I felt I needed to add something at the top here because things aren’t great in the LGBTQ+ community right now. You probably know that here in the UK, the supreme court ruled that trans women are not legally considered women. That’s disgraceful. We’ve still not felt the repercussions of this ruling but anyone with their head screwed on can see it’s a sign of worse things to come, both on legal levels and on social levels. If you’re someone reading this who has a little extra money floating around right now, I would like to ask that you donate it towards a charity that supports trans people. Feel free to do your own research but if you need help, I can get you started. Mermaids do a lot of good work at supporting young trans people and their families, I have attended sessions from Gendered Intelligence which are a really valuable way of keeping workplaces informed of how to support trans, non-binary and gender questioning staff or visitors, and I will personally be giving some money to The Clare Project because they’re a local charity to me, they run support groups and workshops hosted by and for trans, non-binary and gender questioning people who need a little extra support. And if you don’t feel you have enough money to make a difference but you do have trans friends or family, just look out for them, be an ear for whatever they’re worried about and just take steps to be an ally. Buy their coffee, get that book they wanted, make sure you pay for their cinema tickets for a little while. These are small things but when something so big and so terrible has happened, a little treat goes a long way. That’s me, that’s my soapbox, I just didn’t feel I could talk about drag and not mention this because it’s an artform that owes so much to the trans community and as a cisgender man it’s something I owe it to the community to mention. We will now move to your regularly scheduled programming, fix your hearts or die.

I haven’t really talked much about RuPaul’s Drag Race on my blog, because in the grand scheme of it, I’m only a recent fan. It’s also one of those things where I don’t know how much demand there is for me to talk about it, so I rarely do. However, I would be lying to you if I said a great deal of my time isn’t spent watching and thinking about Drag Race. Which brings us to today, shortly after the conclusion of Season 17, a season that I find myself so full of things to say about. Seeing as it’s my first time really talking about Drag Race on the blog, let me give you my credentials (and lack of.) First off, I am a straight cis man, I have only been to a handful of drag shows in my life and though I have a lot of lovely queer people in my life, I have also been primarily surrounded with other cis-het men and women. However, what I do have is knowledge of Drag Race. I have seen all of the American, All Stars, UK, Canadian, French, Swedish, Australian and New Zealand seasons, and have dabbled in Philippines, Germany, Spain and Mexico. I’ve been to Drag Con twice and been socially awkward around very friendly icons of the international drag stage. At this point of my life, I am someone who intricately understands the shape of a reality competition like Drag Race, so while I couldn’t quite describe myself as “in queer media”, I’ve read the core texts. It’s also important to state that, along these lines, Drag Race is a TV show and I will talk about it as such. When I refer to queens, I am referring to them by their stage names because these are characters on a show and we can’t assume to know what the people behind the characters are like. With this all laid out, it’s time to start our engines and find out if the best drag queen won.

Perhaps controversially, I felt this season got off to a poor start. The premiere itself was curious, as we dedicate a lot of time to an elaborate, unfunny and pointless Squid Game parody. So far, so Drag Race, someone let those writers touch grass. However, we do get some air when we’re introduced to the queens, proving that honestly it serves to just do the formula that has been refined over the past sixteen years. Speaking of the formula, it is time to do what we always do on a premiere now and have a talent show (split across two episodes for our viewing pleasure). What was once something so unique and exciting (I need not say more than “same parts” “is she gonna jump from that” or “brown cow stunning” to remind you) has devolved into a show that is mainly queens lipsyncing to their own original “bitch tracks” (songs written to tell you how much better they are than everyone else, “Mama Ru I’m gonna snatch the crown” type things). It’s telling that even in this over saturation, the winners of both episodes were queens who did a bitch track with a twist, those being Suzie Toot tap dance syncing and Lexi Love roller skate syncing. Both shows were fine in general, we just need to radically alter the show and do something crazy like banning pre-recorded music, so that real talents can come to the fore (Shannel, we never forgot what they took from you).

Anyway, that is all by the by, there are two main reasons this premiere is a spanner in the works of an otherwise exciting season. The first is Katy Perry, our space goddess who returned to Earth out of the kindness of her heart and her love for the LGBTQ+ community. She is the exciting premiere guest judge and not to be that guy, I completely called it. When “Woman’s World” came out, it immediately slapped us all in the face as a song whose lip service to feminism was so detached that it was clearly only made for West Hollywood gays without female friends, which led me to make a prediction. Drag Race famously films its seasons almost a year before airing, so there was a chance we were hearing the song after production on Season 17 had wrapped. However, I predicted that Perry would not only give her song to Drag Race early so they could use it, the song would be used on the premiere and she would be a guest judge. Her desperation was as embarrassing as it was transparent and the prophecy did indeed come true, with Perry lacking an ounce of humility and doing her best to act odd enough so that at someone might, just might, shout “MOTHER”. The other issue is the “badonk-a-dunk tank”, a gimmick that allowed two people to be saved from elimination by randomly pulling levers at the end of an episode. It fortunately didn’t last past episode 5 but it cheapened the stakes for a while and I was glad to see the back of it. It did mean though that the culminating lip-sync of these two talent shows was an underwhelming mess which no one went home for. Oh well.

