RuPaul plays Robert Lee, aka Ruby Red, a drag queen so popular that she is showered with money at every performance, and has managed to save $100,000 to fulfill her lifelong dream of opening her own club (assuming a 20-year career, that's $96 per week, barely enough to keep a girl in eye liner). But first she will take a cross-country drag tour of Trump Country, culminating in the Miss Drag America contest in Dallas.
Feeling bloated yet? It gets worse: Tagging along is the adorable street-smart scamp AJ (Izzy G), homeless since her addict mother abandoned her, and trying to get to her grandfather's ranch in Texas (is that like the farm upstate where your parents send your aging pets?). But AJ's mom is all rehabilitated and looking for her.
Got that? Each episode consists of:
1. Ruby fairy-godmothering locals in Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, east Texas, and other godforsaken places, none of whom expresses the slightest homophobia or transphobia. AJ is the only homophobe in the entire cast, and she comes around quickly.
2. Ruby reuniting with friends in the drag world whom she "helped when no one else would" (lots of these) and snarking at enemies who are jealous of her success. Then she performs, to ecstatic adulation.
3. AJ conning people or stealing something.
4. Damien and Lady Danger conniving.
5. Ruby's roommate back home, Leon, aka Cocoa Butter (Michael-Leon Worley), whom she "helped when no one else would," making jokes about being blind and trying to find AJ's mother or track down Damien, with the help of her police-officer boyfriend Patrick (Matthew Wilkas), one of several gay cops. Ok, all the cops in the series are gay.
6. AJ and Robert having long heart-to-heart discussions about self-actualization or "painful memories" or something that I skipped over.
In Dallas, the various plotlines come together in about the way you'd expect. The only surprise is: Cocoa Butter performs in Ruby's place, as she is off handling a family emergency.
What I came away with:
1. Homophobia does not exist, anywhere, not even in the deepest of the deepest South. Even the gun-toting redneck who Ruby meets in an east Texas trailer park is fine with gay men. He doesn't want his son to wear a dress, but Ruby turns him around.
Cocoa Butter tells us that she went blind when she finally decided to tell her "very Christian father" that she was a drag queen. He was fine with it,but she had a stroke.
2. All gay men are super-attracted to drag queens. For instance, Officer Patrick just hooks up with Jordan (Constantine Rousouli, top photo),but with Cocoa Butter, it's "real."
3. Ruby knows everybody and helps everybody, and fixes everything but global warming (maybe next season). I know this is RuPaul's vanity project,but come on, putting on a dress doesn't make you the Second Coming.
4. Constantine's bare butt is worth the price of admission.
5. I'm over-stuffed, like I ate too much and can't digest it all. I'm glad I fast-forwarded past the heart-to-hearts, or I would explode.
A lot of it depends on where you are. States can be red or blue, individuals are definitely red or blue (And that's been true since the 90s, Newt's whole strategy was whipping up the base with extremism and knowing "swing voters" can't be bothered to vote.)
ReplyDeleteOf course the South is a separate animal. In most states, the rich areas, i.e. Redmond, Orange County, Grosse Pointe, Manhattan, Miami and the Keys, vote Republican. Great Plains states are different because Indians, but if you exclude precincts on or near reservations, the pattern holds. So is Virginia, with northern Virginia being Democrats, but that has more to do with proximity to DC.
But the rest of the South? Excluding Virginia and Florida? Solid red. Race is the primary or even sole determinant of voting patterns. Very unique that way.
I had the fun of dealing with Clinton campaign advisers. Most of them bought the McGovern campaign's amusing ideas about the American electorate (or more accurately, Gary Hart's amusing ideas) hook, line, and sinker. Much of the time, they'd invent htpotheticals, explain said hypotheticals, and not ever address the question "Is this real?"
That out of the way, yeah. It seems highly unlikely a place like Mississippi would be so accepting, despite my being told white Southerners were "used to" black people.
By the way, I always heard it was female when performing, make otherwise. Like a performer I knew who went by Mary Cohn.