Hunter Hargraves and host Mel Woods go down a rabbit hole that leads to an examination of RuPaul Charles and the lasting legacy of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Overview
In this episode, we delve into the significant impact of RuPaul's Drag Race on queer identity and culture. Opening with an overview of the podcast's focus on reality TV's influence on the queer community, the discussion highlights how Drag Race merges humour with serious themes, serving as an educational platform for queer history and evolving audience demographics, including an influx of straight viewers. The episode further examines Drag Race's contributions to local drag scenes, addresses ongoing criticisms and reflects on RuPaul's legacy and the show’s role in advancing trans representation. With an emphasis on chosen family and its broader implications for queer culture, the conversation underscores the lasting influence of queer reality TV on mainstream society.
Notes
Introduction to Get Queer Podcast (00:03 - 08:38)
Impact and Evolution of Drag Race (08:39 - 20:06)
️ Representation and Legacy (20:06 - 30:45)
Guest
Hunter Hargraves (any pronouns) is an intellectual bon-vivant and boldly queer social media presence. He teaches cinema and television arts at California State University Fullerton and he is the author of Uncomfortable Television published by Duke University Press in 2023.
00:02
Voiceover
I am doing something very sentimental for the runway today.
00:06
Voiceover
Are you?
00:07
Voiceover
Yes.
00:08
Voiceover
It’s, like, inspired by the generation of, like, gay people that we lost, like, to the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s. I have also been HIV-positive for, like, two years now
00:24
Voiceover
Sir …
00:25
Voiceover
When I, like, first got my diagnosis, I, like, felt like … I felt, like, really lost and, like, I was, like, super alone. You know, people have, like, said, like, really, like, awful, nasty things to me and, like, almost like, dehumanized me.
00:41
Voiceover
Mama, kudos for, for saying that, for spilling. Like, seriously.
00:46
Mel Woods
If you didn’t see that episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race in March of 2024, you probably saw the meme. It was, as we call in Drag Race parlance, “a mirror moment.” A contestant reminisces, confesses, gets emotional. In this case, Kansas City’s more-is-more drag queen Q is having a moment revealing her HIV status. And Boston’s stated plainly, plain Jane, matter-of-factly interjects,” Mama, kudos. Thanks for that, for spilling.” That line, paired up with screen grabs from popular movies or pop culture moments, became a viral meme. Memorable were Barbie’s granny on a bench to Barbie, Olivia Colman in anything and the well-played flashback, Bruce Willis responding to Haley Joel Osment’s “I see dead people.”
01:31
Voiceover
Mama, kudos for, for saying that, for spilling, like, seriously,
01:36
Mel Woods
Mama, kudos. Thanks for that, for spilling. It was inspired and it did inspire, like, Loosey LaDuca’s “Let Loose” or Kerri Colby as Tranos or Jujubee doing anything. These were the queer reality TV moments that permeated into other parts of the culture. But Drag Race has been doing that since the revered early seasons, creating meme-able moments and introducing phrases like “the library is open” and “cunning, uniqueness, nerve and talent” into broader culture. And though much of the tone and most of that language came from ballroom culture, it was RuPaul Charles who launched them into the entertainment universe on his show, for better or for worse. Here’s Hunter Hargraves, academic, loud and proud Instagram queer and author of Uncomfortable Television.
02:27
Hunter Hargraves
I remember watching the first and second seasons of Drag Race. It was my first year in graduate school. I was excited that I could actually write about reality television. That seemed to, like, matter personally to me. And there was a lot of ownership within queer communities over those early seasons of Drag Race, as unpolished or low budget as they now appear to us. You know, the movement from Logo to VH1 and VH1 to MTV, it represents a kind of gentrification.
02:57
Mel Woods
This is Get Queer and I’m Mel Woods. This season, we’re looking at reality TV, and its effect on queer identity in the community, in the world and in the mirror. This is episode five, “Ru-ality TV, the Game Changer.”
