NEW YORK (AP) – As the cast of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” celebrated the new season, they thanked the show’s creator for great drag and expressed concern about the show and threatening performance at the heart of the long-running show.
“RuPaul really drew you into the community, it made people realize that it’s more of an art form than anything else” contestant Marcia Marcia Marcia told The Associated Press at the Thursday 15 premiere in New York. The new season starts Friday on MTV.
“I think everyone was good with a little drag,” said the drag queen with the inspired name “Brady Bunch.” And now history is repeating itself and people are speaking out against it, which I think is stupid. .”
With a long and rich history, drag – the art of dressing as another gender or woman, often for performance – has been attacked by right-wing politicians and activists who have associated it with the “sexuality” and “adornment” of children. In recent months, protesters – sometimes armed with guns – surrounded storytimes, during which actors read books to children. The ban on children at drag events has been reversed. In late November, a shooter at a Colorado Springs nightclub turned a queen’s birthday party into a massacre and was charged with hate crimes and murder.
Another contestant, Jax, said the threats, protests and hate were “disheartening” but not surprising: “Just like being a person of color, being a minority, growing up in other communities, it’s something I’ve had to deal with throughout my life. life.”
“But we always win,” Jax added. “We always win and we always come out on top because we’re on the right side of history and we love what we do and we’re not doing anything to hurt anyone. We’re just trying to bring love. to everything.”
For the competitor Loosey LaDuca, again, this is nothing new: “Unfortunately, at this time, the design has become a new target. But LGBT people are not known to be, you know, the public enemy.”
Meeting the threat with caution is good, LaDuca said, but “we will never panic.”
Last month, New York City Councilman Erik Bottcher attended another towing hearing in his district. He filmed and posted a video of “several homophobic protesters outside with obnoxious signs insulting families and drag queens.” Two days later, he said, anti-traffickers destroyed the corridor outside his office and gained access to his building.
“Two of them were arrested. A third person was arrested for assaulting one of my neighbors,” he told AP at the premiere.
Contestant Irene Dubois has a theory about what’s behind the vitriol directed at drag performers.
“I think a man in women’s clothing always laughs because we’re like, (breathes) ‘It’s not supposed to happen!'” Dubois speculated. “And that’s when men in women’s clothing stop being tickled, tickled, winked, winked and start enjoying the way they look at women’s clothing that people they start saying, ‘Wait, hold, hold, You must be laughing at yourself, and if you’re not, we don’t want you.’
“RuPaul’s Drag Race” judge Ross Mathews describes progress and regression as “pendulum swinging.”
“When we move forward and when we are embraced, accepted, celebrated the pendulum – they will try to turn it back, to turn our movement back,” he says of the anti-gravity. “But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Darling, we are good. “
Marcia Marcia Marcia had a simple message for the critics of drag, which she says is “all for fun and talk”: “If you have a problem with those things, I think you should reevaluate.”
In the end, contestant Princess Poppy hopes it’s the same way RuPaul did on culture with the “Drag Race” winner.
“I think it helped a lot of people who don’t really understand dragging people or gays or dragging queens,” he said. But the show, makes us human, and shows that we are human, too. “
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This article may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or distributed without permission.
