2018: The Year in Drag

Date: January 11, 2018

The year’s earliest drag highlight actually had nothing at all to do with the Drag Race universe. Watch What Happens Live host Andy Cohen is pretty reliable for bringing famous queens on for bar-tending duty or for something like this: a game involving guest Taraji P. Henson and a trio of drag queens dressed up as her most iconic roles. It wasn’t just the energetic performances of Taraji’s greatest hits, it was the genuine joy that Henson took in watching these queens throw themselves into the act.

Date: March 1, 2018

So, so, so much happened in the “Handmaids to Kitty Girls” episode of All-Stars 3 that you’d think it would be hard to impress with just one verse of one song. Well, when it came time for her to step into the spotlight during the “Drag Up Your Life” stage performance, Bebe Zahara Benet proved why she had the stuff to win the very first season of Drag Race. Despite no one else on the show having the first damn clue what she was up to, Bebe laid down her “Jungle Kitty” verse, then stomped the runway beginning with what has now become a primal scream among the gay community: “RRRRRRAKATATITITATA YEAH I’M PUSSY, BITCH!”

Date: March 1, 2018

The same night as “Jungle Kitty,” BenDeLa Creme decided to give the Drag Race universe the crack of the millennium when she voluntarily self-eliminated rather than send any of her fellow top 5 queens home. DeLa was unquestionably the odds-on favorite to win the whole show when she left, and her unprecedented exit left more than just a vacuum at the top. The Drag Race fandom argued for weeks about whether DeLa’s exit was principled (she never liked the idea of queens eliminating queens) or self-aggrandizing (her exit, many felt, ensured that the eventual AS3 champ would be forever in her shadow). Whatever the reason, that little white-out scrawl on the lipstick tube added up to the gag of the season and made DeLa one of the few queens to go out purely on her own terms. We stan.

Date: March 15, 2018

After DeLa’s elimination, there was a void at the top of the All-Stars 3 pack. Shangela had won the second-most competitions and was generally considered the most “deserving.” Plus she’d been the show’s de-facto narrator all season, so we’d all been watching the season through the eyes of the show’s self-proclaimed Mother of Dragons. But when RuPaul threw in a twist that the eliminated queens would have a jury vote, sending two of the top four into the finals, Shangela met one challenge she couldn’t finish in the top 2 of. Every queen but Thorgy Thor (whom Shangela had snaked earlier in the season) voted against her, sending Trixie and Kennedy into the final, where Trixie triumphed. Shangie fans have been grousing about it ever since, but Trixie has never really looked back.

Date: March 22, 2018

Season 10 kicked off with a batch of some of the most compelling and talented queens in a long time. So filler queens in sight! The downside of a cast with no boogers is when it came time for someone to go home first, it was someone the fans had already latched on to: foghorn-voiced Vanessa Vanjie Mateo. And when it came time for Vanjie to exit the runway, her sad, retreating repetition of her own name was saddest, most melodramatic, and therefore funniest moment of the entire season. The moment took on a life of its own thereafter, as RuPaul and Michelle Visage — not to mention the other queens — could not stop saying “Vanjie” all season. Hey, if you’re going to go out first, make sure they keep saying your name.

Date: April 12, 2018

Drag Race season 10 was chock full of fan favorites, but its most important queen may well have been one of its most divisive. The Vixen showed up on day one declaring “I came here to FIGHT!” and that she certainly did, at first with Aquaria, then later (and most often) with Eureka, and finally, and most significantly, with RuPaul herself at the reunion. But more than fighting, The Vixen showed up to call out some of the most insidious streaks of racism and bias in the Drag Race fandom. It’s long been the ugly secret that drag queens of color get more hate and harrassment online and in social media than white queens, and Vixen pointing out on Untucked that her arguing with Eureka and Aquaria will end up making her look like the aggressor no matter what was a much-needed course in optics for many Drag Race fans.

Date: June 3, 2018

There’s some care that should be taken in placing Pose on a list of the best drag moments of 2018, since Pose is not strictly a show about drag queens. The house ball scene of the 1980s sometimes gets referred to as the drag ball scene, and terminology was certainly not set in stone back then, but it’s important to note that while drag queens met up at the balls, so did trans people and others who would not have necessarily identified as drag. Still, so much of modern-day culture grew out of the house balls and the worlds we get to see in movies like Paris Is Burning and shows like Pose, the latter of which was so often an exuberant and defiant celebration of ball culture. Not to mention that sharp-eyed viewers got to enjoy Season 4 Drag Race contestant Jiggly Caliente as one of the members of the House of Ferocity.

Date: June 28, 2018

Let’s be fully honest: by the end of Season 10, we in the Drag Race fandom were worn out, and that final four of Aquaria, Asia O’Hara, Kameron Michaels, and Eureka was more than a bit of a letdown, especially with such faves as Monet X. Change and Monique Heart having fallen too soon. And then the finale itself ended up being a bloated letdown filled with meaningless, perfunctory reveals (the ones that didn’t kill butterflies dead, that is) and a bunch of underwhelming lip-syncs. None of this sounds like best-of-2018 material, does it? Well, the diamond in all of that rough was Aquaria herself, who was rightly crowned the winner after being the only queen to truly shine on that finale stage. A true child of Drag Race, Aquaria really grew on the fan base and by the time she laid down her verse on “American,” it was very obvious that she deserved the crown.

Date: August 31, 2018

A Star Is Born is poised to be an Oscar juggernaut, with expected nominations — and possibly wins — for Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, the songs, the direction, the whole thing. But what nobody on the Oscar campaigns will tell you, probably for fear of losing votes, is that both Shangela and season 4’s Willam steal every inch of the scenes they appear in towards the beginning of the movie. It goes like this: famous rock star Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) stumbles into a drag bar and is transfixed by the woman on stage performing (Lady Gaga). He’s invited backstage, and while he gets about the business of, literally, peeling her eyebrows off, the show emcee (Shangela) and one of the other queens (Willam) flirt with Jackson, sass about, and even coax him into singing a song. Cooper directs these scene with a maximum of casual, realistic good humor, and Shangela and (especially) Willam are more than game for it. Willam even manages to deliver the movie’s single funniest line.

Date: October 5, 2018

Having made her mark in the Drag Race universe, it only feels right that Alyssa Edwards gets to break out into her own reality show. Part-Drag Race, part-Dance Moms, part-Queer Eye, part-“Alyssa’s Secret,” Dancing Queens was first and foremost a showcase for one of drag’s most beloved queens. The combination of a drag reality show and a competitive dancing show is truly a masterstroke.

Date: October 17, 2018

It was something of a rough year for everybody’s favorite drag version of Frick-n-Frack. Trixie left to go film All-Stars 3, they got their own show on Vice, then Katya had to take time off to deal with some of her own personal issues, during which time Bob the Drag Queen filled in to try and keep the Vice show going. Now, though, rather than a retreat, the return of “UNHhhhhh” to YouTube feels like a warm homecoming for two friends who we never truly wanted to leave in the first place.