Culture

Black “Drag Race” Stars Have a PSA for Fans: Stop Being Toxic


 

“I’m a husband, I’m an uncle, I’m a favorite auntie,” says Timothy Wilcots to the camera, dressed simply in a long sleeve black shirt and filtered in black and white.

“I’m a hairstylist by trade and I enjoy spending so much time with my friends,” adds Elijah Kelly, hair tied back and sporting chic rectangular frames.

Wilcots and Kelly, known also as the beloved drag queens Latrice Royale and Mariah Paris Balenciaga, are just two of several Black alumni of RuPaul’s Drag Race who came together for a PSA against racism in the long-running reality competition show’s fanbase.

In a two-minute video posted to the official RuPaul’s Drag Race YouTube channel on Tuesday, the individuals behind the personas of Heidi N Closet, Mayhem Miller, Widow Von’Du, and The Vixen discussed the things that make them human, everything from a preference for pineapple on pizza (to each their own) to lifelong struggles with discrimination.

“I am someone who has experienced injustices and racism at a very young age firsthand,” says Heidi N Closet, neé Trevien Anthonie Cheek. “And even though I endured those things, I still try to look at the positives and look at the good in people and the world as a whole.”

Those experiences of discrimination, of course, extend to Drag Race and the community surrounding it, the latter of which has been repeatedly condemned for racism.

“We need to collectively stop the threats and stop the racism that is affecting this community,” says Ray Fry, who performs as Widow Von’Du, in the PSA. Notably, Fry stepped away from social media in August after extensive harassment from fans, but doesn’t mention this explicitly in the video.

The PSA is far from the first to call out the Drag Race fandom for toxic behavior. In July, season 11 competitor Honey Davenport (also known as James Heath-Clark) released a five-minute video to Instagram entitled “The Reality of Race in Drag.” In it, Davenport and many other former contestants detail some of the harrowing racist comments they’ve received on social media from supposed fans of Drag Race.

Like the “official” PSA, it condemns the racism of the fandom and calls for unity, but with much more specificity, clocking in at nearly 10 minutes long.

“I’ve received tons of messages, comments in my [Instagram] lives, asking me to kill myself or simple, ugly things like ‘Black drag is not good, Black drag is worse than white drag,’” says Davenport.

But the fans aren’t the only source of toxicity; some say it’s also been encouraged by the show itself. This includes the “villain edit,” a common reality TV phenomenon in which certain characters are crafted into antagonists for the sake of a storyline. The team behind Drag Race, including RuPaul himself, has repeatedly denied that the villain edit exists, but there’s an entire page on the Drag Race fandom-run Wikipedia that identifies which queen(s) got the villain treatment in every season.



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