Finally, Some Old-School 'Drag Race' Drama!
“I’m pissed!”
“I feel very attacked!”
“Go back to Party City where you belong!”
“Bitch, I am from Chicago!”
“Your tone seems very pointed right now.”
“I’m not joking, bitch.”
“Ugh… Jesus. Gross.”
“It was Rigor Morris, girl.”
“Let me ask you a very fair question: What do you do successfully? Quickly.”
“I DON’T HAVE A SUGAR DADDY I’VE NEVER HAD A SUGAR DADDY IF I WANTED SUGAR DADDY YES I PROBABLY COULD GO OUT AND GET ONE BECAUSE I AM WHAT? SICKENING. YOU COULD NEVER HAVE A SUGAR DADDY BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL BABY EVERYTHING I HAVE I’VE WORKED FOR AND GOTTEN MYSELF I HAVE BUILT MYSELF FROM THE GROUND UP YOU FUCKING BITCH!”
These quotes to highlight that 99 of the 100 best moments on RuPaul’s Drag Race have taken place amidst a workroom fight. There’s just something about the high camp of a room full of mostly men in wigs and dresses earnestly getting heated at one another in the throes of a competition that hits with a similar effect to cocaine.
But over the years, Drag Race, like much of the reality competition landscape, has softened. Take the most recent season of the All Stars format of the show, for instance, in which no queens were eliminated, instead raising money for charities of their choosing. In Season 4, Lashauwn Beyond famously told Jiggly Caliente that “this is not RuPaul’s Best Friend Race,” but in a sense, it has increasingly developed into something decidedly more kumbaya than its ornery roots. It makes sense, to some extent. The climate has changed drastically in the 16 years since the show premiered. With the unprecedented attacks and threats on the queer community and an administration that seems to want to eradicate our very existence, it can be understood why Drag Race would want to be the antidote to that in presenting queer community vs. queer in-fighting. And yet, the show’s fights (and often inevitable resolutions) almost always exist within the pressure cooker of the competition and seldom reach the depravity of shows like The Real Housewives.
It’s been a minute since Drag Race had one of its signature fights. Yes, we’ve gotten Kandy Muse vs. Tamisha Iman (“If you don’t have star quality, get the fuck out of here”) in Season 13 and Jasmine Kennedie vs Maddy Morphosis (“this is your moment, have it”) in Season 14, but there’s a quality to these fights that presents a meta layer of “let’s perform a Drag Race fight” in an effort to self-produce great television. It’s not a bad instinct, might I add. To the casual viewer, or fans without an encyclopedic memory of the show, these fights might easily slot into the canon. But for me, I’ve been craving the kind of fight that has me up out of my chair. “I needed this,” Colin Drucker said on the most recent Alright Mary recap. “I didn’t need to see the rest of the episode,” Johnny Atorino added.
“We could have seen all of the footage of this and then they said ‘to be continued’ and I would have been like, ‘Great episode.’”
Let’s delight in breaking down the “what had happened was…”
Sam Star gave us the perfect introduction to the vibe shift. “So we’re all working on our fabulous outfits and girls are cycling in and out going to spray paint, and that’s when it gets real,” she says in a talking head preamble to the drama.
First, we get Lexi Love making her way down the ramp from the interior of the studio to the work area outside. “Fuck!” she declares as she places her hands on her head. It should be noted that she’s wearing a green leopard-print coat and a white leopard-print bucket hat.
“I had spray painted my outfit and I left it there to dry,” she explains in a talking head. She goes on to explain that her formerly blue outfit is now blue with brown, muddy spots on a fourth of it.
She immediately bursts into tears. “I’m fucking livid. What am I to do now?’ She then makes her way up the ramp and back into the workroom and declares, “Okay, who ruined my outfit?!”
She wants answers and the workroom is silent, but the editors make a point to keep cutting to Onya Nurve.
Lexi exits, the girls declare it #SprayPaintGate, then Onya finally comes clean. “Okay, so do you guys want to know exactly what happened?” She goes on to explain that she and Arrietty were the culprits, having spray painted their own costumes over Lexi’s, not knowing that Lexi’s tarp was in fact her outfit and not just a surface that she was using to spray her outfit over. “It was a total accident,” she explains. “Sisters, you know that we wouldn’t do it on purpose.” Her sisters encouraged her to apologize and explain. “I don’t think it’s the right time,” she says.
We then cut to Lexi trudging back down the ramp (among my favorite motifs of the episode). Arrietty is out there spray painting and, when confronted, tells Lexi that she accidentally sprayed the outfit blue and apologizes. At that point, Lexi sees Onya’s outfit laying out drying. It’s brown. She’s no fool, and deduces who the perpetrator is. Lexi then makes her way back up the ramp, the music helping to build the tension, and re-enters the workroom.
With the sounds of the sewing machine amped up to “Abracadabra”-levels of thumping, we see Onya in the foreground and Lexi entering in the background.