03:14
Mel Woods
I watched the recent season of Canada’s Drag Race, and The Girlfriend Experience is a local queen to us here in Vancouver who was on, and she’s a—
03:23
Hunter Hargraves
Huge Berlin fan.
03:23
Mel Woods
Yes.
03:24
Hunter Hargraves
We stan The Girlfriend Experience hard.
03:26
Mel Woods
We love her, and we love her in the local scene. And she’s very well known for getting nude on stage. And as soon as she was cast on Drag Race, we were like, “She’s not gonna last long on Drag Race.” Cause her, her drag is not Drag Race drag. And in many ways, RuPaul is obviously … this is his Drag Race. And he’s kind of really changed as a figure in all of that time to become somebody that the fandom somewhat kind of resents.
03:51
Mel Woods
Like, we don’t watch Drag Race for Ru. In fact, we watch Drag Race in spite of Ru. I think a lot of people would be very happy to see Sasha Colby host Drag Race or somebody else, but Ru is still there.
04:03
Mel Woods
And to be clear, that’s me speaking as a member of the fandom. I get very harrumph about Ru from time to time. My biggest harrumph is when I feel like RuPaul doesn’t respect that the audience is watching for real. When he forgets that a lot of us are not just watching for the spectacle and the broad strokes, but most of us are interested in the queens themselves, in the characters and in the people.
04:26
Voiceover
The time has come for you to lip sync for your life.
04:35
Voiceover
Get ready for the lip sync of your life.
04:39
Voiceover
Good luck, and don’t f*** it up.
04:45
Mel Woods
So it’s 2013, season five of Drag Race. That’s the season that I personally became a social viewer, watching with friends or my family. And if you’re new to Ru and her world, season five is a really good place to start, for background and for history. That’s the season of fledgling superstar Jinkx Monsoon, the mean-girl team of Alaska and Detox and Roxxxy, and the Coco Montrese and Alyssa Edwards fallout from their Miss Gay America 2010 scandal. And it’s the season of this epic Drag Race moment. The lip sync itself was pretty epic. Roxxxy introduced the double wigs reveal, Alyssa lost a shoe, they were dancing for their lives, maybe Roxxxy more than Alyssa, because just after that dance finished, just before the judging, which would send either Roxxxy or Alyssa home, in an out-of-the-blue moment, Roxxxy breaks down.
05:38
Voiceover
Sorry.
05:41
Voiceover
Are you okay?
05:43
Voiceover
So many emotions.
05:47
Voiceover
What’s going on?
05:49
Voiceover
Nothing.
05:50
Voiceover
No, tell me about it.
05:51
Voiceover
It just hit me and, like, not feeling wanted and not being good enough. I just feel like my mom never wanted me, and my mother left my sister and myself at a bus stop when I was three. And I remember it like it was yesterday. And then, like, I come off as this strong character. I try to stay so strong, but … it was so weak. It was insane.
06:19
Mel Woods
Roxxxy falls apart. It’s sad. Everybody is shaken. Ru steps into the moment and rallies Roxxxy. She takes a breath, Ru pulls herself together and on with the show. And nobody goes home. For only the third time in the show’s history, it was a double shantay.
06:40
Voiceover
Shantay, you both stay.
06:51
Voiceover
Thank you so much.
06:53
Mel Woods
And for the uninitiated, or just for fun, here’s a lexicon for the Drag Race world of other words that you need to know, or you know, as RuPaul would call it a Ruplexicon? If you shantay, you stay. Sashay, that means go away. The idea of “blame it on the edit” also has its origins here. RuPaul wrote a whole song about how he does not believe it is a thing. The wig reveal was also popularly introduced here, arguably but memorably by Shannel in season one. The double wig reveal is a tribute to Roxxxy from the Alyssa/Roxxy, “Whip My Hair lip” sync, C.U.N.T. are the things a queen needs to succeed: creativity, uniqueness, nerve and talent. The library is open: time to throw shade. Reading, by the way: throwing some shade. “Sissy that walk,” also a Ru song: either up your game or have more fun.
