![]() "As seasons have gone on, you've seen a much larger explosion of over the top wardrobe and really truly couture fashion that is being revered in a way that it didn't always used to." That said, he calls the current format of the show "very predictable." "Now it's become a social media phenomenon and so many of the girls that have these huge social media followings are the ones that are getting on. "That's the beautiful thing about how the show has progressed," Shannel said. And then there's the ones now spending thousands of dollars for clothes and them allowing certain people to pass through the show just because of their looks."īut others love it for that very reason. They come in with this forced ideology of what they're going to do and what's expected of them. "Now they come in with ideas of catchphrases. "I think sometimes it's cheap a lot of cheapness," Brown says. There's no denying that the show has changed from a 101 to a 201 in terms of pivoting from an introduction to drag to an embrace of its status as the chief purveyor of drag in the mainstream. Just the artistry alone is that entertaining." ![]() "We became relatable as human beings and as people and then everything else was the icing on the cake," Ngwa said. Most memorably, Season 1 contestant Ongina revealed her HIV positive status during the show's fourth episode, which is still cited as one of the series's most impactful moments, 141 episodes later. "It's so funny because now there's already this blueprint for all of the artists on the show and all of these opportunities flood to them, but with us we had to create our own opportunities, even still to this day." But it's that very tenacity that helped give Season 1 its heart, which integrated personal stories and journeys into the narrative of the competition. "There were still a lot of people that didn't even know I was the winner of Season 1," Ngwa admits of his time after the show, saying he and his fellow contestants were not given a reason as to why the show had been pulled. ![]() "And I kinda felt like it was a little shady to bring us back only to name us 'The Lost Season.' It was almost as though we were being called 'The Forgotten Season.'" "It was heartbreaking to see the show continue and to kind-of leave us behind in the dust," Sotomayor says. This came at a cost for the original nine, who did not see their star status rise in the way even the first eliminated queen from the show does today. If you made $100 or $150 for a booking you made great money." (Nowadays, he says, you're looking at up to $5K for a booking.) "Drag wasn't really something that you were paid a lot of money to go and do. "Drag was still taboo in many ways, Shannel (real name Bryan Watkins), who auditioned at the behest of his mother, says, adding that the general population of people in middle America knew only RuPaul and what they saw on Jerry Springer or Maury Povich, where drag entertainers were sometimes featured as carnival-like freaks on display. "We were going through such a bad stereotype at the time and drag was really not as popular as it is now," first season's contender Jade Sotomayor (real name David Sotomayor) recalls. Outside of that, stigmas persisted around drag, even from within the LGBTQ+ community. Before Drag Race, drag's largest stage was within the pageant circuit, which included the big three: Miss Gay America (started in 1973), Miss Continental (started in 1980), and National Entertainer of the Year (formally began in 1991). It's not that there weren't famous drag queens before Drag Race - Lady Bunny, Joey Arias, Varla Jean Merman, Linda Simpson, and Jackie Beat, just to name a few - they just weren't on television. Season 1, which had its premiere on the Logo network on February 2, 2009, introduced the world to the first nine drag queens that today populate a queendom of 140 within its extended universe.
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