I couldn’t escape the comparison to blackface. ![]() It was entertaining, and challenging, but I didn’t understand it. What I witnessed could be glamorously feminine, fashion-forward, scatologically sleazy or inanely poppy (in the form of drunken lip-syncs to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera songs, where the aim wasn’t to deliver a perfect piece of synchronisation but to make the audience laugh). I had started going out in East London and was encountering the drag scene first-hand. But in 2009, when that first season aired, I wasn’t watching telly. If Season 1 had arrived in 2000 I might have watched it from the beginning, alongside Big Brother and Channel 4’s radical queer shows from that period: Eurotrash, Queer as Folk and Metrosexuality (all of which could be relied on for the equal thrills of flaccid dicks and gender non-conforming characters). I was supposed to be writing a novel, but as Gia Gunn once said on All Stars: ‘What you wanna do, isn’t necessarily what you’re gonna do.’ I spent hours watching Drag Race analyses from YouTube creators such as Bussy Queen, Drag Detective, JackFed, GreenGay and the Season 9 contestant Nina Bo’nina Brown. I dedicated lunch breaks to a couple of seasons of Drag U, the unloved offshoot series in which an everyday cis women is paired with an early Drag Race queen for a makeover. Then I started on the international editions: every episode of Drag Race UK, Canada, Down Under, France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, the Philippines and Thailand – as well as the relevant spin-offs. Over the next twelve months, I watched all fifteen seasons of US Drag Race, then all fourteen of Untucked, its behind-the-scenes companion show, as well as the seven seasons of All Stars, in which queens who failed to win the series in which they first appeared compete for a second (or even third) shot at the crown. I cantered through to the Season 5 finale. Season 14 was midway through over the course of two evenings, he took me through the first seven episodes, each an hour long.īack on my own sofa, I returned to Season 1, first broadcast in 2009. ![]() But then I went to stay with a friend who was determined that I lose my Drag Race virginity. ![]() Even straight friends considered me a pariah. U ntil March 2022, I’d never seen an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the biggest queer cultural phenomenon in TV history.
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