Logo show bends gender, upends frowns


With the June 20 premiere of RuPaul’s Drag U’s second season, school is already back in session for the eager pupils of the popular Logo network show. Despite the comparatively early start date for the new semester, the recent ‘draguates’ don’t seem to mind getting a head start on their new lives.

You better work · Drag Race season three runner-up Manila Luzon (right) instructs her protége Rhonda in the art of glamour and excess. - Photo courtesy of Aaron Young for Logo

The unconventional makeover show is a spinoff of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a season-long competition pitting female illusionists from all over the world against one another as they vie for the title of America’s next drag superstar, with winners and runners-up from that show helping (anatomical) women, all dullness and frump, unleash their inner diva — something the drag queens from Drag Race have more than ample qualifications to teach.

Expectedly, the same academic conceit from the show’s debut season is trotted out for this one as well. Viewers are reminded even before the opening credits roll that “Deep in the Lake Titicaca Valley, a school was formed by drag queens to help biological women … change their lives through the miracle of drag.” The familiar (if heavily made-up) faces from Drag Race return in the capacity of professors, complete with every arbitrarily appended academic-sounding prefix and suffix imaginable — professor, Dr. and Ph.D., just to name a few. The school even has a dean of drag, female illusionist icon Lady Bunny.

Notebook paper motifs crop up with sufficient frequency and there’s more than enough fake cherry wood paneling on the set to evoke a collegiate feel, but as with anything in the drag world, it’s all camp from beginning to end. The barrage of academic puns featured in the show’s promotion campaign (yes, spring break is over; we get it, class is back in session) is executed with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek self-mockery that there’s no doubt as to whether RuPaul’s Drag U takes itself too seriously in any way, shape or fashion: It does not.

In each episode, three drag professors coach three ordinary women through the entire process, from the moment the woman first sees an age progression-like projection of what she could look like as a full-fledged glamazon (through the miracle of RuPaul’s patented Dragulator 2.0  technology) to the eventual ‘draguation’ ceremony at the end of each episode. In Monday’s season premiere, generically titled “Bringing Sexy Back,” the three professors were Manila Luzon, Shannel and Raven. Only one-third of this week’s faculty was drawn from the recently wrapped third season of Drag Race — offering a some solace for Drag Race fans who were left jonesing for their Manila fix in the aftermath of the May 2 season three reunion special. Fan favorite Manila Luzon was the runner-up in season one — and many thought a shoo-in to win — while Shannel is a season one alumna and Raven appeared in season two.

Photo courtesy of Aaron Young for Logo

For all its campy bells and whistles, the program’s guiding message of promoting confidence and self-worth is undeniably positive. Beyond the dispensation of such sagacious proverbs as “You pluck a chicken — you tweeze your eyebrows” (wisdom courtesy of Raven, Ph.D.), the professors are also charged with bolstering their students’ self-image. In her entrance exam, one of the housewife contestants selected “short, fat and ugly” as the three words that best described her. In that sense, Drag U is offering a valuable service in the rich tradition of the PSAs of yesteryear (kind of).

By the time the frumpy ex-military homemaker Lisa was transformed into “Rai’zon de Rossi,” Rhonda became “Summer Night” and Denise’s dragulation into “Cha Cha Mizrahi” was complete, all three women showed substantial improvements in the way of attitude adjustment, the final component of the D.P.A. scale (Drag transformation, Performance and Attitude adjustment) on which their transformations are assessed.

If the remainder of Drag U’s sophomore season follows through on the implicit promises made by Manila’s Cookie Monster-inspired outfit and the delightfully awkward phone sex competitions to which the contestants were subjected, viewers are in for some uncharacteristically empowering and entertaining reality television.