had to lipsync for her life, and so on. If you’re the first of your type of queen to do something, or the only queen to do anything, that’s inherently considered unique, even if the queens think that your particular thing was whack.

Consider the strange case of BenDeLaCrème, the only queen who ever eliminated herself. DeLa finished in fifth place during Season Six and was voted Miss Congeniality. She then went on to compete in All Stars Season 3 and is the only queen ever to win five challenges in a single season—and four in a row, no less! In Episode 6, she yet again won a lipsync for her legacy. With great legacy comes the great pain in the ass of sending home another queen, which DeLa had already repeatedly done. She became the envy and the prime target of a gagged gaggle of queens, and so, weary of maintaining her rock-solid frontrunner position, DeLa sent herself home. Uniqueness was both her blessing and her curse.

The same goes for quitter Adore Delano. In Season Six, Adore was repeatedly taken to task by Michelle Visage for relying on her natural charisma rather than any display of drag skill sets. With her fly singing voice and unusual (lazy) looks, she eventually came in Runner-Up next to Bianca Del Rio. What’s amusingly ironic about Adore’s storyline for the season is that she repeatedly accused Laganja Estranja of not acting like herself during the competition. Laganja’s over the top personality annoyed most of the other queens, and Adore was making a weird defense of Laganja by staging a kind of brief intervention over Laganja’s lack of realness.

Each queen’s uniqueness had pros and cons. When Adore got invited back for All Stars Season 2, she quit during the second episode after Michelle Visage told her she wasn’t showing growth or doing anything new. Even her brand of uniqueness had grown tired. Being the first quitter is now Adore’s legacy that obviously no queens are jumping to imitate.

What Can I Get for $100,000?

So there are four levels of realness, and so what? Well, for the queens, successfully levelling up on the realness of their charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent yields a chance of being crowned America’s Next Drag Superstar. A year’s supply of cosmetics and a hundred grand is plenty of candy for the winner. Make-up and money can take you anywhere, baby.

Baudrillard was worried about that. Much of Simulacra and Simulation uses Disneyland as a metaphor for these levels of realness just as we have been using RuPaul’s Drag Race. In the end, he concluded that transforming our daily lives into pure hyperreality was both not very good and super-duper inevitable. Girl, don’t deny: the idea of Disneyland creeps you out a little bit. We already understand why the four levels of realness can bring as much pain as pleasure for our favorite drag racers, but Disneyland is not a reality television contest. If we want to feel better about the warnings of Baudrillard as they might apply to RuPaul’s Drag Race, we’ve got to get nostalgic for a moment and focus on why RuPaul is picking superstars.

Meanwhile, Back at the Factory

Andy Warhol invented superstars. RuPaul moved to New York City the same year that Warhol died, or surely she’d have been among his superstars. Way to dodge a bullet, Mother! In the Sixties and Seventies, Warhol’s multimedia painting-photography-film-music empire was amassed primarily through the tentacles of his many superstars. These were young people full of immediate evidence of their C and U, and occasionally N—but Warhol never minded too much if they were short on the T. And that’s the tea.

He collected gorgeous women like wealthy Edie Sedgwick, and proto Pit Crew members like Joe Dallesandro. He also had a couple of judges by his side, like filmmaker Paul Morrissey serving in a sort of Michelle Visage capacity and people like Bob Colacello who riffed more like Ross Mathews or Carson Kressley. Warhol’s rotating guest judges were anybody off whom he could make a big buck to keep the whole operation going strong—Italian heiresses, New York gallerists, and so on. Make-up and money will take you everywhere, right?

Warhol’s pet superstars gave gas to the whole endeavor. They were the queens of pop culture during their reign. And there were three actual queens among them: Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis. He may have photographed many other trans women and drag performers—including himself in semi-drag once in 1981, with the help of assistant Chris Makos—but only these three won the title of superstar. What happened to them?

Jackie Curtis was an exceptionally talented playwright, director, actor, and singer. She also wrote the screenplays for several of Warhol’s most famous films,