RuPaul All Stars season 3 Episode 7 RuView/review: All eyes on RuPaul as fans ask for more from this Male Dominated Show

For a decade now, each season of RuPaul’s Drag Race has begged the same question: what does the future of drag look like? Whether the forward-thinking fashions of season three’s Raja, the grotesque apocalyptic wit of Sharon Needles, or the brilliant political vigour of Sasha Velour, the parameters for what makes a winner, baby, are constantly changing as the world in which drag exists, and its political potential, changes too.

It’s also the only thing we, as a queer community wider, have that is so culturally uniting, so global, a constant touchstone for many LGBTQIA+ people across the world upon which to socialise, con-verse, debate.

For the first time, perhaps ever, RuPaul’s Drag Race took identities like ours to the mainstream, brandishing beautiful, glittering, hopeful flags of power, resilience, love and, most im-portantly, nuance.

We were in the homes of people who would never have access to a drag show: proffering vital representations to drag artists everywhere while providing a genuinely in-depth ed-ucation for those who might otherwise think of drag queens as sinful transgressors. Basically, it did a lot.

So, when RuPaul this week revealed that Drag Race is a competition for cis-gendered men alone, under the totally tone-deaf embarrassment of a headline ‘Drag is a big f-you to male-dominated culture’ in the Guardian, rightly the community of devotees felt a deep sense of betrayal.

In a world that inflicts violent judgements on those who transgress and question binaries and boundaries, for an icon, a mother, like RuPaul to reinforce any sort of suffocating stricture around who can and can’t do drag feels like heartbreak.

Beyond that, Ru’s specific exclusion of both trans and cis women from the show shows first how disconnected he is from a culture on the ground, as well as a huge amount of male privilege in his creaming off and capitalising on the signi-fiers of femininity given to the world by women, both trans and cis, while perpetuating transphobic and misogynist opinions.

Further still, RuPaul’s gate-keeping of drag (race) as a male only sport erases both the labour and beauty and power of so many radical trans and cis female performers both before, during, and after Ru’s reign. With a few words in an interview RuPaul took drag (race!) from a place to push back against a patriarchy, to a place which reinforces it openly.

All of this, then, made watching this week’s episode a deeply awkward experience, reminiscent to feelings of being forced to spend Boxing Day with your homophobic uncle every time Ru ap-peared on screen.

It almost felt like the week’s challenges were set up to expose a level of hypocrisy in lieu of this week’s bleak revelations. Contestants were challenged with adopting personas of ‘strong female leads’ in a tacky chick-flick style movie context: Queens parodied women like Octavia Spencer playing Dorothy Vaughan — the uber-gifted black woman who put the first man on the moon (hmm…), or Erin Brockovich who took down huge corporate power with no formal education, all while being ridiculed, by (you guessed it) men as a “white trash woman”.

To add irony to hypocri-sy, Ru welcomed Nancy Pelosi, the democratic Congresswoman, and the first woman ever to serve as House Speaker in Congress, into the workroom, the Queens living for her work and her legacy.

But all I could think as Ru waved a finger at her and yelled compliments, is that if she were to apply she wouldn’t be granted a place on the show, despite her 100% voting track record in favour of LGBT rights.

Most parts of the episode where RuPaul wasn’t was, indeed, entertaining — Trixie in particular serving up the humour this week. Shangela’s lip-syching fat suit, on the other hand, was a cheap punchline which surprisingly landed. I thought we knew a little better. Overall it was, unfortunately, hard to watch under this upsetting exclusionary cloud.

But, unlike so many celebrities, RuPaul also apologised (kind of) in a Tweet two days after the arti-cle: explaining that she wants to put aside things she doesn’t know about and learn from us, her fans, her community. It’s touching to see her admit her wrongdoings — because she never has in the past — but what needs to happen now is for her to back up her words with action.

The show has given us eleven, soon to be twelve, magnificent winners after a decade on the air. More than anything, Drag Race pays testament to ‘change’: how it’s changed opinions of drag, and how drag has changed beyond recognition since the show’s inception.

What needs to change now is who the show is for, who it’s about. If RuPaul wants to remain the gate-keeper of drag, it’s time she opened up the competition to manifold conceptions of the art form, which takes on so many more styles than simple cis-male to Queen.

While it’s been a disappointing and infuriating week, in the wreckage of Ru’s mistakes, there is perhaps opportunity for a new, more representative, more inclusive Drag Race flower to bloom, bringing even more opportunity to an even wider selection of the jewels in our community. Our eyes are peeled.

RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars season 3 airs in the UK on Comedy Central on Saturday nights at 10pm.