After this though, the show starts finding its rhythm. If I’m honest, it’s always in the middle where Drag Race is at its best, when it doesn’t have to set up new characters or ensure all the storylines are resolved, but can just relish in the momentum it has gained. The challenges are good, but the weight of the season is on the back of the queens, who are charisma machines. It has been pointed out a lot how young this cast is, and while I think their inexperience (i.e. they’re my age) means they don’t do as well in the challenges, it means they have a cattiness and a vivacity that lights up the screen. Take our first three eliminated queens, Lucky Starzzz, Joella and Hormona Lisa. All three have an interesting perspective but just seem broadly unprepared for the types of challenges that Drag Race asks of its contestants, which means we say goodbye. On their way down though, all three get iconic moments in which their larger than life personalities can shine and it means that I remember them fondly months later!

What served as a really good bellwether for the trajectory for the season was the elimination of Crystal Envy. Again, this is about the character presented on the show, not the performer in real life nor their off-stage self. Crystal was a queen I just didn’t connect with. Like Q last season, her drag was high quality, looked expensive and she was able to do what the show was asking her to do. The problem is, I didn’t get a perspective from her. I know Hormona does drag like a good Christian housewife, I know Joella is THE Slaysian diva of LA, I don’t know who Crystal is aside from someone whose nude illusion suits are grotesque. And so, when she was eliminated by Lana Ja’Rae (a performer so charismatic that she lost her wig and still easily won the lip-sync, a new and unique move for her), I felt relief. The show was telling me that it wasn’t going to reward quality without a perspective but that it was interested in queens who had something to say, no matter how consistently well they said it. For me, that commitment to exciting personalities is exactly what makes Drag Race such a consistently rewarding piece of reality TV.

With Crystal gone, our little weirdos continue to get to flourish, doing just okay at the challenges and absolutely nailing Untucked, refusing to keep a single thought inside their heads when it could instead spill out and create drama. As I said earlier, this is a cast whose strength is not in nailing challenges but in being good TV personalities. Take Arietty, the undeniable villain of the season. Her runways were great and her everything else wasn’t, but her mean confessionals were a treat and were a sign that a bigger meltdown was coming. That meltdown came in the phenomenally entertaining Villains Roast episode, in which she proved, in front of three other notable villains, that she was actually the biggest villain of the show’s past decade. In a spiteful rage, she stole jokes from Tampa’s sweetheart Jewels Sparkles, then delivered the stolen jokes badly, then left a mirror message that revealed Onya’s personal medical history on her way out. That was a blaze of glory if ever there were one and you know what, it was phenomenal TV. Thank you Arietty for being an evil little elf.

I’d also be remiss not to mention the sweethearts of the season, Kori King and Lydia B. Kollins. Very quickly, the two began a romance that has continued to grow since this day. Kori was initially worrying as she is the drag sister of Plane Jane, but fortunately Kori inherited the personality that Plane did not. Her confessionals were great, the other queens enjoyed her reads and do I even need to mention her illustrious Cameo career as the premier Suzie Toot impersonator? Initially, it didn’t seem a natural fit that she would go for Lydia. After all, Lydia is your classic weirdo queen, who would reliably be in the most interesting (though rarely the best) thing on the runway and who played David Lynch in the Snatch Game. Despite this, the two worked and got a magical lipsync moment to “Kiss Me Deadly” in which they got to show RuPaul how they really felt about each other. Both immediately make complete sense for an All Stars return (and curiously, Lydia is already confirmed to return for All Stars 10) but only to redeem their challenge performances. Personality wise, entertainment wise, these two did themselves very proud.

Which brings us to almost the end, which confusingly will be the end, as in the winner of the season. A season is often defined by its winner and how well their legacy perseveres. Season 16 has a complicated legacy because it choose the wrong winner whereas season 15 would have felt like a cheat if Sasha Colby didn’t win. Fortunately, season 17 fits into the latter category. All the finalists this year apart from the winner would have been “a good choice, but…”, the types of queens who have an open path to victory in an All Stars season but maybe weren’t ready now. Jewels was great but needed to apply the confidence and humour she had in the confessionals into her challenge performances. Lexi was a super promising queen, but was clearly very in her head and is still working through some personal stuff that is holding her back from being her fullest self. Sam is high quality but needs a hook other than being country. Looking at our final four, it could only be Onya Nurve who took the crown.

