New Age Royal Etiquette: Drag Queens on the Internet and the Public's Netiquette
The hype around mainstream drag is overwhelming, but for some queens, so is the harassment.
By Consuelo de Veranó
The year is 2011. RuPaul’s Drag Race, aka RPDR, is more popular than ever, and it is the night of the finale. However, you could not care less because the winner of season three, Raja Gemini, was already spoiled via Perez Hilton. The internet is a relatively new invention to hit the common person’s market, but newness is not an excuse for forgetting how people deserve to be treated.
Every season of RPDR has competitors that fit archetypes: the front-runner, the comedy queen, the dancing diva and the villain. Viewers rely on all of these archetypes to fully flesh out the reality competition’s storylines. However, the moment a competitor is catty, the internet goes up in arms.
This year, season fifteen’s Mistress Isabelle Brooks had her Instagram account mass-reported and subsequently taken down. This was due to a disagreement between her and another queen on that week’s second and third-place rankings. She then tweeted about what happened and joked about how common it is for RPDR viewers to send queen death threats, but it is not a joke.
Season twelve of RPDR is widely regarded as one of the show’s best seasons, and despite airing during the pandemic, it still was an Emmy-winning season. Despite how much fans loved this season, the competitor Brita Filter was continuously tormented by said fans online. She received so many death threats, she had to deactivate all of her social media temporarily for her safety.
This torment has not been experienced solely by the contestants; the former judge of Canada’s Drag Race, Jeffrey Boyer Chapman, knows that all too well. While Chapman’s critiques of the queens that he was hired to judge were nothing short of scathing, nothing he said or did on that show warranted the racism and harassment that he exponentially experienced.
There are three common threads between all three of these people, the first being that they are all people of color. The second is that they all got into a conflict with a fan favorite at the time their respective seasons aired. The last is two-fold: fans of RPDR will personally send these people death threats and get their social media taken down.
Telling people that sending death threats is wrong feels like putting a “do not ingest” warning on a bottle of lotion. While you may not be about eating lotion, somebody has. These are real people with real emotions, and being on television does not change that.
As digital technology becomes more and more integral to our daily functions, respecting boundaries needs to be a common practice for everyone. Respect is going to look different from person to person, but the key is to listen. People will tell you how they want to be treated, so do not ignore them because you do not want to be ignored either. Bios have a lot of information in them; when interacting with a person, read their bio.
The internet is relatively new to us. The new frontier is digital and we are not always aware of our impact. The power of each pixel is exponential, so the energy we spend here matters. Harassing people over a television show will never be worth the exerted energy.