07:51
Mel Woods
Work: basically, good for you. Michelle Visage is RuPaul’s sidekick on the judging panel and in life beyond. They met in New York ’80s club scene, became friends in the ’90s and have been BFFs on TV ever since. A “mirror moment” is, as we had at the top, a getting-to-know-you unguarded moment with the queens getting into makeup. Often emotional and can result in bonding or shade or a combo of the two. See also, “Mama, kudos for that, for spilling.” A mirror moment also brings us the tea. And the tea is the truth that can vary in tone from shady, gossipy truth to tender truth. In the Drag Race world, the feeling of the tea leans more into the latter.
08:38
Hunter Hargraves
And it’s something that I think is unique to Drag Race, the way in which Drag Race has always tried to emphasize personal vulnerability in a way that, like, isn’t true in other shows. One of the things that you see in Drag Race is that you have contestants Adore Delano and BenDeLaCreme come back to the competition and at some point say, “Not for me, like, this actually isn’t helping. This is actually causing mental health stress,” For very different reasons, right? With Adore, it’s, it’s rooted around a lot of insecurities and her rapport with Michelle and kind of, like, opening a lot of, like, old wounds about herself and her, you know, her previous appearance on the show. And reality television exploits your image and likeness. That’s very literal.
09:21
Hunter Hargraves
Like, you sign away your rights to your image and to your, like, your body, your performance, your film self is the capital that keeps this, this factory running. So, what’s really interesting to me about how those two self-eliminations and All Stars 2 and 3, how those queens eliminate themselves and how they sort of bring attention to the mental health dialogues, you know. This is way before we’re having Bethenny Frankel talk about creating a union for reality TV performers, or the energy that we’ve seen, you know, out of the whole Love Is Blind fiasco. Is about there should be workplace protections for people. But it’s also, I think, an acknowledgement that the way that you push back against the edit, the way that you push back against this system of being in a slickly produced game is you just refuse. You say no. You say, like, “I do not want to participate in this anymore.”
10:11
Mel Woods
So there’s that side of the Drag Race moment, and then there’s also this. Three years later, and it’s All Stars season two with Adore Delano, Phi Phi O’Hara and Katya, and Alaska, and Roxxxy and Detox are also back. And it’s the reading challenge, and the library is open, and Katya looks at Roxxxy.
10:31
Voiceover
Roxxxy Andrews, I think about you all the time, especially in the morning at the bus stop.
10:38
Mel Woods
Pure Drag Race. And the fact that those two moments could exist on the same show in the same reality and not disrupt the tone of the show speaks to the queer sensibility of Drag Race. It’s always reframing the situation, indulging itself, and then immediately calling itself out, always being two things at the same time.
11:02
Hunter Hargraves
Queer people are, of course, very good about, like, those kinds of code switchings, but as an audience member, it can still feel really jarring and, you know, uncomfortable.
11:09
Mel Woods
Yeah, I feel like that’s one thing, that Drag Race has at least gotten better at it than it used to be. But I do think it does balance that often very well. When you get those mirror moments, that can be some really heavy stuff. And there’s been a few that have been handled really well, which I, you know, is not the case for Drag Race’s history completely by any means. But it does impress me compared to, again, you compare that to other things and you get queens talking about some really heavy stuff, and then you can also have the same conversation, dumb, you know, throwing plastic tits at each other and somehow it works. And that’s the magic of Drag Race.
11:43
Hunter Hargraves
Throwing plastic tits at each other is maybe one way how we, like, work through our trauma. And that’s like a very, I think, that’s actually a really great message to put out there. That’s, you know, you’re there to actually give a different kind of perspective and just change the narrative ever so slightly.
12:00
Mel Woods
And as Hunter mentioned, one of the people who changed the reality TV narrative was Adore Delano.
12:05
Voiceover
Nothing much, just trying to keep my nerves down.
12:07
Voiceover
What do you think happened?
12:08
Voiceover
A lot.