Lexi sees Onya, who momentarily glances at her only to continue ignoring the situation, and decides to get her face to face before confronting her. As she passes, she gives her the kind of side eye you only reserve for an idiot walking too slow or distracted on their phone when you’re in a hurry. It’s such a powerful glance that I felt it through the screen.
Onya proceeds to confront the situation at last, asking if Lexi was informed about what had happened. Lexi unleashes her arm as though she’s Spiderman letting the web sling, and says, “It was you! It was your outfit, your brown outfit.”
Onya demures, saying it was her and Arrietty. “Right, but I just sat here right behind you and asked and you turned away from me and ignored me while I was asking who did it.” “Honey, listen…” Onya tries to intrerject but Lexi ain’t having it. “You ignored me! You put your back to me!” Onya tries to explain that she didn’t think it was the right time in seeing Lexi so worked up.
Lexi: “I just needed you to be a sister and own it and you turned your back to me, so therefore I see how we’re playing this game.”
Onya: “It’s not a game that’s being played.”
Lexi: “That’s games right there. You could have turned to me and told me and been real and you didn’t. I didn’t deserve that.”
Onya: “Girl, I’m literally telling you now, you came storming in…”
Lexi: “You told everybody else!”
Onya: “I didn’t know if it was the right time, okay?”
Lexi: “Girl, you knew it was the right time because you messed my costume up. Let’s be real.”
At this point, the simmer handn’t reached a boil. But then Onya released her first “fuck” and, to evoke Valerie Cherish, the fucks began being thrown around, indicating the potential of a boil-over.
Onya: “Girl, I didn’t mess up your fucking costume on purpose. Calm the fuck down.”
Lexi: “You should just own your shit. Since you didn’t own it.”
Onya: “I’m literally telling you now, it was a fucking accident and I didn’t do it on purpose.”
Lexi: “But you’re fucking with me when you ignore me.”
Onya: “I’m not fucking with you! I spray painted it on a fucking accident.”
Lexi: “Just own it!”
Onya: “I’m owning it now!”
Lexi then grabs her pigtails and gives them a tug and declares, “Gucci,” before exiting the scene. Onya is shook, and turns to her sisters and asks, “Like what?”
It’s a remarkable moment because neither is attempting to heighten the moment for the camera. Instead, it’s the kind of raw emotion that can only rise from a given circumstance made more tense via the pressure of the competition. Lexi’s anger feels like it’s less about the garment and more about feeling lied to. Onya, meanwhile, was trying to handle the situation in the most dignified way, by letting the heat turn down, but that effort was received differently than its intention. Lexi had a need that couldn’t be met unless Onya agreed to an arena that she simply didn’t opt into. Onya’s attempt to diffuse was received by Lexi as an unwillingness to accept responsibility. It was a classic fight that was born out of a situation being responded to in two very different ways, neither of them right or wrong. Thus it wasn’t a “who’s side are you on?” kind of fight, but rather a “will they be able to resolve this?” It’s a far juicier (and rarer) dynamic for the show because it complicates the notion of who to root for, an implicit aspect of the viewer experience.
The next day, we’re back. “You can cut the tension with a cheese knife,” Sam Star once again narrates. “Do you and Miss Thing want to have a chit-chat real quick before we start make-up?” Lexi asks Arrietty. “Yesterday was not the best day for me,” Lexi says in a talking head, explaining that she slept on it, digested it and is now ready to move on with a more positive attitude. And then she does my favorite thing: she apologizes. “I’m so sorry that I was so crazy, but I’m not going to hate you over garbage.” Onya says that the situation was unfortunate and that she’s sorry how it went down. “I love you and I’m glad that we can get to a better place,” Onya tells Lexi.
And with that, the hatchet is buried and the sisters move past it. It’s a particularly satisfying moment because Onya got what she had wanted all along: Lexi to calm down. And Lexi, too, got what she wanted: an apology. And one that was recognizing the wrong vs. putting a band-aid on it in an effort to appease her freak-out. Lexi’s entitled to her freak-out! It’s a high-pressure situation and she felt sabotaged. Onya, too, is entitled to want to demure from a face-off. In resolving the situation from the jump the next day, the drama of yesterday was able to feel like it reached its natural conclusion without putting water on it, but rather, by letting the embers slowly extinguish.
“First, I love Onya,” Lexi tells me when I reached out to get her reaction to the moment having now seen the episode.
“Second, it was such a surreal experience to watch yourself, not only on national television, but getting into an argument on national television. It’s just so eye-opening and humbling. Third, thankfully and honestly, I can tell everyone that there have been times in my life where I would not have made the same decisions and I am still learning from my mistakes, but also proud of myself for what I have learned and practically applied along the way!”
A truly satisfying Drag Race fight and one that, in the end, established a truer version of sisterhood in displaying the power of conflict resolve. We love to see it!