How RuPaul's Drag Race Has Inspired A Younger Generation Of Fans

By Evan Ross Katz


a fast stroll by way of the crowd of thousands at the Los Angeles Convention Center last weekend at RuPaul’s DragCon will give your eyes a buffet of delights: Some of the most famed drag queens working today including Trixie Mattel, Alyssa Edwards, and Monet X Change; an array of queer-owned firms including Drag Queen March and BoobsForQueens; and kids — kids everywhere.


From babies in tulle dresses to pre-teens in totally fainted faces (often flanked by parents, some of whom in various states of drag themselves), DragCon, right now in its fifth year, once again proved itself to be not just a safe space for yet a celebration of young people wanting to experiment or express themselves freely from a culture that often polices — consciously and subconsciously — gender presentation.


DragCon by its very construct is revolutionary in the access it gives young people to drag. An art form that is often relegated to nightclubs for a 21+ crowd, this three-day convention, open to anyone of any age, gives young people access to their preference queens. Through RuPaul's Drag Race, crowds have been able to watch and get to know contestants who help more wholly round out the vast array of gender expressions and sexualities that exist in the spectrum. Yet DragCon gives them the possibility to exist in a room full of people like them, and if not exactly like them, a room full of people devoid of judgement. This isn't to mention the LGBTQ community is without judgment of one another, as was the case in a now-viral tweet seeking to ban kink and fetishes at Pride, although to spotlight the power in normalizing otherness from a young age by subverting that which are often be deemed "other."


Kids walk the runway at RuPaul's DragCon LA 2019 at the Los Angeles Convention Center


For Nemis Quinn Mélançon-Golden, a 10-year-old drag performer from Canada, the event is a possibility to express himself freely in front of his peers. "Because of my age, there aren't a lot of places I can go in drag or be in drag or maybe visualize drag performances. DragCon lets me show up in drag, as Lactatia, as myself, and just be who I am," he tells MTV News. "It lets me be segment of a culture that people think I shouldn't know about or be a piece of. Any time While I go to DragCon, I get support for my drag although I'm just a kid. All of us kids get support and we get to support each other."


It’s a sort of utopia that for several adults seemed like idealistic fantasy growing up.


“I’m habitually inspired by it and I love that this is a family member affair as the kids bring the parents or the parents bring the kids and we all get to be able to see this crazy thing called drag,” Alaska Thunderfuck, the winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars 2, tells MTV News. “I can’t imagine if I was a kid and had this. The closest thing we had was seeing cats on water skis at SeaWorld. That was drag to a child. With this art form, these kids get to express themselves, whichever that is, and so they get to play around with gender which I think is something we shouldn’t be strict about. Gender is something to play around with.”


“I couldn’t even imagine this as a child because I’m still here — my old 47-year-old self — overwhelmed, and can’t believe what I’m looking at around me,” Latrice Royale, star of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 4 and All Stars 4, says. “It certainly would have given me a sense of ‘I noticed my tribe.’ There really are people that understand me and get me. And I wouldn’t have felt so alone and isolated and scared all of the time in not knowing who I was. This really gives all these kids growing up the answers that folks like me didn’t have and the support."


Still, Royale admits she some days gets mixed emotions about it all, asking herself should these kids are also young to know. “But no, ’cause I remember any time If I was that young, I knew that I was different and I knew I felt a certain way and I didn’t have a safe place to express it.”


Jack Barkowitz, 27, and Daniel Cohen, 33, who brought their 5-month old twins Ava and Ezra to DragCon definitely don’t think so. According Berkowitz, they came out to be able to see their preference queens and "be surrounded by our community and share that with our children and companions For the occasion, the dads outfitted their twins in wigs and Trixie Mattel onesies. "They were living their French Vanilla Fantasy," Berkowitz tells MTV News. "Even though they're small, they were very stimulated by all of the eye catching displays and sounds. One day, they plan have the ability to look back at photographs they took at DragCon and marvel that they met Milk!"


Drag queen Nina West with young fans at RuPaul's DragCon LA 2019


For Drag Race Season 6 and All Stars 4 contestant Gia Gunn, who revealed her transgender identity publicly in 2017 between her stints on the show, having a convention like this in her youth could have been life-changing. "I think if there was something like this around While I was little, I would have been able to connect with others like me from an early age and possibly would have been able to discover myself sooner," she says.


With the series and cultural events like DragCon — along with Lady Bunny’s Wigstock and Horrorchata’s Bushwig — drag has undeniably cultivated new, global crowds. For World of Wonder co-founders Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey, co-creators of both the convention and the television show that inspired it, seeing a younger generation embrace drag isn't just a sign of the art form's popularity; it's a testament to their relationship with gender and identity.


"Younger generations are way behind the confines of the binary. Let’s not forget, they are growing up to be the broader society. It’s so exhilarating that we are moving in back of the stereotypical norms that have wrought so much damage to previous generations," they tell MTV News, noting that looking and living in back of the confines of the gender binary is hardly a new idea, making reference to Native Residents of the United States, who valued the contributions of two-spirited people.


"Our own experience growing up was that there were restrictive expectations about what was male and what was female," they add. "The myth of typical and the straight jacket of conformity not only advantages no one, although also fails to adequately describe any single one of us — gay or straight. The crowds at DragCon show that the time is up for these obsolete ideas."