12:09
Voiceover
Bad song choice, one.
12:12
Mel Woods
We first met Adore in 2008, auditioning for American Idol under another former name. She had auditioned the year before with disastrous results, but this year she was ready.
12:25
Voiceover
[singing] “Left a good job in the city, working for myself every night and day. And I never lost one minute of sleep from worrying about the way things might have been. Whoa, big wheel keep on turning, proud Mary keep on burning …”
12:53
Voiceover
And we’ve watched Adore continue that journey more and more towards herself. We watched her tender, long-lasting friendship with Bianca Del Rio begin on Drag Race in 2014 on season six. And then in 2016, Adore returned to Drag Race for All Stars 2, where she bravely took a step back early in the season and said, “This isn’t for me right now.” It set a precedent in the Drag Race universe that paved the way for BenDeLaCreme’s shocking self-elimination via lipstick in All Stars 3. And it might have been shocking, but in both cases, Adore and Ben, it wasn’t so much dramatic as it was matter of fact. It felt real.
13:33
Hunter Hargraves
And I think now we’re starting to see how that can maybe be leveraged in other interesting ways, whether that’s Lisa Vanderpump quitting The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. In an iconic goodbye, she says, “You know what? This show is too toxic for me. I don’t want to have to engage anymore. I’m done.” To even something like on the first season of the The Traitors, someone like Kate Chastain actively decides that she’s going to kind of sabotage the game a little bit because she feels like she’s trapped. And so she just decides she’s going to, like, be a complete chaos animal to everyone. And it’s so entertaining, but also kind of like, how do you push back against the logics of reality television that just sort of say, like, “We control your image?” Like, you have to find ways to maybe interrupt the system somewhere.
14:20
Hunter Hargraves
And so I really like that. It was some drag queens, right, Adore and Ben in All Stars 2 and 3 that were, you know, advancing this as maybe one way to push back against that.
14:29
Mel Woods
Adore remains one of the characters in the greater Drag Race universe and story who continues to push back. According to an interview she gave in 2023 on Sissy That Talk Show with Joseph Shepherd, she had been in talks to come back for All Stars 6, but because production wouldn’t clear her talent show of breathing fire and smashing bottles over her head—she even had the breakaway sugar glass already custom made—she said, no, in her words,
14:54
Voiceover
I’m not gonna not do my talent show because y’all ain’t gonna f***ing goop me again. And takes … they, like, put me in the bottom when I’m singing, so I’m gonna f*** shit up if you’re gonna let me on this stage. And I said, I couldn’t.
15:06
Mel Woods
The show wouldn’t let her, so she said no. She’s taking control, which is great to see. She’s changed the narrative in the Drag Race story and in her own personal story. Adore seems to be doing well these days. She continues her friendship with Del Rio, she’s proudly sober and she’s confidently stepped into her identity as a trans woman. She said no. She told us who she was, and she changed the narrative. She’s one of the game changers too.
15:37
Mel Woods
This is Get Queer, and I’m Mel Woods, and this season we’re talking about queer reality TV: where it came from, how it got here and what it’s doing for us. This episode. “Ruality TV, the Game Changer.”
16:00
Hunter Hargraves
What I do think is really important about a show like Drag Race, you know, is the way in which we also look to it as an educational show. Even though Ru is, you know, when Ru is very insistent that, like, if you are going to do a Cher reference, you need to have a … your wig needs to be from the same decade as the look. You have to know your references. And I think that’s a very important kind of side benefit of watching Drag Race, that also needs to be sort of acknowledged that it is actually still an educational show in many ways, because it is teaching a younger generation specifically about references that, yes, don’t matter in the same way, in our sort of world of Gaga, Ariana, Dua Lipa, like kind of domination, right?
