RuPaul, the 6-foot-4 to 6-foot-7 (by his own varying accounts) drag queen who sashayed into mass consciousness in the 1990s with the club hit “Supermodel” and a VH1 talk show, is back on TV with “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
A reality competition show now about three-quarters through its first cycle on Logo, the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) cable network where it airs Monday nights, it aims to discover “America’s next drag superstar” — that is, the next RuPaul.
It’s a little bit “America’s Next Top Model” and a little bit “Project Runway” and, like drag itself, a parody without being a joke.
If it’s highly unlikely that a superstar, even a subcultural superstar, will emerge from a third-tier cable game show or at least solely because of it, “Drag Race” has done very well by Logo standards and is scheduled to be rerun on VH1, its higher profile, gender-neutral cousin under Viacom. (The series to date is also available on the network website).
Like its host(ess), who appears in and out of drag, functioning as both (sharply dressed) Tim Gunn and voice of decision Heidi Klum — now a mentor, now a judge — the show is good-hearted and basically family- friendly, adjusting for your family tolerance for sexual innuendo and risque acronyms.
Challenges have included “Drag on a Dime,” in which the contestants had to build a “look” from thrift- store clothes; create a girl group to lip sync to Destiny’s Child; channel their inner Oprah, and dress female martial-arts experts as versions of their drag selves.
It’s clear from the range of styles, attitudes and ambitions on display that there’s nothing monolithic — homogeneous, if you will — about drag culture.
Shanelle, a Las Vegas veteran, is all high-polished glitz; Tammie Brown, with Bette Davis eyebrows and slathered-on lipstick, was like an echo of 1970s-style Downtown camp (and was soon eliminated). Nina Flowers, tattooed and muscular and made-up and bewigged like something not quite of this Earth, doesn’t “even consider myself a female impersonator,” while Rebecca Glasscock comes across mainly as a normally pretty girl. When the contestants were asked to do one another’s makeup, most were unhappy with the results.
Show business is, of course, all about dressing up and pretending, and drag is just a more particular version of the thing that all actors do.
We’re long past the point where a man in a dress and lipstick is automatically funny, or even remarkable.
Thomas Rogers argued recently in Salon that an aging audience, the disappearing gay bar and a less closeted, more socially integrated younger generation of gay men, means that drag as an instrument of liberation might have seen its day.
Still, the fact that drag queen Ryan Allen was voted homecoming queen at George Mason University earlier this year seems a benchmark worth noting.
But for these TV contestants, the larger point is personal, the public solving of an essentially private equation. Flowers: “I like what I see, it doesn’t matter what anybody else has to say — it doesn’t matter if the judges don’t like it … because I feel good about myself and I love what I see.” And for the rest of us, “Drag Race” is a useful reminder that masculinity and femininity are not absolute terms but a shaded series of possibilities strung between (relative) certainties.
If drag has lost its shock value, well, shock value has lost its value anyway; it is just hot pepper for jaded palates nowadays.
“Pink Flamingos” made Divine notorious, but “Hairspray” made him a star.
For all its crazy flamboyance, the big hair, the extreme makeup, the outrageous characters, the taping and tucking and stuffing and gluing, the cartwheels and the juggling — yes, there is juggling — this is an art whose true subject is dignity.
The humble production values of “Drag Race” might seem at odds with the fabulousness that drag reaches for, but it makes the performers look all the more human. There are trips and slips, someone falls, someone loses a wig, someone says for the first time that he’s HIV-positive and collapses in tears.
But they get up again. They finish the act.
