Reclaiming the F-Word: ‘Drag Race’ Cast Breaks Down Using Queer Slurs
Things are coming down to the wire on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8, which means that the workroom is becoming more spacious, and the producers are looking for ways to fill an entire hour of television. On Drag Race, that typically means a dreaded makeover challenge, where the remaining cast of queens will have to drag up a set of random people with a defining shared trait, roped in from some bar somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. Not literally, of course, but judging by how haphazardly these groups of makeover participants are picked, it does feel as though a producer stumbled into some watering hole and asked, “Who wants $1,000 and a free lunch?”
This season’s makeover subjects are—drumroll please—lesbians. To which you might ask, “...Lesbians?” Yes, just good old-fashioned lesbians. Hell, they’ve done army vets; they’ve dragged up underappreciated school teachers; they’ve even touched up the cast of Little Women LA. All that’s left is lesbians!
Explaining their choice, host RuPaul said, “From the early days of the gay liberation movement, to the AIDS crisis, to today, our queer sisters have always shown up when the LGBTQ community needed them the most.” That’s very true, but it was a statement that left me scratching my head. Ru makes it sound as if the lesbians were showing up at these moments in queer history just to support the Gs, but the Ls in LGBTQ were just as impacted at those times, too. Ru did, however, mention that lesbians often remain the silent heroes supporting their entire community, so this week was the show’s tribute to those champions.