Jujubee on Trump, tokenism and why she’s ‘totally done’ with Drag Race
Jujubee: ‘I’m totally done competing as a drag queen’. (Getty/Canva)
Jujubee feels utterly at peace. “I have complete autonomy over what I do,” the 40-year-old drag queen purrs over a morning video call, her voice so soft I’m concerned that there’s someone asleep on the other side of her dimly lit room.
She’s out of drag and mellow, quite some way from the feisty yet fair RuPaul’s Drag Race star who made her name with firecracker quotes including: “Just get yourself some manners so you won’t look so damn stupid!” (Directed at her season two co-competitor, Tyra Sanchez). She seems beyond that now, with newfound zen.
“I really am getting older, because I started saying ‘No is a complete sentence’, and I love having this idea where I get to make these decisions for myself,” she says. We’re mulling over her career to date, including her extensive Drag Race history, and the decision she’s made is this: she’ll never return to a drag TV competition again.
“Yeah, it’s… I’m totally done competing as a drag queen,” she says, the words falling out of her like the deepest exhale. The roots of RuPaul’s drag empire have finally let her go.
It’s unsurprising. Jujubee, real name Airline Inthyrath, arguably became the first ever properly unanimous favourite among the Drag Race fandom when she appeared on season two back in 2010 with a winning blend of bite, heart, and sage wisdom.
She made the final, but lost. Two years later, she appeared on the inaugural All Stars season, competing in tandem with her season two bestie, Raven. She made the final, but lost. In 2020, after an eight-year break, she returned again, this time for All Stars 5. She made the final, but lost. Most recently, in 2022, she came back for the first ever RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs The World season, hoping to try her luck across the pond. She made the final, but – come on, all together now – lost.
Today, she is “not being bitter at all, you know… and that was satirical right there,” she laughs. In all seriousness, she’s dealt with the numerous defeats with grace, but most importantly, humour. With subsequent Drag Race cast announcement, fans have edited Jujubee into the promotional photoshoots, jesting that she’s back once again. She reposts every single one, always in on the joke, never the butt of it.
“It’s really crazy to me because I feel like I have this love-hate relationship with competing in anything, right? I feel like life is complete competition,” she says diplomatically. “But I make the rules here for myself.” And here’s the kicker: by “here”, Jujubee means her appearance on the brand new, drag reality competition series, Drag House Rules. Yes, really.
Well, sort of. Drag House Rules seems to have your bog standard reality TV set up: seven drag queens are drafted to live in a house together, where they take on a series of unhinged challenges, form alliances and rivalries, and vote each other out, with a mystery prize up for grabs. Yet as Jujubee tentatively puts it, “We are a reality show competition, but it’s in the format of The Office,” which is to say it’s more satirical sitcom, with the chaotic aura of a Drag Race acting challenge. Essentially, it’s a parody of the world Jujubee has been tied to for 15 years. “It’s real,” she insists, “but there are moments where, you know, it’s a fairytale. And the fairytale is heightened.”
Jujubee stars alongside some of TV’s most exuberant drag performers; Silky Nutmeg Ganache, Manila Luzon, Rock M Sakura, Biqtch Puddin, Laganja Estranga, and the eternally enigmatic Tammie Brown. “I am obsessed with Tammie Brown,” Jujubee says of her unknowably kooky co-star, whom she first worked with on All Stars 13 years ago. “I believe that Drag House Rules is the complete comeback of Tammie Brown.” Juju, Tammie and Silky spent much of their time together lolling by the on-set pool, ordering takeout. “Production probably are still upset with the bill, but we don’t care.”
Between them the cast have a caustic amount of vim, yet episode one puts Jujubee front and centre. The cast and producers lean into her reputation as a serial drag competition botherer, and she makes it plain that she doesn’t want to be there as she is, in her words, too old for reality TV. She packs her bags and tries to leave, but a legally-binding contract puts paid to her escape plans.
