Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
I had begun to hate my bookshelf. When I first moved into the apartment, I kept my room sparse as an aesthetic choice. The white walls looked clean. The bookshelf had been constructed by one of my roommates, an interior designer, and it looked nice alongside his artwork. He had been planning to get rid of some wooden crates, but I suggested that I could use them to give a home to my books. Perhaps, a guy might be impressed by the size of my library. But it soon came to represent something awful: wasted money. Reading wasn’t going to get me a job.
When you’re unemployed, you become hyper-aware of how every dollar and cent leaves your bank account. I stopped going to readings and other events because the subway cost money. Besides, who would want to hang around me right now? I stopped eating as much because food cost money. I shouldn’t have been eating as much before to begin with.
At first, it was a way of cutting down on spending, but soon it became hard to justify doing nearly anything. I got out of bed because my body needed to move. I ate because my body needed sustenance. I applied to multiple jobs a day because I needed to get one. Otherwise, my days were listless. I had no idea what to do with myself.
There was one more thing I could get myself to do; one bit of entertainment that I allowed myself. Every Tuesday morning, I’d catch up with RuPaul’s Drag Race on my laptop.
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“Me? I’m a humble gal with a little reality show.” These words introduced viewers to a new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Every year RuPaul gets together roughly a baker’s dozen of drag queens from the United States to compete to be America’s next drag superstar by performing a series of challenges while showcasing a runway look each episode. If a queen performs poorly in a challenge, they might have to lip sync for their life against a fellow competitor for the chance to stay.
The promo for season 6 was a big affair, with set pieces resplendent in black and neon pink. Ru even turns into a panther! It was a promo that was perfect for the season, as it was a year of big names and big moments. Some had been on other reality competitions, some were friends with past contestants, one was an actor with notable credits and the season’s winner is a legend in the industry. The season started off with two opening episodes and featured a musical, celebrity guest judges and a wedding ceremony.
Compared to the promotion for the previous season, the promo for season 7 was stripped down. The trailer featured RuPaul, then the cast members, against a white background. Some of the queens say a line and then are paired with a block of black text. Tempest DuJour, for example, sips out of #1 Dad mug and gets the tag “Gives Good Hugs.” We would later learn that the loose focus of the season was Ru’s catchphrase du jour, “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.”
Of the cast, the most well-known queen and most hyped-up of the season was the New York City-based Miss Fame who frequently did makeup tutorials on YouTube. The rest, in relation, were more obscure than in seasons past. Perhaps, the idea was to return to the basic idea of earlier seasons: putting a bunch of queens in a room together to see what happens.
The trailer ended with RuPaul saying “You have no idea.”
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What I gathered was: It wasn’t working out. Leaving the office, I walked out into the brisk November night air feeling unmoored. Getting the job had made me feel like I had finally crawled out from underneath the economic wreckage of the recession and made my way into adulthood. Because of it, I was no longer stuck on Long Island nor was I still reliant on my parents, the job didn’t just provide a salary, but independence. There was no comfort in the realization that all my plans were upended nor was there any in the chill sweeping through downtown Manhattan.
After treating myself over the weekend, I updated my resume, reached out to friends, and went to a career counselor. I was going to head into this prepared and ready. I was going to see this as an opportunity to forge a path towards a new career. I was going to be fine, I told myself. I was going to be fine.
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“How’s your head?”
The correct answer is: “Haven’t had any complaints yet!” RuPaul loves Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. Miss Fame gets asked the question a few times during her time on the show and misses the joke all but one time. It was especially egregious during the ‘Death Becomes Her’ runway when she had a glittered knife sticking through her head.
In her defense, being on Drag Race is hard. There’s a lot of work going into doing well in challenges. You also get hours-long critiques every other day, depending on how long you last. You’re competing against other drag queens but also trying to out-pace yourself as well. It’s easy to get trapped in your mind. The runway might as well have been a commentary on her mental state.
This season was uniquely heavy on the acting challenges, which seemed incongruous with the talents of most of the cast, Miss Fame included. Now, failure is inherent in any competition. And on this show, if you fail spectacularly and memorably, it’s almost as good as winning. People failing in a variety of ways is compelling to watch. People failing for the same reasons repeatedly becomes frustrating.
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Easter afternoon was spent on my mother’s couch in the fetal position, feeling miserable while the rest of my family went out for dinner. At this stage of my unemployment, I was forcing myself to eat. Eating had become an intellectual process as, over the past few months, the sensations of hunger had weakened. I understand now that anxiety had manifested in grips on my throat and stomach.
The evening was spent in urgent care at the nearest hospital. After tests were ran, it was determined that there was nothing out right wrong with me, as in: my bodily processes were operating as intended. The phrase ‘in my head’ was never said, only implied. While that was technically true, there was only so much I could do to change how I felt about my life’s direction at the time.
