‘RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars’ Debuts Inclusive New Theme Song with Season 6

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars is now exclusively a streaming experience. With the launch of Season 6, the star-studded Drag Race spinoff sashays onto Paramount+. But that’s not the only change made to the franchise for Drag Race All Stars 6. If you’ve already streamed the first two episodes, now available to binge on Paramount+, then you heard something new too—and it’s a change that’s 12 years in the making.

The season premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars kicked off with a new remix of the “Drag Race Theme” by RuPaul. This in and of itself is a huge deal, as the theme for both RuPaul’s Drag Race and RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars has remained virtually unchanged since the franchise debuted in 2009.

But the music ain’t the only thing that’s changed. The new theme song includes an updated vocal track with a slight—yet mighty—tweak to the lyrics. Instead of “May the best woman win” echoing over the last beats of the theme, RuPaul now sings, “May the best drag queen win.”

So this is huge, y’all.

Just on the level of a queer cultural artifact that will one day be studied, Drag Race’s rise as a phenomenon has documented not only the world’s shifting attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community, but also the way the community itself has evolved over 12 years.

The starkest example of this growth can be found in the RuMail segments at the top of every episode. From 2009 to 2014, this segment was accompanied by a soundbite and title that’s a pun on a derogatory name for the trans community—and I don’t feel comfortable typing it here, because it is not my slur to reclaim! But you know what I’m talking about! This changed with Drag Race Season 7 in 2015, with the RuMail segment now accompanied by the absolutely iconic “She done already done had herses.” Variations of that catchphrase are also used in these segments in the UK and Down Under spinoffs.

But there’s a more subtle shift that’s happened within the Drag Race lexicon over the past few years that I didn’t notice until very recently. The show’s main catchphrase, the one that’s immortalized in the seemingly immutable theme song, has always been, “Gentlemen, start your engines—and may the best woman win!” This phrase, or an ever-so-slight variation on it, is said twice in every single episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race and All Stars from 2009 to 2016. It’s said once by Ru in the Werk Room after delivering the main challenge, and again on the main stage before the runway.

In All Stars 2 in 2016, Ru started to switch things up with “Gentlemen, start your engines—and may the best all star win.” So while RuPaul’s Drag Race continued to use the “Gentlemen/Woman” combo all the way up to Season 12 in 2020, All Stars switched to “Gentlemen/All Star” for most of Seasons 2 and 3. Then there was a notable change for All Stars 4 in 2018, which included trans queen Gia Gunn. All Stars 4 used a rotating lineup of nouns (“Racers,” “ladies and gentlemen,” etc.) paired with “may the best all star win.” In 2020’s All Stars 5, the arrangement flipped and it became “All stars, start your engines—and may the best woman win.”

This period of the franchise, from 2016 to 2020, is marked by blips of change amidst a lot of tradition—and Drag Race loves its traditions. But these changes were important to note, as the show finally started to include more trans queens and trans and nonbinary narratives in every season. There is still a shocking amount of transphobia in the queer community, and Drag Race has often been at the center of those clashes. While drag and Drag Race have always been about subverting and celebrating gender expectations to a lavish degree, there was still an inaccurate assumption that all drag had to be gentlemen dressing as women. That’s never been the case (and please watch the fantastic doc P.S. Burn This Letter Please on Discovery+ if you want proof of this).

The show pivoting away from the “gentlemen/woman” dichotomy is a major deal because it opens up the spectrum of expression and inclusion that can—and should—be celebrated on this series. With no fanfare, and probably with few noticing, the entire franchise made a choice in 2021: starting with the premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 13 on January 1, 2021, the show’s most notable line now goes: “Racers, start your engines—and may the best drag queen win.”

That change can be heard in Season 13, UK Season 2, Down Under, and now on All Stars 6 (with “all stars” replacing “racers”). This change accompanies seasons that have included a trans man, Gottmik, making it to the finale of Season 13, and numerous nonbinary queens—Bimini Bon Boulash, Ginny Lemon, Etcetera Etcetera, and like, half the cast of Drag Race España—talking openly about their gender expression. It’s a beautiful thing—and now this change has been immortalized in a brand new theme song.

It’s also great that this new theme song debuted after two trans queens entered the All Stars 6 Werk Room with entrance lines directly riffing on the show’s history:

Drag Race has grown from a franchise perceived to be about gay cis men dressing up as cis women to a celebration of people dressing up extravagantly as people. It’s no longer a risk to get into male drag for Snatch Game (Shea Coulee won as Flavor Flav), queens can have beards (Madame Madness from Drag Race Holland), trans men and trans women and literally everyone between, next to, above, below, and kitty-corner from every end of the spectrum are welcome. Of course we’ve yet to see a cis woman compete on the show, nor have any drag kings been cast, so there is still progress to be made. But finally switching out “woman” for “drag queen”—which is counterintuitively a gender neutral term since people of every gender expression can and do perform as drag queens—is a great move.

And all that comes from just one line change in one theme song.

Stream RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars on Paramount+