The Truth About RuPaul's Drag Race's Symone

RuPaul's Drag Race has come a long way since its premiere in 2009. The show has particularly been hit with super strong spoilers over the years, which forced the show to start taping multiple endings as a way to arm itself against such issues, per its Fandom page. Just over a decade after its premiere, RuPaul's Drag Race made a change that would have been shocking to RuPaul just a few years prior: It has accepted its first openly transgender contestant.

RuPaul sparked some controversy when in a 2018 interview with The Guardian the famous host said he would not want transgender contestants on his show. "You can identify as a woman and say you're transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body. It takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we're doing," he stated. His opinion has since changed, and the 13th season of the hit reality competition show debuted its first transgender male drag queen, per Them.

However, that's not who is causing waves on the show's newest season. Drag queen Symone has already shown she is a force to be reckoned with just within the season's first two episodes. RuPaul even called her "Kiddo," which according to Junkee, is a huge honor. So, who is this drag queen taking the show by storm? Let's take a deeper look into the truth about RuPaul's Drag Race's Symone.

RuPaul's Drag Race's Symone is from Conway, Ark., and it is currently based in Los Angeles. She's also a member of Avalon House, which in simplest terms is a club of flamboyant drag queens who like to live their life out loud. The house started off as a party called "Glitterrock" meant to celebrate queer culture in conservative Little Rock, Ark., per Hornet. The club's members now reside in Los Angeles.

While contestants in the "werkroom" originally identified Tina and GottMik as their biggest competitors on the season (per Junkee), Symone is a contestant who has proven she is a queen to pay attention to. Symone took the $5,000 cash prize in week two after a head-to-head lip-sync battle to Dua Lipa with fellow contestant Olivia Luxe, which, according to Jezebel, was an easy feat for her. "At the end of the song, Olivia's wig was askance and disheveled from dancing literal circles around Symone in an effort to grab some spotlight. Symone had barely broken a sweat," the publication wrote of the battle.

"People are always pretty and know how to put a look together, it's easy to do that, so it's always fun to flip it on its head," Symone said of her drag performances, per Entertainment Weekly. For her, though, drag is not just a fun hobby — it's her way of life. "To me drag is not an escape. It's everything, she said.