Eleven years into its run, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is no longer a kitschy cult favorite on a little network called LOGOtv: It’s a sprawling media empire, with multiple international spinoff series and six Emmy Awards under its glittery belt. And RuPaul himself is bona fide mainstream. This winter, he’s graced the cover of Vanity Fair, hosted “SNL” and formally claimed his title as the “queen of drag” on “The Tonight Show.” For millions, RuPaul and drag itself are one and the same: mouthy, glamorous and male.
Yet RuPaul doesn’t speak for the drag movement. This much became clear last March, when he made some insensitive comments to the Guardian about the show’s first openly transgender contestant: “Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it.” RuPaul later backpedaled, but it wasn’t the first (or last) time he expressed controversial views about gender. Back in 2016, I published an interview with him at Good magazine; asked what he thought about people who view drag as a transphobic or misogynist art form, he didn’t exactly hold back: “They’re ... idiots and who cares about them. [...] This world is upsetting, get used to it.”
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