The Dystopia of RuPaul's Drag Race
The men behind Drag Race claim to be progressive but they champion a kind of anarcho-capitalism where consumers "liberate" themselves through morbid fantasies rooted in contempt for women.
Just when you think the gender ghouls can’t sink any lower, RuPaul’s Drag Race comes along to signal we haven’t seen anything yet. Last week’s performance on the spin off series Drag Race All Stars by Kade Gottlieb aka Gottmik, a woman who thinks she’s a man, was genuinely shocking.
If you’d told me even a year ago that an entertainment show would feature a woman sashaying on stage for giggles while waving what was supposed to be her two severed breasts in a “hospital waste” bag, I would not have believed you.
It’s a testament to the relentless dynamic that powers so-called ‘queer’ culture and its desire to push moral boundaries that it somehow keeps managing to go to places even its fiercest critics can’t imagine it would.
And each time another important societal boundary is set aside we can be sure the usual chorus of sunken-eyed sickos will celebrate it. This was the reaction of Pink News to the horror Gottmik’s performance elicited. Her act apparently “managed to get on right wingers’…. tits.”
Geddit?
Obviously only right wingers are upset by a psychotic narcissist encouraging girls to dream of removing their breasts.
Drag Race has form in the thoroughly amoral stakes. Who can forget 10 year old Desmond Napoles aping adult nightclub performers at a Drag Race Convention in 2017 while being cooed over by RuPaul?
If you suspect this suggested the new-style drag culture RuPaul has propelled into the mainstream doesn’t take child safeguarding seriously then you might be on to something. Three years before his Drag Con outing little Desmond appeared in a music video made by the winner of Drag Race Season 5, Jonx Monsoon. If that name seems familiar it’s because he plays -excrutiatingly badly- an intergalactic nightmare in the latest uber-woke Dr Who. Talk about type-casting.
In 2014, Monsoon explained in Out magazine the theme for the video for a song he released, ‘The Bacon Shake’, in which he sings in a bar done up like it was in the Jazz Age.
“It's a bawdy, after-hours gentleman's club and this woman is 'getting the boys thirsty,' and it turns into a big dance that everyone joins.”
All very adult then.
So why you might be tempted to ask was Desmond, who was aged just seven at the time, filmed gyrating on the bar top; wiggling his body in full drag make-up and costume? You may have to ask your local paedophile enthusiast group for a convincing answer to that mystery.
This is a still from the video. Innocence itself.
Criticism of apparently dodgy lapses like this tends to be shot down by Drag Race devotees as bigotry; presumably because any seven year old boy that wants to go into a bar in a skimpy dress and perform in front of men should be encouraged to do so.
As for Drag Race’s producers, they love to flaunt their performatively liberal values, vociferously decrying attempts to limit the freedom of the same type of creepy parents who put Desmond in a bar in drag…. to medicalise their children with puberty blockers.
During the last election they missed no opportunity to describe Donald Trump as a fascist goon and irredeemably sexist. I’m no fan of Trump but talk about hypocrisy when it comes to sexism. Ever since the show was launched in 2009 on the minor US gay channel Logo, RuPaul’s Drag Race has delighted in the sort of cartoon misogyny and sexualised parodies of womanhood which are no better than the overt sexism of Trump. Perhaps worse since Drag Race repackages misogyny as liberating and worthy of approval. And Trump’s not glorifying elective mastectomy.
It’s not even as if RuPaul, full name RuPaul Charles, has always been so woke himself. He has been reinvented as a latter day Deepak Chopra, offering quotable bon mots that are supposed to be full of self-help wisdom for the non-binary. This conveniently ignores the fact he was briefly cancelled by the trans lobby for defending the use of the word ‘tranny’. When the Loony Troons assailed him in 2017 he fought back with this clarion call for free speech.
“…don't you dare tell me what I can do or what I can't -- say or do. It's just words, like, 'Yeah, words hurt me!' [Whiny inflection] Bitch, you need to get stronger. If you're upset by something I said, you have bigger problems than you think."
When a prominent musician apologised for using ‘tranny’, Charles responded with this distinctly unChopra like zinger,
“I hate the fact that he's apologized. I wish he would have said, 'F-you, you tranny jerk!'
Me too RuPaul. Me too.
The following year as the future of Drag Race faced peril Charles apologised.
His penance was sufficient for this trans-gression to be forgotten, as well as that time he argued transwomen who had had the snip shouldn’t be contestants on the show. He had to apologise for that one too.
What he can’t erase is the fact he built his career on the kind of hyper-sexualised tranny fetishism of his video ‘Tranny Chaser’. This fetishism involves men adopting the costume and other social signifiers of “womanhood” such as wigs, make-up and fake breasts and then presenting them as an identity that is desperate to be sexually used by other men. The problem is that the underlying message this sends is that real women whom they are contemptuously parodying, by definition, want to be sexually objectified.