16:43
Hunter Hargraves
But also there is a queer history that gets imparted there. And I think in really important ways. We might want to think about the question of audience. Now you have a lot of straight audiences enjoying Drag Race. When you go to DragCon, it’s not just a bunch of queer people. It’s a very mixed crowd. And there are a lot of queer women and maybe straight women there who are deeply, deeply invested in the whole Drag Race fandom, which is great, right? Like more platforms, more money for these girls. You know, they’re getting their flowers, they’re getting their coin. I was at a conference in Calgary last June and some colleagues and I decided that we’re going to, you know, sample the local drag bar flavours. And we go there and we’re feeling really alienated from the show.
17:33
Hunter Hargraves
It’s a great show, but every number felt like it was basically an audition tape for Canada’s Drag Race. We’re going to show you I can do the splits, I’m going to show you I can do the kakita-kakita-kah. We’re going to show you I can do all of the things that you now associate with, like, a Drag Race number. And you know, we, the four of us that were watching this, we all, we’re all kind of from an age in which we know, we remember drag pre-Drag Race, and we’re all having kind of conflicting feelings about why this is not exciting us. And one of the things we were sort of talking about afterwards is like, maybe it’s okay that shows like Drag Race and the drag that it has now sort of inspired, doesn’t always speak to us on a personal level anymore.
18:12
Hunter Hargraves
And maybe it’s a good thing that it’s able to be more marketable and accessible to straight audiences like that, because it means now there’s going be a whole generation of straight parents to queer and trans kids who will look at those mirror chats and think maybe twice about how they choose to raise their child in a certain way. And I say that as someone that doesn’t speak to my parents.
18:34
Hunter Hargraves
So, I think it’s really cool that, you know, we’re able to maybe think about and maybe reframe some of the feelings that at least I as like a 40-year-old queer man have about Drag Race and drag in general to be, you know, to really kind of also think about what this means for the next generation and how it’s okay to maybe say, like, “I don’t always have to, like, be as excited about that anymore because it’s, it’s okay that it’s not for me. It’s, it’s actually for the next generation.”
19:02
Mel Woods
You know, and I as not quite the next generation, but, you know, I’m 28, so I’m a young millennial/elder Gen Z, I guess, and I went to university in Calgary—fun fact. But I think often when I go home and visit my mom, she loves Drag Race and she’ll be like, “Oh, all I want for Christmas are tickets to the Jinkx and DeLa show.” And she loves BenDeLaCreme, she loves Jinkx Monsoon, she loves Bob the Drag Queen. She has her very specific favourite queens. And that’s what I always … very much the point you were just making. It’s like, whenever I’m watching Drag Race and I kind of feel, like, harrumph about it’s, like, I just think about my mom and other moms watching. It and it’s like, “This is for the moms. And that’s okay.”
19:44
Mel Woods
And to be clear, my mom really does love it. But I often love it too, because it works. It’s entertaining, it’s educational, it’s edgy, but only just edgy enough to be exciting and still palatable to everyone. It’s not the G-O-A-T, you know, it’s not Are You the One? season eight. There are no fivesomes on Drag Race, but it’s edgy-ish, it’s queer, it’s visual, it has a huge fandom and it easily inspires favourites or cheering people on. And on top of that, it’s unavoidable. It’s on constantly, and throughout it, there are constant cultural reminders and touchstones. It builds on its own history and it becomes self-referential to the point of creating its own giant swirling mythology. RuPaul’s Drag Race is kind of like gay Taylor Swift: it is almost no longer just reality TV; it’s its own thing entirely. In the same way that Taylor Swift is no longer just music. It’s a phenomenon. Like sports, it’s something to talk about. And whenever I meet a new queer person, it’s immediately a point of connection. It is queer culture, whether we like it or not. But yes, I do sometimes harrumph about RuPaul, because while Drag Race is popular, it’s far from perfect. Here’s season nine’s Peppermint talking on Joseph Shepherd’s Exposed in 2023.
