Sitting on Twitter during an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race these days, it’s hard to imagine the show once debuted to a niche audience.
The social-media friendly competition show, lead by Mama Ru, as RuPaul is known by his girls, has had quite a month.
There was the triumphant Season 3 finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars, which concluded as the No. 1 original cable program in its time slot with its March 15 finale, the highest ever for the series. The next day, the new album from All Stars’ newly crowned winner Trixie Mattel, One Stone, debuted at the top of Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. A week later, the Season 10 premiere featured a guest appearance from Christina Aguilera.
Now, it seems that mainstream pop culture is catching up to drag, with Drag Race enjoying a new level of exposure. Between the ballooning ratings, thanks to the shows’ new home on VH1 (where it jumped from LGBT cable channel Logo for Season 9), episode recaps posted all over mainstream media and the show’s notoriously vocal social media fanbase, audiences seem more receptive than ever to the cheekily transgressive art form that has sashayed from underground clubs and drag balls onto basic cable.
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