Saturday Night Live Gets Their First Drag Queen Host Ever With RuPaul
Who hasn’t encountered RuPaul? Nowadays, you don’t have to be a proud member of the LGBTQ community to know who the most famous drag queen in the world is. RuPaul went from sleeping on his sister’s couch and bouncing around from bar to club with next to nothing in his pocket to decades later having his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and can be seen seemingly every Friday on your televisions hosting RuPaul’s Drag Race. RuPaul doesn’t stop and it’s the reason why he continues to be a trailblazer not only in the gay community, but for anyone who believes they can overcome the odds stacked against them. RuPaul is taking another big step for his career and he may soon be eating his own words that “drag will never be mainstream.”
According to Entertainment Weekly, RuPaul is going to be hosting Saturday Night Live (SNL) on February 8th. Not only is he headlining, but the special musical guest is freakin’ Justin Bieber – who is going to be basically returning to music among the iconic energy that is RuPaul. This is huge! And, well, SNL is pretty mainstream… so, is drag being normalized?! Hell yeah!
RuPaul is known to give his drag children (the Drag Race alumni) a little taste of the cookie, too. In RuPaul’s latest feat, starring and producing Netflix’s drag queen drama, AJ & The Queen, we saw a handful of the queens appear in cameos. While it’s safe to RuPaul and the drag superstars we have all come to know and love are definitely not going to be Academy Award winning actors, they don’t need to be to see success on Saturday Night Live. RuPaul is naturally hysterical, hello, he is the best drag queen in the business. It won’t take much for him to cozy up to the other funny heavyweights on SNL and create some sketches that we’re going to want to replay over and over again. We can speculate that they’ll definitely do a Drag Race parody, so I’m sure we’re going to have plenty of surprise guests. We’re basically about to get a televised gay pride during February and I’m not mad about that at all!
Besides AJ & The Queen, RuPaul has brought his comedic acting chops to series such as Sister, Sister The Real O’Neals, The Brady Bunch Movies, and But I’m A Cheerleader to name just a few. Randomly, he was also in a SNL gig as a drag queen in 1993. Most of the time, he refuses to don drag unless the money is talking and I don’t suspect this is an unpaid gig. Will we get to see him in full RuPaul glam or are we going to have to sit through two hours of RuPaul Charles the man? Either way, it’ll be a treat to see our favorite muva on screen.
RuPaul’s episode of Saturday Night Live premieres on NBC on February 8th.
Writer’s Note: This is the opinion of one Instinct Magazine contributor and does not reflect the views of Instinct Magazine itself or fellow contributors.
H/T: Entertainment Weekly
