Bianca Del Rio is back home in New York, resting up after performing a sold-out show in Amsterdam. It’s not the first time the drag queen has been to the Netherlands’ capital city, and it surely won’t be the last. Next week, she’ll land in Tel Aviv for a two-night event, before kicking off a three-month tour across the U.S. Plus, a dozen or so Canadian cities, as well as stopovers in Latin American countries including Brazil and Argentina, are already dated for 2022. This is the life of a star. “Who would have thought?” Del Rio asks now. After all, it’s quite a leap from winning a TV competition.
But as its millions of global fans can attest, RuPaul’s Drag Race is no ordinary reality show. Since its quiet 2009 debut on the LGBTQ+-focused Logo TV network, the series has not only made countless careers, but introduced—and, in turn, redefined—an entire art form to the global general public. The original U.S. version of the show has been spun off in iterations from Europe (U.K.; Spain) to Asia (Thailand) to Australia (Down Under); the brand can now boast of a Vegas residency. For years, the ideas of a drag fan and of a Drag Race fan have been synonymous.
All the while, it’s given hundreds of queer people a national TV platform, not just to showcase their talents but to reveal who they are. “Drag Race tells our stories,” says Trixie Mattel, contestant on season 7 and winner of All-Stars 3. “You watch through the feathers and the beads and the magic, but you really watch because it’s the American dream in real time.” Early seasons featured groundbreaking discussions of living with HIV and identifying as transgender; contestants today still tell stories of unaccepting parents, emotional and sexual traumas, and overcoming all this in their pursuit of stardom—and beyond.
This, amid rapidly changing culture and occasional controversy: It was only a few years ago that Drag Race’s namesake, RuPaul, had suggested that trans women who’d undergone gender confirmation surgery would not likely be cast, and declined to discuss the issue with Vanity Fair in a 2019 cover story, adding: “I know what I am. I come from a place of love. I’m not here to make people feel bad.” The show and its host have generally evolved in step with the times, though, rather than ignore criticisms—openly trans queens who’ve undergone surgery now compete more regularly, such as season 13 runner-up Gottmik, and the show’s language has changed to be more inclusive and less cis-normative. “When I was growing up, the word trans wasn’t even in our vocabulary, it wasn’t even a thing,” says Michelle Visage, a producer and judge on the show. “[RuPaul and I] come from a different generation, but it shows that we’re also willing to learn and listen and move with the times.”
Look no further than Drag Race’s reigning champ, Symone, to see just how deeply new contestants believe in pushing drag’s boundaries through the show, an urgency felt by many in the community. “I want to do things that have never been done,” says Symone. “I want to be in spaces that haven’t been occupied by people that look like me. I want to expand the notion of what drag can be.”
There’s no better platform to pull that off.
Recently, Visage asked RuPaul whether he could have ever imagined Drag Race getting as big as it’s become. The answer was, obviously, no. “This show started made by queer people for queer people on a very small, queer cable network,” she tells me. “Nobody had any idea that it would be the worldwide, Emmy Award–winning phenomenon that it is now.” (The show is up once more for the best-competition Emmy, which it’s won for three years running.)
Nowadays, it’s near-impossible to imagine a Drag Race contestant who isn’t obsessed by, and completely familiar with, the show. Its nickname, “Drag Olympics,” holds up: It is the showcase, the opportunity, for queens with aspirations beyond local success. But for many of the show’s biggest breakouts, that’s not what it represented at the time. “Seeing drag on TV was something I wasn’t used to, so I just took it as, ‘It’s a fad, it won’t last,’” Del Rio says. She’d gotten into watching the previous season or two before joining for season six, but not religiously. After it aired and she emerged victorious, the performer—an insult comic who blends clown-inspired makeup with the withering stylings of Don Rickles—was in her late 30s and knew the clock was “ticking.”
“It was a whirlwind. It was doing every possible club gig that I could possibly do, every gay pride that I could possibly do,” she says. “I said yes to all of it knowing that my plan was to use it as a platform to then create my solo touring shows that I still tour with today.” She charged ahead not expecting a national, let alone global, embrace. “To be in Australia, to be in Hong Kong, it blew my mind that they even knew who I was or even cared,” she says. “That’s when you realize the little power of television.”
The experience was similar for Mattel, who joined the Drag Race family a season later. The series was quickly gaining in popularity, and Mattel saw it as “the best way to get yourself on a billboard.” She “fiercely” believed in her character, both artistically and commercially: a satirical, occasionally shocking spin on the Barbie doll (which Mattel was obsessed with as a kid). She didn’t even have her eyes set on winning, exactly: “Even if I couldn’t pull a win, I was doing something that nobody had done.”
Before Mattel’s season maybe a dozen people would come to a typical show of hers; after she lost her Drag Race season but won the All-Stars that followed, she was traveling the world like Del Rio, stunned by the response. She remembers going to the U.K. for a tour early on in her post–Drag Race career: “There would be lines around the block. I’m like, ‘How do these people even know who I am?’ People who have never met you, who would otherwise have no idea who you are, have this deep, personal connection with you…. I don’t know them, but they really feel like they know me.”
Mattel has released multiple Billboard Folk Top 20-charting albums—her newest, Barbara, came out last year—and, with her frequent collaborator Katya Zamolodchikova, recently became a New York Times best-selling author. She has nearly 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube and, along with Del Rio, has topped 2 million followers on Instagram. “A few of us, like me and Bianca, have gotten to have these insane careers that before, honestly, only RuPaul had ever had,” Mattel says. It’s a level of celebrity that, perhaps outside of early American Idol, would be unheard-of as a product of a reality show. The implications of that are even more significant.
