Telegraph e-paper

How Drag Race won over the world

Producer Fenton Bailey gave misfits and outcasts a platform – then created a global TV phenomenon

By Suzanne MOORE

SCREENAGE by Fenton Bailey

384pp, Ebury, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99

RuPaul’s Drag Race debuted in 2009 on a US LGBTQ+ cable television channel. It was cheap to make and the suits at the network thought it would be “a guilty pleasure”. By 2016, its host, drag queen RuPaul, had won an Emmy and the likes of Lady Gaga were appearing on it. Now the show is made in several countries – a global phenomenon.

Producer and director Fenton Bailey is one half of the duo that created the franchise. It comes from the stable of World of Wonder, the production company he founded in 1991 with filmmaking partner Randy Barbato, which has been behind documentaries, TV shows and films – often focusing on misfits or those embroiled in scandals – that have done much to usher gay culture into the mainstream.

In ScreenAge, Bailey gives us glimpses of his 30-plus years in the business. The book is more than a series of celebrity vignettes and gossip (though there appears to be no one Bailey has not worked with, from Britney Spears to Graham

Norton, Anna Wintour and Monica Lewinsky). Rather, it is a story of how TV has shaped our reality and about a way of seeing the world that celebrates every kind of difference, queer and otherwise.

As a gay boy, born in Portsmouth in 1960, Bailey was enamoured by Quentin Crisp and knew that, like the flamboyant author, he must somehow get to New York. TV had already become “a friend. It didn’t call you names. It changed my life.” At Oxford, he got a scholarship to film school, where he met Barbato. On the plane to the US, he filled in the immigration form, which asked “Are you or have you ever been a member of the Nazi Party?” The next question was: “Are you a homosexual?”

New York in the early 1980s was where he found himself, honing his aesthetic among drag queens, bands, punks and clubs. He went on to gather the alienated and dispossessed and put them on TV, where he made no separation between high or low culture. Bailey sees in the home-shopping channels and televangelists of America a kind of honesty and it is this ability to dig into the medium of TV that makes his programmes, and this book, so compelling. Like Andy Warhol, who adored television’s “alchemical power”, Bailey understands that it’s the movies that really run America.

Bailey is drawn to subjects who have challenged norms, but he doesn’t white-wash. His films get to the kernel of scandals by refusing to sanitise them, whether it’s about Lewinsky’s affair with US President Bill Clinton, the Menendez brothers’ murder of their parents, or the S&M-loving photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In embracing the freaks or those who have fallen from grace, Bailey’s career has a deep moral seriousness. Unlike Susan Sontag, who thought that camp was somehow depoliticised, Bailey sees it as the great leveller. We are all creatures in costumes. As RuPaul famously put it: “You’re born naked. The rest is just drag.”

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2022-11-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-26T08:00:00.0000000Z

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Daily Telegraph