As the runway illuminated on the season premiere of the RuPaul’s Drag Race spinoff series Secret Celebrity Drag Race, mentors Bob the Drag Queen, Trixie Mattel, and Monet X Change all wondered aloud who might soon shanté onto the stage. Eminem? Michael Jordan? Haley Joel Osment? Larry David? Well, no. But the night’s three mystery celebrities underwent such drastic and dragtastic makeovers, it would have been impossible to recognize whoever it was under all that padding and pancake stick, anyway.
This was all for a laugh, but also for a good cause, with Friday’s Celebrity Drag Race champion ultimately winning $30,000 for charity. And there was a noble, can-I-get-an-amen-worthy message here, too. As RuPaul explained to the contestants, “Our mission is simple: We want everyone to experience the miracle of drag. Doing drag doesn't change who you are — it actually reveals who you are. So, consider yourselves cultural pioneers. Or at least Drag Race lab rats!”
As it turned out, this week’s very willing “lab rats” were Younger actor Nico Tortorella, stand-up comedian Jermaine Fowler, and Riverdale star Jordan Connor. All three were absolutely, admirably up for the challenges of wedging their size 12 feet into pointy pink stilettos or memorizing all the lyrics to RuPaul’s club banger “Jealous of My Boogie,” but it was eventual winner Connor — now known as the surprisingly fishy drag queen Babykins LaRoux — who truly embodied what this transformational and aspirational show is supposed to be all about.
“I was a football star in high school, so I'm used to wearing pads,” Connor joked, before adding more seriously, “Coming from a football background, it's such a masculine energy, and I never really was the alpha-male in those situations. … I think when I was 19, 20 years old, and I was playing football really seriously, I would have been pretty scared to do something like this. But now, I think the more you can learn about other people's lives or other cultures, it's such a good insight. At the end of the day, I'm more secure in my masculinity by doing something like this.”
Connor later told his mentor, Trixie, that he signed up for Celebrity Drag Race to support his two gay siblings. “As a straight male, I don't necessarily relate to drag as much as maybe my brother and sister do, and understanding the empowerment that a man feels when he dresses up in drag. I think that doing drag for me will really give me a new experience, and a new viewpoint on drag and the LGBTQ community too,” he explained.
Though Connor admitted that he was scared to venture so far out of his comfort zone — “The first thing I thought was, ‘Oh no, are people going to judge me for coming on here?” — he realized, “Then you quickly put that away, because that's stupid. And then you just think, ‘I'm gonna have fun, and people are gonna love it. And if they hate it, then they're idiots.’” Trixie was stunned and moved by Connor’s open-mindedness, saying, “I don't really have a lot of straight male friends. To be honest, straight men still freak me out, because when I was young, it was just like I would never fit in with them, and they'll never think I'm cool or normal or acceptable. And so, to have this experience with Jordan, it inspires me. I think it's cool!”
Connor really got into character, first in the iconic Snatch Game maxi-challenge, in which he hilariously impersonated Chrissy Teigen (his Academy Awards reaction-shot grimace was GIF-able perfection), then in full feeling-the-fantasy makeover mode on the runway, during a three-way lip-sync to “Express Yourself” in which he definitely took Madonna’s song title to heart. He even worked a red rose into his act, which indicated he’d done his home-werk and was probably familiar with Sasha Velour’s herstoric rose-petal lip-sync from the Season 9 finale. “All right, she's the lip-sync assassin of the season,” Monet said of Babykins’s skills.
