Season 10 Miss Congeniality and All Stars 4 winner Monet X Change opened up about the generational conflict that exists between RuPaul and the queens who have competed on RuPaul's Drag Race. In recent years, RuPaul's Drag Race launched several spin-offs and won several awards. Among them, RuPaul won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Competition Program four times. In 2019 alone, Drag Race won four Emmy awards, including the very competitive Best Competition Program category. However, despite the wide critical acclaim and commercial success of the Drag Race franchise, RuPaul has gone on record several times to say that he doesn't believe drag will ever be mainstream.
Since her time on Drag Race, Monet X Change has had a very successful career that includes high-profile projects and marketing campaigns. Monet's achievements include her own talk show, podcast, digital series, Pepsi Super Bowl commercial, and a worldwide tour alongside her Drag Race sisters. On the latest featured episode of Werq The World: The Docu-Series season 2, Monet brought up RuPaul's famous statement regarding drag never being mainstream and went on record to say that she disagrees with that point of view. Despite the fact that Monet isn't the first queen to say that, her post-Drag Race success certainly adds weight to this divergence of opinion.
In an exclusive interview with Screen Rant, we asked Monet X Change if she had any theories as to why there is such a divergence between RuPaul's views on drag and what the Drag Race contestants actually experience in the real world. "Ru comes from a place where I think, societally, we're just at a different place [now]. I don't think Ru comes from a place where we'd be so open about sexuality and gender, or be able to blur the lines through those who live outside of the binary." Monet then remarks on what she has experienced from fans on social media and on the road. "There's this explosion of love and acceptance coming from not only the queer community, but just the world at large. And I think that the world is just a more accepting place overall. Ru came from a time when this was shocking. And yes, depending on how bad the makeup is, it is still shocking (Laughs). But when he became a huge star in the 1990s, it was unfathomable for that to be a reality. In 2020, that is just commonplace."
With so many drag performers working on major projects in Hollywood, it's certainly hard to argue against the notion that RuPaul's Drag Race has propelled this art form to new heights. In fact, fans pointed out that many of the queens who were featured as mentors on RuPaul's Secret Celebrity Drag Race were more famous than the actual celebrities featured on the show, which is certainly a new reality for drag performers.
Monet X Change certainly has the mainstream success to back up her stance that drag is no longer a niche art form. Nonetheless, the RuPaul's Drag Race queen made it clear that she understands where RuPaul is coming from, saying that this is just a normal generational conflict between artists who experienced different things in their careers.
Werq The World: The Docu-Series season 2 airs every Tuesday on WOW Presents Plus.