I’m always a late adopter: I apologise for talking about RuPaul years after everyone else has declared themselves pro or con. I have been enjoying season 2 of Drag Race on Netflix, but I feel ambivalent about it. Should I let my young son J watch it? My daughter A said the rude jokes would go over his head, but he does love catchphrases. What will happen if he says ‘Good luck and don’t fuck it up’ in the playground or in Granny’s presence? My husband thinks the programme is dystopian but he clearly isn’t the target audience. J and I love glitter-gun transformations, the more extreme the better.
I love live art but I’m far too scared to do it myself. Some of my best friends are performance artists with well-honed personae that they have been working on for years. Sadly, J isn’t old enough to take to Duckie at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and see them perform. I hope it’s still there when he is.
I had one idea for a live art piece: forming a band with other HD sufferers called ‘Charlotte Raven and her Kind’. I wonder what my friend Murray would make of Drag Race? He liked RuPaul in the Nineties. We used to sing along to ‘Supermodel’ when he came round to my flat in West London, but he may have ditched Ru now he’s mainstream (Ru not Murray)
I’m worried about the racism and misogyny, but Drag Race was recommended by two of my most trustworthy and politically-aware friends. The Guardian thinks it’s the best reality show bar none. I never let A and J watch the X Factor, but Drag Race is more humane. No-one is humiliated or set up to fail. ‘Lip-syncing for your life’ should be undignified but it’s strangely life-affirming.
I let him watch it in the end. He loved it. We have been bonding around the TV. A personal highlight was the ‘snatch game’, an innuendo-heavy parody of Blankety Blank/Celebrity Squares, where the contestants performed celebrities. Last night J was singing RuPaul in the bath.
‘Don’t be jealous of my boogie, don’t be jealous of my boogie. You say that you are not but I always see you looking.’
J felt sorry for homeless Tyra, the winner of series 2, but didn’t think she deserved to win. Raven was his favorite.
J has a great sense of style. I love the black nihilist coat I bought him from Zara. It says ‘NOTHING’ on the back in big white letters. Understandably, J hates the trucks and badly-cut jeans in the boy’s section of John Lewis. We get his super skinny jeans from the girl’s section in Uniqlo. I hadn’t considered Zara until I went there with a friend who was looking for a sun hat for her son. J liked everything in there, but the jeans he tried on didn’t cut off his circulation like the too small Uniqlo ones, so were rejected.
working the nihilist look
I covet J’s coat. And he covets my handbags. They are all piled up in a shelf in my study, and every morning before school he spends s few minutes thinking about which of them will go with his outfit. Although it’s more practical, he hates his school rucksack.
‘Mum, does this look nice?’ The smaller bags look good on him, but he prefers my big grey All Saints bag that is my pride and joy. I bought this from a charity shop in a posh part of London but I’m scared to take it out in case it gets rained on. I am between bags. My favorite one broke and J hated it anyway.
He has been weighing up whether to go trick-or-treating as a witch like he did last year, but might go for something more gender-neutral. Not a character as such but a scary presence. Last World Book Day, he was teased for his Matilda bow. It remains to be seen whether RuPaul will inspire him to ‘work’ a goth-girl or black-widow look on the 31st. I don’t want to corral him into drag, or make him feel I wouldn’t support him if he wanted to fit in.
Forgetting myself 