Going into the RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 13 finale, it seemed pretty certain that a Los Angeles queen would reign. Even the Los Angeles Times excitedly wrote about the possibility of either Gottmik or Symone winning the season, bringing the Drag Race crown back home for the first time in a decade, when L.A. queen Raja won Season 3. In the intervening years, the crown had gone to Pittsburgh, Seattle, Atlanta, Denver and Milwaukee, plus New York City four times in five seasons. Finally, it looked like it was L.A.’s turn once again.
But the queens’ L.A. connections were curiously underplayed on the show, outside of some light L.A. versus NY smack talk between the final five (Kandy Muse, Olivia Lux and Rosé are all NYC queens). Season champion Symone’s upbringing in Conway, Arkansas, earned much more attention than where she moved with her arthouse collective, the House of Avalon. Your guess is as good as mine as to why, though I do think to some extent it’s hard to sell the idea of a star being found by the show when she’s already living and working in L.A. (Case in point: Gottmik’s prolific celebrity makeup career, which was mentioned only a few times on the show.)
But the excitement for these two both in and outside of Los Angeles was palpable going into the finale. Here, you have two of the most high-caliber fashion queens to ever compete on the show, who owned the challenges and who spoke for something bigger than themselves: Symone’s celebration of and activism for Black lives and Gottmik’s representation of trans people in the world of drag, with Mik being the first trans man to compete in the show. This season, reaching the finale with these two well-matched frontrunners as the top queens felt like the most fitting possible ending.
Of course, the dreaded wheel and Lip Sync for the Crown format couldn’t quite let us have that dream top two. Like in Season 9, when best friends Sasha Velour and Shea Couleé faced off in Round 1 instead of the very final showdown, Gottmik and Symone were paired in the semi-final lip sync battle to Britney Spears’ “Gimme More.” Symone won, and earned her spot to Lip Sync for the Crown against Kandy Muse. Gottmik sashayed away in a joint third and fourth spot with Rosé, leaving us with the memory of her incredible performance this season and a hope that we’ll see Mik again on All Stars someday soon.
Regardless of their actual placements, Gottmik and Symone will almost certainly be remembered as two of the brightest spots of this very long, inconsistent season. This is thanks in large part to their drag and challenge performances, of which there were more terrific moments than I can recite. (Symone’s durag runway! Gottmik’s safety pin look! Symone’s “flag fac-tree” acting challenge performance! Gottmik’s Snatch Game as Paris Hilton!)
But it was also how committed Gottmik and Symone were to not just winning for themselves that made them both such compelling presences on the show. From her entrance line (“Time to crash the cis-tem!”), Gottmik spoke openly and frankly about her experiences as a trans man doing drag. She shared that her signature clown white mug was a way to cope with looking, in her eyes, “too feminine” at the start of her transition. She talked about her initial insecurities about not being masculine enough as a trans man, which eventually gave way to acceptance of herself and her femininity.
She utterly charmed RuPaul, who has previously been slow to include trans competitors, and helped open doors for more trans people of various experiences to compete on the show. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Gottmik was an absolutely groundbreaking competitor for Drag Race.
Her L.A. sister deserves major plaudits for breaking ground, too. Symone’s drag is a proud celebration of Blackness and of Black women in particular. (“I love Black culture and Black women, and the strength that comes from us,” she said in her post-win interview with Entertainment Weekly.) From her durag and braid runways to her beyond stunning Say Their Names look, Symone’s drag is an appreciation for and a celebration of Blackness, and a declaration that Black lives do, in fact, matter. That came across in workroom segments as well, as she and other Black and Afro-Latino queens like LaLa Ri and Kandy Muse discussed the mass demonstrations and demands for change that were occurring just as the queens left to film the season.
“Despite all that was happening around them, this group of queer people gave us reasons to celebrate and become invested in their journeys.”
Not only did Symone and Gottmik make powerful statements in their drag, they were also a pure joy to watch—and that’s a testament to the whole cast, not just the two of them. The past year-plus has been agonizing: There was the health and economic crisis caused by the pandemic; the ongoing police brutality and murders of unarmed Black people; the absolute onslaught of anti-trans legislation across the United States; the terrifying surge in anti-Asian hate crimes. And we continue to deal with all of these things.
For this cast to be so entertaining, so joyful, so ready to put on a show despite the circumstances is a tremendous credit to them. Despite everything that was happening around them, this group of queer people gave us reasons to celebrate and become invested in their journeys. They wowed us, they made us laugh and cry. They knew what this season would mean for its audience, but they never let the weight of expectations stop them from putting themselves out there for the good of the show.
The season was able to meet this moment thanks to the queens taking part in it. And even though they filmed in a quarantine bubble almost a year ago, it still felt timely. As Symone said of her Say Their Names look in her pre-finale Vulture interview, “I knew we were going to be filming at a very important moment in our history. And I knew when this aired, it would still be a very important moment.”
The hope, coming off of this season, is that this type of casting can be the baseline moving forward: Queens who celebrate their backgrounds and identities; queens who offer up unique, individual points of view. Queens who aren’t cisgender gay men; queens who are given the room to speak openly and honestly about their experiences. The casting is a big part of what made Season 13 noteworthy—in fact, it was often the thing that saved the show as its production and editing choices frustrated fans. (Suffice it to say we never need a season this long with just 13 queens again.)
There’s definitely been a sense both during the season and in its immediate aftermath that Season 13 is destined to be ranked low among the many seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I get that, but I don’t totally agree. For one, I think rewatching it in a binge will make the length of the season easier to handle, and the many weeks of non-eliminations less frustrating. For another, the back half of the season was better than the first half, and several other very good seasons (I’m thinking of Season 9 in particular) share this in common.
But most of all, I think frustrations over elimination order and such will fade, and the strength of this crop of queens—led by Gottmik and Symone—will stand tall in the collective memory of fans. This wasn’t the best season, but it felt like the right season for our moment, largely by virtue of its outspoken and proud cast. And for someone who has spent the majority of my adult life in Los Angeles, I have to admit, it’s good to have the crown here again. Symone is going to make one hell of a Drag Superstar. We can only hope that an All Stars win for Gottmik s next.
What’s on your mind, my love? Join us for Kiki with Kevin to untuck your final thoughts on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 13, on Friday, Apr. 30 at 4 p.m. EDT.
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