21:07
Voiceover
I knew that when I was preparing to go for the show, I had to mentally prepare for, okay, you’re going to have a conversation about being trans at some point, because it’s not something that’s that typical on the show. There weren’t a lot of examples to look to, so I just, I knew that it was not the norm. And so by that regard, I really wanted … I felt some pressure to perform well. I wanted people in the trans and the LGBTQ community to be proud of me, and I wanted … I knew that the show had a mainstream audience, and I wanted those folks to be able to see someone who’s trans just doing their thing.
21:47
Voiceover
Especially just coming out of 2015 and 2016, there was a lot of conversation online about appropriate words to use that also describe the trans community, and whether or not those words should be on the show. And I remember the backlash, and it certainly didn’t make me feel like, “well, come on, trans girls, let’s go to Drag Race!” Because it was not. That was not the feeling.
22:08
Mel Woods
Peppermint is referring to 2017’s season nine. She was already out and living openly trans in her personal life. And a lot of the backlash that Peppermint mentions came from the darker side of the Drag Race fandom and from the broader fandom. There was also concern about how the show represented her from the start by not being open about her transness. For some time, there has been disappointment with the handling of trans storylines and cast members by Ru and by her broader Drag Race world. But Peppermint’s presence and success on the show—she came in second to Sasha Velour—seemed to be a shift in attitude, maybe?
22:46
Mel Woods
Since then, we’ve had more trans openness on Drag Race. In 2022, season 14 started with one openly trans contestant, Kerri Colby, and by the end of the season’s airing, four more had come out as trans, with several crediting Kerri’s openness and influence in supporting them getting there. That feels like a landmark season of TV for trans representation, reality or Ru-ality or otherwise. And also in 2022, we saw Kylie Sonique Love, who’d come out as trans since her original season, go on to win All Stars 6 and become the first openly trans Drag Race winner ever. A huge achievement. Okay, Ru might be late to the protest, but she can still have a trans rights sign, I guess.
23:33
Mel Woods
So while RuPaul and the show seem to be settling the struggle with their trans identities and representations, Ru and the show still have issues around dancing a little too close to the whole capitalist flame for some people, myself included. In his Book Reality TV and Queer Identities, Michael Lovelock describes the successful Drag Race queen as, quote, “One who turns drag into lucrative remunerative labor, multifaceted enough to be capable of channeling into many different commercial contexts.” Ru never said she wasn’t for the free market.
24:05
Mel Woods
And of course, there’s also the fracking on the ranch. Here’s Hunter on Ru.
24:09
Hunter Hargraves
The RuPaul character has always, you know, from the punk rock days in the ’80s scenes that were happening in that decade, to getting a VH1 show in the ’90s, to then Drag Race. RuPaul’s career has always been about, I think, promoting the idea that you can be anyone you want. RuPaul’s great at that. RuPaul, like, knows the brand. Her brand now is America’s TV host [laughs]. Right? Out of drag, in drag, you know, we’ll be cashing those Paramount and CBS cheques, like, I don’t really … I don’t like to talk shit about RuPaul for that, necessarily, like, I think I want RuPaul to be a, a multimillionaire with … who has, who has more Emmys than, you know, any other person of colour in the television academy. I think that is a success we should be cheering.
25:03
Hunter Hargraves
You know, I think it’s easy to roll your eyes at RuPaul. He’s definitely done a lot that fracking cringe and all of that. But at the end of the day, like, I think to me, the biggest sort of legacy of Drag Race is that it created an infrastructure for queens to be compensated. Like, Drag Queen can now be a full-time job in a way that it wasn’t when I was 22 years old. And for that, Rupaul has been incredibly transformational like that. You can’t ignore the way in which he has always leaned into the logics of reality television as a way to sort of say, like, “No, you can be whoever you want. You get to decide that sort of trajectory.” It’s compelling.
25:39
Mel Woods
And that is Ru, if nothing else: compelling. And as for me on Ru, I think we are nearing peak RuPaul, if only that we’re now at more than 30 RuPaul-hosted seasons across franchises. Within the bounds of the show, it’s easy to overlook Ru because the show is about the myth and the culture of RuPaul and less of actual him onscreen. But we’re reminded when we see his mansion or watch him win more Emmys. But at the same time, we can’t rule out his influence in bringing queer culture and phrases like kiki or C.UN.T. or mama; kudos for saying that, for spilling, to mass audiences and monetizing them. And now performers are growing up influenced by the show and having the show influence their art. And largely thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race, queerness has woven itself inextricably into online cultures.