Michelle Visage came of age in what the world of drag looked like pre–Drag Race—which is to say, for the vast majority of its existence. She calls the level of marginalization for the then club culture “extreme,” and that even within the queer community, a stigma surrounded it. “I’d say, let’s go to a drag show, and people within the community were like, ‘Ew, girl, no, we’re not going to a drag show,’” she recalls. “So the fact that it is where it is today is just remarkable…. Drag is in the forefront now because of RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
She’d hear stories of queer kids getting kicked out of their parents’ house, and wanted more for the artists she saw perform. “I could never understand why this wasn’t up there with other modalities that are art mediums, like sculpture and painting,” she says. “This is as intense and as incredible and as profound as any kind of art form, in my opinion.”
Enter Drag Race. Now, “Boys and girls can watch it with their grandparents, and cackle and laugh, and see that it is an art form,” Del Rio says. There are massive conventions and global tours—Del Rio is the first drag queen to have performed a solo show at the storied Wembley Arena—as well as boozy brunches and watch parties. “It’s pretty amazing that in the face of gay bars closing left and right, and queer spaces evaporating,” Mattel says, “something like Drag Race is very strongly, accidentally stimulating the economy and creating jobs and creating interest in an art form that honestly was built to be hidden.”
For most casual observers, Drag Race defines drag. Visage says she first noticed the audience for the form changing, as a result of the series, when she herself started performing again early in its run. (Visage identifies as a cisgender drag queen.) The audience, at first, was “98% gay men.” Then she saw couples coming. “I then started noticing parents with their children—sometimes a dad with their gay child—and that was really eye-opening,” she continues. “I would meet them after the show with their child and the child would be trans, the child could be queer, the child could be just a misfit. And the parent would say, Thank you for helping us understand our child. We couldn’t understand this child. We always loved them, but we didn’t know what was going on, or who they were. Watching Drag Race together has brought us together.”
This gives the form more of a spotlight, of course—allows space for queens like Mattel and Del Rio to soar in their careers—but some argue there’s a trap to this “mainstreaming,” too. “Drag Race has gotten so mainstream that the actual gay audience is actually slightly less interested,” Mattel argues, “because now when they go to a drag show, they are shoulder to shoulder with 18-year-old girls.”
Adds Del Rio, “I remember Ru once said that she didn’t think drag would ever be mainstream. I’m like, ‘Well, she might have to take that back.’”
For a TV program to transform the very nature of an art form is unprecedented. The extent to which Drag Race has done this is debatable. “I don’t think it’s changed as an art form; I think it’s progressed,” Visage says. “What we don’t ever want to lose is the F-you to society story line. That was always there with drag.” To that point, Mattel makes a key point about her own art, even as she’s now seen as one of Drag Race’s most broadly successful contestants: “Being shocking and gross to many is part of what I like about drag. If drag ever got to the point where everyone totally accepted it and loved it, I don’t think any of us would do it anymore. What is the point?”
And the fact is, drag still isn’t totally beloved or even respected. Mattel tells me about an article she recently read that referred to her as “a drag queen who is often seen with A-list celebrities,” laughing it off. Of course, Mattel is about as big a celebrity as there is among Drag Race alumni. “As successful [as] Drag Race gets, we’re always going to be the piñata, we’re always going to be the party favor, the beautiful, ornate, potted-plant corner,” she says. “We always talk about drag being mainstream, but we forget that I could probably be killed for just walking down the street as Trixie in America in a lot of towns. I think it’s sometimes a little pipe-dreamy.”
That too is part of the power of RuPaul’s Drag Race though—that it still exists in a world often not welcoming to queer people. In that, what it offers each of its contestants—whether they can go on to tour the world, or sell some sold-out shows at their local bar—is an opportunity of the first of its kind, a ticket to a dream worth pursuing for folks from all walks of life.
Symone, last season’s winner who turned heads with runways that ranged from the flat-out gorgeous to the blazingly political, is the new kind of Drag Race contestant—the one who got into drag because of the show. She grew up in a Southern community where “there weren’t that many Black gay people” around, and found the show before adulthood. “It represented everything that I wanted in my head, where I felt like I couldn’t find, or I felt like I couldn't be,” she says. “Drag literally gave me a voice. It gave me confidence. It gave me a sense of who I was when I didn’t really know.”
It also gave her some A-list fans. Some of the U.S.’s biggest stars consistently dip into the Drag Race fandom: The show regularly features such guest appearances, whether on the judging panel or as mentors (see Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johansson of late), and still others make themselves known as admirers. Rihanna reached out to Symone simply to compliment her work. “People that you look up to not only seeing your work, but also coming at you and saying, ‘We appreciate everything that you’ve done and that you’ve shown’—you can’t really put a price tag on that, you know?” Symone says.
Before Drag Race—as in, just a few years ago—Symone was doing drag “outside of a day job” to make ends meet. She was living paycheck to paycheck. She didn’t even have the confidence, at first, to audition. But her friends pushed her to do so. When she got on Drag Race, she knew her life could change. And sure enough, it has. “There’s freedom with winning and being on the show: You get to take care of yourself and the people around you…and follow your dreams,” she says. “The world is really open to you now.”
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