Whenever this kind of disgust for women on Drag Race is pointed out its supporters respond by asserting that it’s not womanhood that is being parodied. Oh no, no, no.
The show, we’re told, merely platforms a marginalised community, one immune from the everyday sexism of the real world, because they are not real women. Relax, they say, this is just drag queens throwing shade at each other.
The fact that it is always feminine pronouns attached to their insults and ridicule is dimissed as irrelevant. This despite the fact that we are constantly told, by the sort of people that adore Drag Race, that pronouns are a window into a person’s soul and are able to act like tiny defribrillators rescuing someone whose heart has stopped after a moment of casual misgendering.
What Gottmik’s performance has now done is dismantle these excuses by bringing the misogyny that has always been at the heart of the format to centre-stage. The casual loathing for women’s biology represented by her “severed breasts” was bad enough, given the popularity of the show among young women and girls. The fact her act included prosthetic hands wielding scalpels that appear to work on her wounds adds insult to injury, so to speak. This is, in effect, a declaration that in the world of Drag Race a real women’s body is only truly welcome or celebrated when it has been desexed and cut up.
And Gottmik knows exactly what she is doing. Her Tik Tok account posted a scene from the show in which she emerges out of a studio dressed up as an operating theatre, newly removed breasts like dead meat in her carrier bag. The perversity is sickening.
Yet according to her, the performance was intended to be an image of defiance and pride,
“This look represents the pain and suffering I went through while all at the some time experiencing complete trans queer liberation in a way that I hope everyone seeing this will feel one day.”
In truth nothing could less represent the surgery she is celebrating than her sassy act. There is no hint of the excruciating pain women who have their breasts removed, including so-called transmen, actually endure. The internet is replete with videos made by troubled girls bemoaning their slow recovery from such surgery. Afterwards, most can hardly walk for weeks, never mind striding out of the operating theatre all heels and fashion fresh. Instead of being pumped up with trans queer liberation real girls have to be pumped full of pain-killers.
The suspicion Gottmik is a contestant in the highly competitive Paraphilia Olympics deepened when I learned last week’s surgery-fest wasn’t the first time she’s waxed lyrical about her mutilation. Two years ago on Drag Race she told viewers “ever since I had my top surgery I love having my chest out” and promptly wore a costume showcasing her bare chest with a tassle where the nipple used to be.
Her behaviour is so appalling it’s tempting to try to reassure ourselves that Drag Race is just an entertainment show after all. The problem is it has real-world implications. Versions of it are being broadcast in 13 countries, at the last count. It is also incessantly promoted by broadcasters desperate to get down with the kids or in the case of the BBC to placate its Pride staff group, the Midwich Cuckoos of Broadcasting House.
The joke is that Drag Race ratings have often struggled. When it was made the centrepiece of the relaunch of BBC3 in 2022 they were nothing to scream like a queen about. Even the Guardian’s Political Media Editor noticed that a repeat of Fred Dibnah’s classic series ‘Building of Britain’ on BBC4 out-rated it.
Even if Drag Race can be outrated by an old steeplejack repairing crumbling structures that doesn’t mean its narrative of personal liberation isn’t seductive. The reactions on Tik Tok to Gottmik’s video are a case in point. Her fans adored it.
“This was major”, says one.
Another, says “I loved this look so much I cried”.
I cried too.
For different reasons.
It’s not just its visceral impact on young people that means we can’t afford to downplay the significance of Drag Race. The show matters because it has never been just about entertainment. The two gay men behind the show, whom I’ve known off and on for decades, and even worked for have always had a highly political agenda. Drag Race is the most complete expression of their agenda.
Randy Barbato (an American) and Fenton Bailey (a Brit) who were a couple for years and are now just friends and business partners set up World Of Wonder in 1991. I first met them a year later and have vaguely kept in touch ever since. I say ever since, but I really mean until they blocked me when I started to speak out about transgenderism in 2018.
I also worked for them for a few months in the early 90s developing a series called Takeover TV which featured amateur content filmed by ordinary punters at home. I have the dubious honour of having chosen a video by a young Adam Buxton to be included in the taster tape. After Buxton became a star of the show his career soared. Fenton and he remain best buddies.
I digress.
All this is just to say that I think I can say with confidence that the key to understanding the amoral philosophy both the founders of World of Wonder and Drag Race espouse is to return to the birth of their company and its most important inspirations.
One was a remarkable American television experiment. The other was a controversial financier who was denounced as a rapacious and soulless profiteer before he was convicted and jailed for fraud.
Let’s talk about the financier first.