RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE GLOBAL ALL STARS: Boobie: The Shequels

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As OG Drag Race recappers, we bore witness to the show’s rise from the depths of the Logo channel to an international audience and massive worldwide fandom. With that ascension came an entire cottage industry of commenters, influencers, and drag journalists who interact directly with the performers and the fans. We decided it was our job to stay away from almost all of that, much as we’ve always felt we should avoid befriending any celebrities or becoming too chummy with any stylists or designers. This isn’t some sort of humblebrag on our parts. You do what we do for as long as we’ve done it and you get invited to parties and put on publicist lists. We feel we’re meant to keep doing the old-school recaps, without being beholden to anyone, from the fandom to the show’s producers to the queens themselves. We’re making this long intro about us and for that we do apologize, but our point is this: sometimes, we’ve got to listen to the fandom and admit that they have something right.

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Especially because it’s not a frivolous complaint in the slightest. In fact, Drag Race is teetering right on the edge of its biggest disaster as a franchise; one that would force the question of just how far Drag Race’s stated principles of inclusion and acceptance actually extend.

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More to the point: the fans are right to note that the judges favor the native English speakers, and by extension, the queens who have already performed for Ru before this season. We have been making the point for over a decade that it’s best for any fan or viewer’s blood pressure to go into Drag Race with the understanding that it’s a variety show with cash prizes, but it’s not some sort of above-board competition, with well-articulated rules and criteria.

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We still believe that, but the show has a responsibility to the queens it chooses to cast (and let’s be real here, exploit) — not to keep them free from critique or to handle them with kid gloves, but to ensure that the playing field isn’t over-rewarding the wealthiest queens as well as the queens who have a clear advantage in the established Drag Race challenges.

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Kitty Scott Claus won the Library Challenge because of course she did. It was always going to go to a native speaker of English because true wit in any language requires a high level of fluency. That’s no shade against any of the other queens. Most of them are fluent if not extremely adept in their English skills, but come on. Reading is one hundred percent about language and culture. Anyone not speaking Ru’s language or from a culture with which she’s unfamiliar is automatically unlikely to win it.

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And if you’re going to hand comedy scripts written in English from an American perspective to a group of international queens, 2/3 of whom don’t speak English as their first language you better damn sure give them absolute masterpieces of comedy. You can’t hand a bunch of queens a shit script with character descriptions that barely offer more than their names and expect the ones who don’t speak the language it’s written in to do nearly as well as the ones who get all the references and understand the timing.

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It’s not shady (and we hope it doesn’t sound condescending) to say that a lot of the queens are not working on the same level as some of the other ones; partially because of their lack of exposure, so their level of televisual polish isn’t as high, but also because some of them simply don’t have the economic advantages or the available platforms to take their drag to the level of someone like Alyssa, who had her own TV show at one point.

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Drag Race is loath to do anything to shake up its format in any way (although Ru just lost the Emmy for the first time in 8 years so it would be nice if the people at World of Wonder took it as a wakeup call), but when you pull a bunch of queens from very different cultural and economic backgrounds from all over the world, you have a responsibility to not mistreat them, dismiss them for their disadvantages, or embarrass them. Eva La Queen said something that really hit us like a slap. “I have the eyes and the hopes of an entire country on me.” The producers should have been listening to her.

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That doesn’t mean we think the show should excuse poor work. It’s not like we can suggest that Eva gave a performance that deserved consideration. But that’s kind of our point. Virtually none of the queens did a good job on this one because it was nearly impossible for most of them to manage it.

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So of course Ru gave the win to the team with the three English-speaking queens with whom she’s most familiar. We tend to avoid saying this in our Drag Race recaps because it’s not a standard we tend to hold the show to all that often, but this was blatantly unfair in a way that skirts the line of being offensive. The show needs to tailor its challenges to the specific makeup of this cast. Make them do mime or put them in a silent movie sketch. But anything that relies on their language skills is clearly not fair to them, not because we’re being shady about anyone’s English, but because Ru keeps rewarding the English speakers. It’s not right, especially when the result is to embarrass a queen in front of the eyes of their home country.

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The runway category was “brown” and that’s just about the laziest bullshit we’ve ever heard. It’s like this whole season is half-assed and barely thought out. Fortunately, the girls all stepped up.

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This is fun. It takes a fairly basic garment and drags it up with sparkle and proportion play.

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This is striking, but the judges were right to say it was too much to look at.

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The dress is okay and Michelle is right to point out how pretty her drag is, but the styling her doesn’t help the look. The brown hose looks awkward and that wig line is terrible.

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Stunning face, but she needed to do something to drag this up more, even if was just to stone it a little or wear something sparkly with it.

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Cute-funny, but a little awkward.

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Really spectacular.

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Also spectacular. Her best-ever, and a wonderful tribute to someone Drag Race should mention more often, William Dorsey Swann. She really felt she had this one in the bag and we can’t say we blame her for being pissed.

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This might be one of Alyssa’s best looks.

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We’ll say it: lazy. Some of these girls are serving insane costumes and she keeps walking out in off-the-rack drag.

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This was fantastic, although from a design perspective, we’d have liked it if the bodice was several shades darker.

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Gala and Eva were in the bottom and it was absolutely painful watching the two of them struggle through a Gen-X classic to which neither of them could connect. All of the judges (all of whom are between fifty and sixty) were dancing in their seats to it, of course, but the poor queens clearly weren’t feeling it at all. This show has to tailor its challenges to the people its casting and not to Ru’s whims and tastes. It’s one thing to do that with the American version, but it’s downright obnoxious to be doing it on an international stage.

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Her final costume was amazing. She deserved better material and better consideration from Ru and the producers.

Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life, a New York Times “New and Notable” pick, praised by The Washington Post “because the world needs authenticity in its stories,” and chosen as one of the Best Books of The Year by NPR is on sale wherever fine books are sold!   It’s also available in Italian and Spanish language editions, darlings! Because we’re fabulous on an INTERNATIONAL level.

[Photo Credit: Paramount Plus via Tom and Lorenzo, World of Wonder Productions, Inc./Paramount+]

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