26:30
Mel Woods
The Drag Race subreddit, whole subsections of TikTok and X or Twitter, and endless analysis and recaps. You can even check out ours at xtramagazine.com with our local Drag Race herstorian, Kevin O’Keeffe. In a story by Ronan Farrow for the New Yorker promoting Rue’s recent memoir, The House of Hidden Meanings, World of Wonder’s Randy Barbato, a Drag Race producer, describes Drag Race as RuPaul’s way to, quote, “spread the rebuttal to what’s happening in the world. His way to ward off the enemy.” Maybe that’s what it is for all of us.
27:02
Hunter Hargraves
You know, no matter how many times RuPaul says, don’t “blame the edit,” the edit is still a really important tool that the show uses in order to maintain control over its narrative. Now, that doesn’t mean that, you know … and that’s also why anyone who’s listening to this, if you, if you want to work in reality television, learn how to be an editor, because you will have much more power in terms of being able to shape a story and think about that narrative in, like, so many, you know, compared to maybe other kinds of ways of breaking into the industry. But that’s neither here nor there. Sorry, we’re talking about—
27:38
Mel Woods
So, I’ve gone through all of my prepared questions. I know we’re coming up on time here. Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you wanted to really dig into? I know. I’ve. We’ve gone down the Drag Race hole several times and could truly go on forever.
27:52
Hunter Hargraves
It’s so easy. It’s like sports. Like, it’s just what we talk about.
27:57
Mel Woods
It’s just what we talk about. We queers and allies. Yeah, that includes you, Mom. In the Drag Race world, it always comes back to family. Family is something that RuPaul talks about a lot. Family is the thing that moulded us or damaged us or as the thing that we choose. Family is what makes the shade okay, what makes the hard work seem reasonable. What makes Mama Ru deserving of her trophies and her mansion. And family is how Ru calmed Roxxxy’s breakdown after that season five lip sync.
28:26
Voiceover
We love you, and you are so welcome here. You know, we, as gay people, we get to choose our family. You know, we get to choose the people that we’re around. You know what I’m saying? I am your family. We are family here. I love you.
28:56
Mel Woods
For all of RuPaul’s complexities, Drag Race’s influence, culturally, is vast and significant and here and queer. And the same can be said for what we’ve been calling queer reality TV generally. From the casual queerness of Lance Loud on An American Family and Zeke Smith on Survivor, to Pedro Zamora’s gentle but intended activism on The Real World, and the in-your-face, living-out-loud queerness of the superstars of Are You the One? season eight, to the baby-steps representation of Boy meets Boy, to the tragic cautionary tale of Miriam Rivera, reality TV has this, intentionally or not, created a portal for queerness to enter the living rooms and laptops of Middle North America, from Edmond, Oklahoma, to Red Deer, Alberta.
29:41
Mel Woods
And as Eve Ng says in Mainstreaming Gays, “more queer content means more queer fans, means more queer participants, means more queer producers, means more queer content from real queer people, real queer lives.” In reality TV, our queerness is implied and intended and casual and tender and loud and undeniable. It’s one of the foundational ways that we remember how we got queer. Thanks to my guest, Hunter Hargraves. Follow him on Instagram and check out his book, Uncomfortable Television. And a massive thanks to our tiny but mighty crew for Get Queer. Producer Daniel MacIvor, chase producer Russ Martin, consultant Rachel Matlow, sound engineer for episode one, Lito Howse and sound engineer for episodes two through five, Jamie Foulds. Get Queer was mixed at Sound Park Studios in Nova Scotia and produced by Pink Triangle Press in Toronto. In Vancouver, I’m Mel Woods. Thanks for listening.