Ru-veals: The Intersection of Drag and Drag Race Taboos
Trixie Mattel struts down the runway, signature blonde hair towering enough to give Marie Antoinette a run for her money, dressed head to toe in a bubblegum pink with a wink to vintage camp. She stops at the end of the stage, strikes a pose and serves face as RuPaul, Michelle Visage and Ross Mathews look on from the Judges’ panel. As expected, “You better work!” booms from the speakers, while she takes a final spin and sashays back across the stage.
While the show RuPaul’s Drag Race seems to many as an indulgent, turn-your-brain-off show, its development as a series and its influence on modern Drag culture hints at a deeper complexity. The changes to the challenges and performances of queens seen within the show reflect how it mirrors, diverges from or influences modern-day Drag. Trends like wig snatching serve as a reminder of the struggles that pushed this once-marginalized art form into visibility.
From cross-dressing Egyptian queens to men adopting female roles on stage when female actors were banned in Europe, drag has a long history. Figures like Julian Eltinge rose to fame for their cross-dressing forms of entertainment who, dressed in elegant train dresses with a fur mantle and lush black updo, became one of the highest-paid actors in the world in the late 1800s. During prohibition, drag flourished as New Yorkers escaped underground toward clubs and speakeasies, from Madison Square Garden all the way to Harlem.
Black drag performers have played a pivotal role in innovating trends and propelling the movement forward in the 20th century. One of the first publicly known Drag queens was William Dorsey Swann, the mastermind behind the modern drag show. This “Queen,” as he referred to himself, built one of the first social drag houses for formerly enslaved Black men, the “House of Swann.” This iconic house built a strong community in the heart of Washington D.C., hosting the first “Drag Balls.” One can speculate that the first reads, (witty disses critical to the drag scene) originated in these social houses as survival mechanisms for the LGBTQ+ community. It took cruelty from the world around them, turning it into humor as an effort to transform their flaws into beauty marks. Queens such as Swann understood the importance of creating a space to just take space for marginalized communities. Despite the numerous attempts to arrest Swann and her possé of glammed girls, her ideas continued to catch on and flourish across large cities in America, far beyond what the House of Swann could have predicted.
Drag offered refuge from the restrictive norms of American society, finding a home within Black social houses like The Hamilton Ball Lodge in Harlem. At these Balls, men competed for prizes in drag, and as the culture expanded from the House of Dior to the House Of Xtravaganza, it gave rise to the much-popularized “vogue” where Drag queens perform an improvised dance, similar to the ways models would pose in fashion magazine with over accentuated facial expressions, hand movements, and dramatic footwork.
Drag entered into the mainstream later in the 1990s, with documentaries such as Paris is Burning (1990) highlighting Ball culture within the Latinx and Black Harlem drag community. Around the same time RuPaul Charles found success with his hit song “Supermodel(You Better Work).” What began as intimate house performances at drag balls eventually transitioned to the big screen, culminating in RuPaul’s reality competition, RuPaul’s Drag Race, which brought the best of drag to weekly television audiences. The consistent formatting and similar or even repeating challenges across seasons created norms that existed within the show which may not have been seen in traditional drag.
It was clearly representing the culture it was derived from, and stuck with the pre established traditions that existed in drag. It kept the essential forms of drag that existed through its challenges, which required basic drag skills like sewing and acting; even lip syncing was used to decide eliminations. In early seasons we saw simplistic outfits, like bodycon dresses that could be found at strip malls, paired with exaggerated makeup. Yet as Drag Race continued and evolved, the show’s style evolved from the previous norms of pageant-based drag.
This could be seen with queens taking their shoes and wigs off during performances; in regular gig-based drag this was extremely common, as it represented vulnerability and openness through demonstration of one's true appearance, behind the facade of drag. On Drag Race, however, many queens took their shoes and wigs off in early seasons, to the point where it seemed to become more of a Hail Mary when losing a lip sync. This constant use of the last minute and often ingenuine wig toss made hair and shoe removal a taboo on the show.
Drag on a dime was a norm in early drag, with small amounts of money spent on outfits, makeup and compensation for queens. Amber Hollibaugh, an American writer and filmmaker, described the culture of gay bars during the 1970s as one which included a wide array of sexually marginalized communities and was a safe space for sex workers. The lack of a stable and secure living wage within these careers made affordable and crafty drag common, and often necessary.
As the art form has become more visible in the last couple of years, in part due to the show, the amount of money being put into drag work has changed dramatically. Rates are higher than ever for drag performers, especially for those who have been on the show. Season Four contestant Latrice Royale noted that before her appearances on Drag Race, she charged between $125 to $250 per gig, after her appearance on the show, she is now able to charge $1,500 as a starting price. Garments are often designed and sent to queens rather than being made by hand as before and as a result, the amount of queens who can’t sew has been increasing season on season. This clear difference in the skill sets required to do modern drag could be considered threatening to the original traditions and culture of drag.
While the show has influenced modern drag, there remain some remnants of an older era throughout the show. The snatch game is a challenge that focuses on celebrity impersonation, an asset of drag that was very common in older drag styles. In order to bring more people into shows and make higher wages, celebrity impersonation was extremely common, since the marketing of a drag persona was much less profitable than marketing celebrity impersonation. The art of celebrity impersonation remains as a tradition on drag race and reappears every season. Interestingly, we see queens doing worse and worse every season at the snatch game, such as in Season 14, where the performance of the snatch game was so poor that only one queen was safe from elimination (Deja Sky’s performance of Lil Jon). Drag Race has become impersonation drag’s worst enemy, given that celebrity impersonation is less popular since individual drag personas are now celebrities in themselves.
While RuPaul’s Drag Race has changed as new forms of performing take shape, it has launched drag into the mainstream, with the official Drag Race Youtube channel generating over 73 million views over the last 12 months. As Rupaul’s Drag Race continues to grow, so will local drag shows, and society will continue to see how they inevitably influence and reshape one another. Most importantly, they will continue to serve realness wherever their popularity takes them.