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Usually when the contestants talk about their trauma and struggles it’s in an easy digestible five minutes as they do make-up in front of ‘The Werk Room’ mirrors before heading out to the runway. The conversation on the couch between Katya and Miss Fame is uncharacteristic for the show and not just because it takes place in another spot.
While seeming to have a wide gap between their aesthetics and personalities, their talk reveals an unexpected bond. Both Katya and Miss Fame have had a history with substance abuse and have an emotional discussion about the struggles of staying sober being amplified by both the stress of the competition and being removed from their usual support circles. While the music playing over it all but tells you how to feel, the sincerity of the moment pushes beyond the typical story beats. Sitting in bed, feeling emotionally remote, I was reminded of the kindness of the world through simple connection, not caring if it was produced or not.
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It was the afternoon and I had only travelled between the kitchen and my bedroom, so I forced myself to take a walk outside. My only goal was to take in some fresh air.
East Williamsburg has increasingly become a dwelling for transient art school students and graduates who treat the neighborhood and those already living there with indifference. Additionally, part of the neighborhood is designated as an industrial park where living spaces blend in with factories and warehouses. The atmosphere of the neighborhood was manageable when I was commuting back and forth from Manhattan, journeying into the more residential Williamsburg, and had money to spend at local restaurants. Now, the area seemed far more barren and desolate than I remembered.
I usually walk to a destination or have a path in mind. When I wander, so does my mind. As I walked, my mind raced through every negative outcome of my continuing unemployment. I would be a burden to my parents. I would be a burden to the world. I imagined myself walking past my apartment and walking forever, somehow disappearing into the ether. Instead, I just walked back to my apartment.
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It was the final challenge episode and a few minutes into it I could tell Kennedy Davenport was going home. How could I tell? She was the focus of the episode. Episodes tend to highlight the queen going home, the queen winning and sometimes the queen winning the season. Despite her being a contender, it was only now that viewers were given insight to who she was outside of the show. It didn’t seem fair.
Much of the season doesn’t seem fair, especially in retrospect. The reasons for departures seemed arbitrary. Mrs. Kasha Davis said ‘welcome’ wrong, Kandy Ho was barely a presence and Max was made out to look loopy. Queens didn’t seem to go home because they failed, so much as the show seemed done with them.
I had already soured on the show after Katya went home the week before. Her absence was notable as the warmth and humor she brought had seemed to leave the show with her. Watching the show had become another task to engage in alongside filling out job applications and tracking them for unemployment benefits: something to do in vain hopes I would get something out of it.
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Returning home from an interview, in a suit that I buttoned myself into and let hang on my gaunt frame, I was faced with the prospect of being trapped in a temp-to-perm situation at a sketchy staffing firm. My roommates let me change before telling me more bad news. The landlords were raising the rent for all of the apartments in the building.
It had been six months in this limbo. You could be nice to me and say it wasn’t really six months, not when companies rarely hire between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. But it was six months, because I felt each day. I knew it didn’t make sense to stay. I knew I would have to move in back home with my mother. I knew I had failed.
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At first, it was regarded as the worst season of the show. But fan opinion has changed with some retrospection, a significant portion deeming it to have a great cast that was saddled with a flawed set of challenges. Some of the cast returned to participate in All-Stars seasons. Most notably, contestant Trixie Mattel flourished outside of the competition with a music career, a cosmetics company, and collaborations with Katya on shows and podcasts.
As for me, going home was a necessary change in environment with the abundance of trees in the neighborhood helping immensely as did starting to see a therapist. A month into moving home, I started temping at a company that eventually hired me full-time. The organization that let me go went out of business later that fall.
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Sometimes despite itself, the show was a comfort during a low point in my life. I identified with the queens, because I thought I also was running a race full of unsurmountable hurdles and inscrutable critiques. It wasn’t hard to find patterns and parallels between the events happening on either side of the screen.
However, there was one lingering connection that took me longer to recognize. Contained to the width and length of my laptop screen, it was easy to see the capricious season for what it was. Yet years out, I still haunted myself with the idea that I could have done anything different instead of extending any empathy to myself. I too had a knife in my head and thrown glitter on it in hopes that it would help. But there was no ‘cracking the code’ as contestant Sasha Belle put it, sometimes you are up against the unknown whims of people you’ve met briefly, if you even meet them at all.
It began with a blank background, an empty wall—the perfect liminal space. What followed was a season of no meaning: no overall story to be told, no lessons to be learned. Now I know it was enough to just to have made it through.
Alex J. Tunney is a writer in New York. His writing has been published in Lambda Literary Review, The Rumpus, Pine Hills Review, First Person Scholar, Fauxmoir, Complete Sentence, The Billfold and The Inquisitive Eater. One of his essays will be included in the forthcoming anthology Where To Hang The Hat: Storytellers On Sondheim from Alternating Current Press. More of his writing can be found at alexjtunney.com.