Jacob Dockery just wanted to make his classmates laugh. On May 27, the 25-year-old dressed as his drag alter ego, Ruth Canal, while graduating from Temple University’s Kornberg School of Dentistry in Philadelphia. In a video of the ceremony posted to TikTok, Dockery accepts his lavender sash in a full face of makeup, before cheekily posing for a photo with the school’s dean, lips puckered for the cheering audience.
The brief, 10-second clip quickly went viral, racking up over 1.5 million views on the platform in a matter of days. But according to Dockery, internet fame wasn’t the intention. He just needed to serve some levity after 4 years of dental school, which he describes as a very “serious” place.
“Unless you’ve been through it, nobody knows the true horrors of dental school,” he tells them. over the phone. “I would not wish it upon my worst enemy. So I was like, ‘I need to make a joke out of this in the best way possible.’”
The video was something of a public coming-out moment for Dockery, who discovered his passion for drag after moving back in with his family during quarantine. Prior to the pandemic, he had only dressed in drag a handful of times, including a Daenerys Targaryen Halloween costume three years ago, but he said that having a captive audience was an ideal space to develop his skills. His family always “told me the truth,” he says, especially when his looks needed work.
Key to his makeshift drag think tank was older sister, Faryn, who he says inspired him to step up his game as an artist. In drag, he says the two “really look like twins,” which bred a healthy sibling competition between them.
“She almost went to school to become a makeup artist,” Dockery says. “Her looks always helped inspire me, because every night at 11 o’clock, I’d walk upstairs and she’d be in a full beat face. I’d ask, ‘Where are you going?’ And she’s like, ‘I’m just playing around.’ She always tried so many cool looks, and it inspired me to think: ‘What I see on YouTube doesn’t have to stay on YouTube. I can easily apply it to my own face.’”
After spending the year working on his craft, Dockery says his appearance at last month’s graduation was his first time as Ruth Canal in public. It was a full circle moment: The moniker was actually the name he gave to the dummy with plastic teeth that all dental students have to practice on while they’re in school. When he was thinking of names for his persona, he recalls he kept thinking back to how much “that stupid mannequin head” made him laugh.
Dockery says that despite the solemnity of dental school, Ruth Canal was a big hit among Temple graduates, who posed for photos with him after the ceremony. He says he even got messages from their parents saying how “beautiful” he looked in drag. At least one dad commented that he would “totally date” Dockery’s drag persona.
“When I got that, I said, ‘Okay, that was a success,’” Dockery says.
But what made the public embrace so fulfilling is that Dockery says Ruth Canal isn’t all that different from who he is as a person. While the character was loosely inspired by an aunt he describes as his “twin flame,” that “flamboyant, outrageous, funny” personality that comes out when he’s in drag is all Dockery. It’s just the part of himself that he rarely got to show to the other students while they were busy getting their PhDs.
As Dockery prepares for the next phase of his life, which includes finally getting his dental license in July, he says that he was happy that he got a chance to show that “everyone has to have a little slice of humor in them.”
“If I can get someone to crack a smile, I did my job,” he says. “That truly is what is fulfilling to me, as a dentist and as a drag performer.”
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