Tonight marks the premiere of the twelfth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race (sixteenth, if you count the four seasons of All Stars), where thirteen more queens will sashay into the famous Werk Room and join the ever-expanding pack of RuGirls that have graced the show since its start back in 2009. This season, the queens hail from all over — everywhere from the typical big cities, like New York and Los Angeles, to a few much smaller ones, like Ramseur, North Carolina and Acworth, Georgia. (One is even from France!) Still, as always, the focus is on the drag and each queen’s ability to serve Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent.
At a special Meet the Queens event held Wednesday night at TRL Studios in Times Square, them. caught up with all 13 of the season twelve queens to ask them to describe their drag using a fruit, a vegetable, and an entree. Below, check out their answers and get to know them.
A 29-year-old from Acworth, Georgia, Aiden Zhane chose her name because she wanted to represent the spectrum “from A to Z.” A self-described “love child of Judge Doom from Roger Rabbit and the alien from the movie Species,” Zhane is “equal parts cartoon, colorful, dark, horror, all sort of mixed into one.” Because of her small-town upbringing, Zhane did not come up in a gay bar scene like many of her peers — in fact, there were none in her town — but the spooky queen feels that the freedom she got from paving her own way worked out for the best.
Fruit: “I would describe myself as a pineapple. They’re spiky, they’re funky. I’m funky. It works.”
Vegetable: “A vegetable? You know, I’m not big on vegetables, I’m not going to lie. My mom always had a hard time getting me to eat them, so I’m not even going to relate myself to one.”
Entree: “Something spicy as fuck. I don’t know what it would be but it has to be spicy.”
A 34-year-old from New York City, Brita Filter chose her name because she wanted to be “anything but pure.” A diehard performer at heart, the queen moved to the Big Apple out of a real need to be on stage every day — and now she is, working seven nights a week at various bars around Manhattan. As she says, “[Brita] had a dream of being on Broadway, but now she’s off-off-off-off-off-off-off-off-Broadway…at a gay bar.” The Polynesian queen is a fan of “big, bold, beautiful leading women of color” like Jennifer Hudson and Jennifer Holiday, and like them, she’s here to dispel the notion that performance queens can’t also turn a stunning look.
