a drag king finally made it into the drag race werkroom. the arguing started before the season did.

via GCN, OUTinPerth, Out and PinkNews.

After all these years and all these franchises, a drag king is finally walking into a Drag Race werkroom as a drag king, and a portion of the audience has decided this is the hill.

Marcus Massalami joins the cast of Drag Race Espana season six, which premieres September 27. Both GCN and OUTinPerth flag the distinction that makes it a first: Velma Jones competed on Canada's Drag Race season six and took on some challenges as her king persona, Johnny Jones, but Massalami is the first contestant in the franchise's history whose drag is exclusively king.

who the first king is

OUTinPerth describes Massalami as a Valencian drag king who is also an actor, a violinist and a nurse. GCN describes a deaf, lesbian performer who wears hearing aids. The season sets Massalami against eleven queens: Alex Marteen, Alma DeSoul, Buba Anorex, Coco Luna, Joan Chevalier, Kim Miller, Liak, Liz Dust, Maitetxu Mia, Sorny and Vanessa Artiles.

The objection, where it has been made in English, arrives dressed as a judging problem, and it is almost reasonable. One widely shared post put it this way: "I don't think a drag king should compete on Drag Race. Not because drag kings aren't valid drag artists, but because this is a competition built around drag QUEENS. How are you supposed to judge two completely different forms of drag under the same criteria?" Spanish-language drag accounts spent the announcement weekend answering a considerably less reasonable version of that question, and more than one of them made the point that a lot of the complaining seemed to be coming from gay men whose entire experience of drag is this one television show. We cannot prove who was posting what, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We can say the argument is real and it is in Spanish.

what gottmik actually said

On Sunday, at the season two premiere party for King of Drag at Beaches Tropicana in West Hollywood, Gottmik went straight at it.

"People have been asking me like, 'Why is drag kind of like stale right now? Is it like too many Drag Races or what's going on?'" Gottmik said. "And I'm like, it's because we've seen drag be that. We need drag to be this. This is the future. This is gonna unstale the community."

He added, as a trans man who does femme drag, that watching the kings work "literally turned my world upside down," and then delivered the only review that carries any weight in this economy: "you'd kill a lot of the girls on Drag Race's ass!"

King of Drag is hosted by Cameron Esposito and airs Sundays on Revry, which is to say the first competition show built entirely around kings is running somewhere most Drag Race viewers would have to go looking for it. All of this is happening in the same month that the president named a family drag show as his reason for taking a national arts center, which is worth holding in your head next to a fandom arguing about whether a moustache counts.

The show that spent the better part of two decades teaching a mass audience that drag is an art form is now finding out it taught some of them that drag is one specific art form with a wig on it.