At long last, the world of drag queens has moved from the underground dive bars of New York City and become a part of mainstream pop culture around the world thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race, a competition that puts drag queens through their paces to find the next drag superstar. Despite being shown on American TV networks since its first season, the show has only been available on Netflix and dodgy putlocker-equivalents in the UK… until now. Comedy Central is hosting All Stars 3, with unsuccessful queens from past series coming back to battle once more for the crown. If you’re new to the drag scene you’d better sit down hunty, because along with the padding, contouring, and lip-syncing comes an entire dictionary of drag vocab which can be a little confusing for a newbie.

Is that a read? Reading is not merely limited to books. Rather, it is either subtly or overtly insulting someone. When the library is open, all hell breaks loose and the meanest of reads explode from the creative queens. They battle to put each other down to reign as the sassiest, shadiest queen on the scene. Because reading is what? FUNDAMENTAL. 

Eleganza: Eleganza refers to the look created by the queen on the runway to showcase a theme to the judges. Queens may say, for example, that they will be ‘serving latex realness’ which means the queen is wearing latex eleganza to impress the judges (See All Stars 2 for true latex eleganza from Detox).

Fishy: If a queen is looking as if she could be a true, biological woman, then she is referred to as fishy. The term references the –how to keep this PG– scent? of the downstairs of a lady. Not pleasant.

Tucking: In order to be as fishy as possible, and hide their junk, a queen has to tuck. This is the process of putting their bits and bobs as far up and behind as possible (tucked away) so that wearing a tight leotard, or leaping into the splits during a lip-sync battle, is actually possible without immense pain (See Kennedy Davenport, Season 7 for inspiration).

Drag family: For the vast majority of queens, their experiences of the drag world is through the bar scene, where your drag mother shows you the ropes. A drag mother is an older, more experienced queen who mentors new queens who are unfamiliar with the drag world. A drag family then becomes a community of drag queens as sadly, there is still a lot of judgement and negativity directed towards drag culture, and worse, often from the real families of drag queens.

For people who are not aware of this drag queen competition but know what a meme is, then it is interesting to see how the two overlap. Take for example Latrice Royale from season 4: a big queen with an even bigger personality. Describing her drag queen persona as chunky, yet funky. Multiple captions available.

Or the sassiest, most savage comedy queen Bianca Del Río, winner of season 6, ‘Not today Satan, not today,’ was originally referring to Courtney Act (recent winner of celebrity big brother when she wanted to stay relevant but didn’t have the Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent as required to win RPDR -excuse the shady read).

Condragulations! You have been schooled in the language of the drag world. However, this is merely a brief overview of the main terms used throughout the past 9 seasons and All Stars episodes of Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Many references are made in every episode to previous contestants and pop culture so you still have a lot to learn. Shantay you stay.