“It’s Here, Girl”: How Drag Became Big Business

Ahead of he grew to become a domestic identify, Justin Andrew Honard worked each and every odd task less than the solar. “I waited tables. I offered clothing in a boutique. I labored at an adult e-book store. It hardly ever actually lasted or labored out.” Now, he’s an internationally touring performer with a fourth studio album, Purple 4 Filth his ebook, My Name’s Yours. What’s Alaska? and a musical, Drag the Musical, all accessible now. What modified Honard’s lifetime? RuPaul’s Drag Race, of system. “I am merely a bumblebee in RuPaul’s beehive,” he tells me, Zooming in from his residence in Los Angeles.

Honard, improved known as his drag persona Alaska Thunderfuck 5000, has a Cinderella tale that is not one of a kind among the now hundreds of drag queens who have cycled by the lots of iterations of Drag Race, the Emmy-successful, groundbreaking, intercontinental reality-level of competition collection hosted by RuPaul Charles. Considering that showing on the demonstrate, drag performers like Peppermint, Katya, and Trixie Mattel have absent on to very successful—and lucrative—careers, launching makeup strains, promoting albums, starring in function movies, and providing out arenas on the power of their charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent, by itself. While RuPaul may reign supreme as the drag superstar of the planet, it is turn out to be more and more crystal clear that you never have to be the queen bee to make a awesome tiny honeypot of your possess in the earth of drag.

A great deal of that is thanks to Producer Enjoyment Group, a expertise and administration business that signifies the world’s leading drag queen artists, LGBTQ+ expertise, and influencers—including all the aforementioned queens. Like a lot of queer origin tales, PEG commences with a funny lady.

“Back in 2010, I was a talent booker and producer for gatherings. I was performing a present for Kathy Griffin in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I needed to book an opening act,” cofounder David Charpentier tells me more than Zoom. “And I assumed it’d be genuinely awesome to have a drag queen. So I went on line, did a bunch of study and found a queen named Mimi Imfurst and emailed her.” The relaxation, as they say, is herstory. “We went from [David] doing this, like, in his kitchen area to now getting two office environment buildings and 30-ish complete-time workers, and likely an additional 10 or 15 freelance part-timers that occur and assist us,” states cofounder Jacob Slane.

Pre–PEG, Slane was an keen assistant in VH1 and Logo’s publicity section. “There’s this new demonstrate with the drag queen RuPaul from the ’90s. And it is truly weird, but we will need another person to perform on it,” Slane remembers his former manager telling him. “So go in advance.” He ended up performing on the series for 7 seasons ahead of leaving to support Charpentier make PEG, and give the queens he’d grown to know and like an off-ramp into the globe of enjoyment following the demonstrate. Huge as the show’s system is, he suggests, “It’s about what you do following that. What’s your five-12 months approach? Your 10-yr system? The tough function definitely starts just after you are on the present.”

Foremost up to Drag Race, Christopher Caldwell—a.k.a. Bob the Drag Queen—was undertaking just fine on her individual, thank you quite considerably. “I was kind of the toast of the town,” she tells me over Zoom. In a standard 7 days, she would get the job done all-around 8 exhibits more than the study course of five evenings. “I’ve worked at virtually each gay bar there is in New York Town. Some of the bars do not even exist any more.” She thinks for a bit. “Probably basically a couple of them.”

Kevin Bertin, a.k.a. Monét X Alter, can relate. “Before Drag Race, I was operating six evenings a 7 days. Friday was my only working day off.” Monét calls her pre–Drag Race plan “completely crazy”: “I experienced to be at the bars by 11, which means I need to have to depart my household by ten o’clock. So I begun acquiring in drag at 8 o’clock, and then I would do the job until finally five o’clock in the morning, and get dwelling, sleep right up until two o’clock in the afternoon,” she recalls. “It was that cycle each individual solitary day. And then you have to go down to the garment district to get fabric—it was nuts.”

That difficult perform was having to pay off, to some diploma, for both of those queens. “I was making fairly decent money before Drag Race, specially for a nearby queen,” Bob claims. “I was not raking in millions or something, but I made ample revenue to live by myself on the Higher West Facet.” Both Bob and Monét recall creating about $150 per gig—excluding strategies. “If I worked really hard for tips, I could make wherever concerning $100 and $300 in tips for the display,” says Bob. “On a good night, I’d make 500 bucks for turning the social gathering, for carrying out my drag.”

Drag Race adjusted all of that. Bob remembers not recognizing what would be following after profitable time 8: “It wasn’t very like it is now, the place the women occur dwelling with this two-yr program,” she suggests. “I was just trying to get back to working my gigs.” After conference with Charpentier and requesting that he appear to a Bob the Drag Queen Show to “really see what my matter is,” Bob ended up signing with PEG administration. Now Bob hosts the official Drag Race recap sequence, The Pit Halt, cohosts the podcast Sibling Rivalry with Monét X Transform, and is currently taking pictures the third time of her Emmy-nominated HBO collection, We’re Here, with fellow Drag Race alums Eureka and Shangela.

Just after she received Overlook Congeniality on year 10 of Drag Race, Monét at first signed with Neverland Enjoyment just before switching around to PEG. “In searching for other management, Alaska, Bob, Trixie, they ended up all with PEG,” Monét suggests. “And so I go, ‘You know what? These girls have some of the occupations that I would want for myself.’” Now, with a preferred online chat show termed The X Adjust Charge a podcast, Sibling Rivalry, with Bob and now competing on time 7 of Drag Race: All Stars, Monét has the sort of post–Drag Race job she dreamed of.

Charpentier and Slane used to indicator quite a few of the “top” queens right after each individual period of Drag Race. In recent several years, on the other hand, they’ve started to “rethink” that technique. “We really don’t truly signal any person who’s brand new on the present any longer,” he states.