Onya Nurve has absolutely commanded season 17, being a dominant personality from the second she appeared. While she was never a queen who would be wearing the best outfit on a given runway, she is a queen who knew how to work the stage, how to work a script and how to work RuPaul very specifically. She was an absolute treat to see on screen week to week and is a testament to the quality of a different kind of drag queen. Her outfits don’t look as expensive as others and she isn’t even doing drag full time, Onya revealing in the final episode that she works as a burger chef for her day job. I feel the same about her as I do Spankie Jackson from Drag Race Down Under. Both were the obvious frontrunners for most of their seasons, but lacked the polish of some of the other competitors. However, through sheer talent and force of charisma, they won. It once again is a promising sign that RuPaul’s Drag Race is moving away from rewarding queens who throw a bunch of money at designers to cover up a lack of perspective and instead moving towards rewarding queens who are born superstars that are only short of a platform to showcase themselves on.

There’s one key building block of the season that I’ve not covered yet and that is the lightning rod of the season, the one thing we all can’t stop talking about. If you have watched it, there is one thing you certainly have a very strong feeling towards and that is Suzie Toot. Suzie is a queen from Fort Lauderdale (we love another Florida girl) and her style is heavily influenced by twenties and thirties cinema. Naturally, I was besotted quite early and she won two episodes very quickly, the first of which she won by tap dancing at Katy Perry instead of actually singing “Woman’s World”, an iconic move. Her makeup was distinctive in a way that a lot didn’t like, but she was quick to change it up and try something fresh. However, as the season develops, something shifts. Suzie hits Snatch Game with an intense delusional edit, claiming to have won when she clearly didn’t do well. This sets her on a downturn in which she becomes the punching bag for the girls, specifically Lexi, whose entire storyline starts to become about Suzie. By the time Suzie is eliminated just before the finale, we have been shown her as a great competitor, a delusional menace and someone who didn’t live up to her own potential. It felt odd, considering that we knew the first to be true and had conflicting evidence on the other two.

However, Suzie’s arc is wrapped up in the Lip Sync Lalaparuza. It starts very business as usual, with everyone (including Michelle) laughing at Suzie because she doesn’t get the Liza Minelli song. Instead, she is forced to tackle the Dua Lipa song “Training Season”. And guess what? She crushes it. A new Suzie emerges here, a cool and effortless one, akin to the rocker chick Suzie we briefly saw at the start of the season (and that she should have won the challenge for). She wins the lipsync and moves onto “We Found Love” by Rihanna. Once again, she is calm and composed, winning the lipsync without whipping out a single trick more complex than a stanky leg. She easily moves forward to the final round against Kori King, where they perform to “APT” by Rosé and Bruno Mars. This is the best lipsync of the season, no doubt. Once again, Suzie is in control completely, relying on smooth and carefree movement as Kori attempts to do tricks. She swishes and she glides and for many viewers, she cast an intoxicating spell that two weeks on has yet to be broken. Suzie blows Kori out of the water and wins a $50,000 prize for her troubles. It’s the kind of redemption arc she needed and, after the way the show presented her, the kind of redemption she deserved. She is a superstar of immense and admirable complexity and while Onya always deserved to win the crown, I would have loved to have seen Suzie in the finale giving her a run for her money.

All in all, a season well done! We had some reasons to be worried in the first few weeks but once the production tricks got pushed to the background and we let a group of charismatic drag queens hang out, we got some really exciting TV. As it always is now though, we look to the future and ask what next? I think a lot of production decisions with this season, specifically Crystal’s elimination and Onya’s win, push the franchise in the right direction. Drag Race has become a show that people will literally re-mortgage their house to appear on (I am told it’s just as bad, if not worse, for the UK franchise), so it’s a comfort that the show is being explicit in rewarding what it claims to have valued this whole time, in charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent. All Stars 10 is already on the horizon and shows lots of promise, especially because as a huge fan of season 14 it’s nice that this is basically a full reunion. We’re also getting the first edition of Drag Race France All Stars this year, on top of all our regular franchise outings. After a disaster with Global All Stars and a course correction with UK season 6, Drag Race feels reliable again. If you’ve never jumped in, these past seasons from the US and UK franchises are perfect places to start, with casts full of personalities you are doomed to fall in love with. Or, if that isn’t enough to convince you, can I again remind you that this is a season where a queen inspired by the great depression tap dances to “Woman’s World” in front of a befuddled Katy Perry?