A pivotal point in the early history of World of Wonder, the production company responsible for RuPaul’s Drag Race, reveals a lot about the origins of this entire enterprise. Two young men who would go on to change television, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, used to skip film school classes to watch drag queens perform and sip dangerously strong gin-and-tonics at the Pyramid Club in Manhattan’s East Village. They weren’t conducting market analysis. They were unable to turn away.
Tens of millions of dollars were made from that intuition.
Logo, a tiny Viacom cable channel targeted at LGBTQ+ viewers, debuted RuPaul’s Drag Race in February 2009. It had a small budget. It was a specialized audience. It was not being considered for cultural dominance by anyone in a network boardroom. And yet here we are, about sixteen years later, with seventeen seasons of the original series, over a dozen international adaptations (from Spain to the Philippines to Brazil), four yearly fan conventions, a residency in Las Vegas, and a host with an estimated net worth of about $65 million. Such a trajectory is not the result of chance.
It took years for the entertainment industry as a whole to realize that drag was never truly niche, despite what Bailey and Barbato realized early on. Due in part to circumstances and in part to a culture that wasn’t prepared to face it head-on, the art form had been restricted to LGBTQ+ spaces. The audience was anticipating the show’s move to VH1 for its ninth season, which would reach tens of millions more American homes. The show’s highest viewership to date, one million people watched the season 10 premiere. Nothing had changed. It was surrounded by conditions.
Much of the heavy lifting in this case was done by social media. Drag Race developed alongside Instagram and Twitter in a way that seemed almost planned, even though it wasn’t. Contestants came on stage with pre-existing fan bases, departed with larger ones, and used those fan bases to launch book deals, merchandise lines, touring careers, and YouTube channels. These days, some former students make between $5,000 and $10,000 per appearance. Many earn six figures a year. For an art form where working drag queens used to frequently live in poverty, that is an amazing reversal.
In addition to ticket sales from over 40,000 attendees who paid $40 apiece, DragCon, the fan convention series that eventually spread to New York and the UK, brought in $9 million in merchandise sales in a single year in Los Angeles.
At the time, Bailey observed that half of the attendees were heterosexual and 60% were women. It may not seem important, but that detail is crucial. It subtly disproved the notion that the RuPaul Drag Empire was exclusively targeting gay men, and it paved the way for a sponsorship and licensing discussion that looks very different when your audience is so diverse.
However, there is something worth considering about how this expansion took place. Money and mainstream acceptance have a complicated relationship in the history of drag in America. Some of the radical queens of past decades openly rejected commerce as a component of art, so they weren’t attempting to establish brands. Drag Race and its social media ecosystem have accelerated the trend toward entrepreneurial self-branding, creating genuine opportunities for real people who might not have otherwise had any. However, it has also altered expectations about what drag should be and do. Depending on who you ask, that trade-off may or may not be net positive.
The franchise model itself is more difficult to dispute. The Drag Race formula, which includes local talent, culturally sensitive judges, a standardized format, and widespread brand awareness, has proven remarkably resilient in a wide range of markets. In 2018, a Thai version was released. In 2020, a Canadian edition was released. Editions in Spanish, Dutch, French, Italian, Australian, Filipino, and other languages quickly followed. Currently, the franchise has operations in over fifteen nations. Even for formats with much larger original audiences, that kind of geographic dispersion is uncommon.
Drag would never become popular, according to RuPaul. Additionally, he once declared that he preferred an enema to an Emmy. Since then, he has won over a dozen Emmys. It’s possible that the prediction was incorrect or that what transpired wasn’t exactly mainstreaming as he had anticipated, but rather something more unusual and long-lasting. Built by a man who put up his own posters on New York streets that read “RuPaul is everything” and simply persisted until everyone agreed, this subculture learned to negotiate with commerce without completely dissolving into it.
