'Like camp, which began as a private joy, an in-joke for outsiders, drag has become an open buffet for mass consumption.' e_alexjung writes
Shangela in an ad for McDonald’s. Photo: Youtube When the finale of Drag Race season 11 aired on May 30, two days before Pride Month, a sense of relief washed over me. It wasn’t that the season was bad , or that Yvie Oddly, a genuine weirdo, didn’t deserve to win , but the show had begun to feel relentless, like serving gay penance. Many of my friends had either stopped watching or did so only sporadically; the fervor of the early adopters was gone.
Shortly after the season-eight premiere in 2016, RuPaul told me that drag was the “antithesis” of the mainstream. “Listen, what you’re witnessing with drag is the most mainstream it will get,” he said. “But it will never be mainstream, because it is completely opposed to fitting in.” Nine Emmys later, Drag Race can no longer claim outsider status.
RuPaul likes to boast that the show has launched the careers of so many drag queens , and it is genuinely affirming that an entire class of drag queens can now make a living off their art. But it’s also created a monopoly. It’s difficult to imagine a viable career path independent of the show. The rise of Drag Race, then, produces an inherent contradiction: If drag is about revealing that gender is a performance, the show has produced new rules to this performance.
Nowhere does the show expose itself more than with its half-baked political statements, which seem telegraphed from the DNC. A potentially insurgent challenge like “Trump: The Rusical” culminated in a call for more female political candidates. The finale’s 50th-anniversary tribute to the Stonewall riots could have been an attempt to unearth the intimate histories of drag and trans identity, but instead ended with a limp declaration that “LGBTQ rights are human rights.
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