Dragula stars Boulet Brothers on double-edged sword of drag’s popularity and defying toxic fans

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It’s safe to say the popularity of drag is at an all time high, thanks in huge part to its new mainstay status on TV screens around the world.

Shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Boulet Brothers’ hit show Dragula, the antithesis to Drag Race in many ways, have helped drag as an art form reach audiences who may never otherwise have encountered or engaged with it.

Of course, with this proliferation of drag-centric TV shows and celebrity drag queens comes its own challenges. Many have argued that commercialisation has watered drag down in order to cater to the wider, and often straight, audience that enjoy these TV shows. Slang that was coined by the Black queer community in New York City’s ballroom scene now sits uncomfortably in the captions of Instagrams posted by straight, white women in the suburbs of Ohio to Calgary, Norwich to Cork.

Queer people are forced to join queues around the block to enter gay clubs and other safe spaces, standing behind their straight peers who have got there early in order to catch a glimpse of Aquaria, Adore, Jade Jolie or whoever else might be in town on tour that night.

PinkNews caught up with Dragula hosts The Boulet Brothers, ahead of their upcoming tour around the UK, to reflect on how the rising popularity of drag has changed the scene and for them, it seems, this peaking interest in the art form is something of a double-edged sword.

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“Well, I think that anytime you put something on TV you want to make it as broadly appealing as possible, right?” posited one half of the famous duo Dracmorda Boulet.

“So I think sometimes when you take a medium of art and you turn it into a reality TV show, a lot of things get watered down. It has to become very mainstream so a lot of things that maybe you would assume the general public wouldn’t understand, get cut out of it.

UK