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SPOILER ALERT!
SPOILER ALERT!Seriously, turn back now unless you want to learn a MAJOR spoiler from the latest episde on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 3!! I’m not going to rehash the whole episode and just to be clear, I write for The Wow Report but I have nothing to do with Drag Race. I’m not biased, and know nothing beyond what I watch on TV, just like you.
On last Thursday’s episode as one of the night’s top 2, BenDeLaCreme faced off against BeBe Zahara Benet to Deborah Cox’s Nobody’s Supposed to Be Here. DeLa won the lip sync. She announced she would be bringing Morgan McMichaels, who DeLa eliminated in the first episode (and, as you saw, had a bit of drama with on this episode, but they made up. I think.)
DeLa then had the apparently IMPOSSIBLE choice of whether to eliminate, Shangela, Trixie or Kennedy… well, in the end the decision wasn’t SO hard as s she said to the judges, that this was
“the easiest decision I’ve had to make all season. I’m going home.“
DeLa told Billboard about making her shocking decision.
“There were so many weird little fractions that fell into place that all had to align perfectly for what happened to happen. So, the whole idea for even switching the name on the lipstick actually came from an ongoing joke that Trixie and I were always making on the show. We were like,
‘You know what, if we win the lip sync, we’re just gonna write Michelle‘s name on the lipstick.‘
[laughs] And we always joked about using whiteout to do that, but of course there’s no white-out anywhere on set.
However, it came to me on the episode when all the girls returned — I remembered that on episode two, Thorgy Thor was painting her fingernails with whiteout. So I went over to Thorgy and said,
‘Thorgy, do you still have that whiteout in your bag?‘
And she was like,
‘Yeah, why do you need it?‘
I just said,
‘Don’t worry about it.‘
I shoved it in my bra, and the rest is history. But it was like, if all of those pieces hadn’t fallen into place it couldn’t have happened.
I came on and never expected to do as well as I did, because you can’t expect to do well or you won’t, right? Like, you have to always be keeping failure in mind if you’re going to be kick enough ass to succeed. I was honestly dumbfounded by my own performance in the competition so far, and I never envisioned feeling like I’d succeeded this much on the show.
… in that moment, the others of the top five were so upset at the idea that they would have to go home at this point. And I realized,
‘Oh, each of them feels like there’s still something that they want to prove. And I actually feel fully satisfied with my experience.‘
Like I said, it was all of these little pieces coming together. I don’t think I would have felt that way under any other circumstances. It was like,
‘Oh, at this point, I have shown the world that I am capable, and I don’t have to keep going along with a rule that has never sat well with me.‘
I have gotten a lot of responses, and the majority of it is mostly supportive…. my message that I’ve tried to convey through my actions on the competition, and in my life, is that you create your own rules, you create your own success. It’s that old RuPaul quote,
‘What other people think of me is none of my business.‘
So you know, once the heat of the moment has passed, I hope that those people able to open their minds. Like,
‘Oh, if I don’t get that job promotion, that doesn’t mean I failed. If I don’t have that new car, it doesn’t mean I failed.‘
RuPaul has done incredible things for our community, and incredible things for me personally. Not just bringing me on TV, but being a light in the dark when I was a child. When I was a young, queer kid in the middle of nowhere, I remember seeing RuPaul on the red carpet of the MTV Music Awards and being like,
‘I don’t understand what I’m looking at, but I understand that something about this makes me feel like I’m not alone.‘
So do I wish there was less conflict on Drag Race? Sure, I think I’ve made that abundantly clear. But I also think that there are a million more incredible things about Drag Race and what it symbolizes and the way it shapes our culture.”
You can read the whole interview here.
(Photo, Instagram; via Billboard)