“OK, so I’m gonna be upfront with you. I thought that it was going to be really insane in a terrible way,” she admits, “but it was the best kind of insanity possible. I like to see myself as a really put together menace, so I caused a lot of issues, but it was all fun.” What kind of issues? “You’ve seen me on television!” She promises confrontations, rule-breaking, steamy hook-ups, a poisoning (?) and “maybe a little bit of violence… it’s a total circus”.
It’s remarkable, I suggest, that almost half the cast (Jujubee, Rock, and Manila) are of Asian-American heritage. On RuPaul’s Drag Race, she is one of just seven Asian queens across 17 US seasons to make it to the final. Across nine seasons of All Stars, an Asian queen has made the top two only twice; both times, it was Jujubee. Though she’s still widely regarded as a franchise-wide favourite – a rare feat for someone who’s been at the mercy of the show’s editors four times – she’s still endured a hefty amount of racist abuse from the fandom’s trolls.
“Whenever I see an Asian person do anything, I feel a sense of proudness,” she offers, “because a lot of the time, I feel like I’m the one Asian one, you know? And then you start feeling like there’s a sense of tokenism.” How is she feeling now, under a president who has not only stoked hatred against Asian people – in 2020, he dubbed Covid-19 a “Chinese virus” – but has rolled out a targeted campaign against the LGBTQ+ community?
All things considered, she’s feeling blessed. Blessed to be a drag queen, blessed to be sharing queer art in the face of vitriol. “I only worry about things that I can control. I can’t control what people feel or say about us. All I know is I have to be present and I have to be here, and I have to live my life so fully,” she says.
She mentions the Trump administration recently removing transgender and non-binary individuals from information listed on Stonewall National Monument’s website. “I know that so many identities right now are being forced to be ‘erased’,” she says, waggling her fingers in an air quote, “because you can’t erase a people”. She praises the trans people in her life for their “great hearts” and “beautiful souls”, and suggests the community could try to “not throw so much shade, I suppose, at each other, because there’s a bigger monster who is trying to destroy the the kingdom – or the queendom – that we’ve created.” Anyway, back to her show about poisoning and punching drag queens.
Drag wasn’t Jujubee’s original calling. She cut her teeth on performing at theatre classes in Massachusetts, where she was born, and California, where she grew up. In her teen years, she returned to her home state, majoring in theatre at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “It was always theatre,” she says. “That was my first love.” Drag – which she first saw via RuPaul’s cameo in the 1995 comedy film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, before trying it for herself at a Halloween party aged 16 – became the “quickest fix” for accessing the joy she found on stage as a kid.
As her career inches away from reality TV, it’s going full circle, back to the theatre wings. In 2022, she landed a part in dragged-up murder mystery Death Drop on the West End – her first major theatre role. That same year, she headed back to Massachusetts for a role in musical Cinderella. Last year, she began starring in the Off-Broadway version of glitzy, drag house rivalry show, Drag: The Musical alongside her Drag Race co-stars Alaska, Luxx Noir London, and Jan Sport. Liza Minelli is an executive producer.
It’s a mammoth career ascension, but she’s unsure she’d be able to reach these heights if she were coming off the back of Drag Race for the first time today. “I am so glad that I auditioned for season two, because I don’t think that I would get on today. It’s a completely different beast,” she says. Stars of recent seasons have opened up about being unable to find work: in December, British contestant Sminty Drop said she had four bookings throughout the entirety of 2024. Others have complained of struggling to hit the 100,000 followers mark on social media, compared to earlier seasons, where contestants would breeze past half a million.
Some fans have suggested the diminished returns of Drag Race is down to the show being moved from Netflix to MTV, and on to drag streamer WOW Present Plus for international fans. Others think it’s down to oversaturation: in just five years, 18 international spin-off seasons have launched.
All Jujubee is certain of is that the drag landscape has changed immensely. During her original run, RuPaul called her a “social media queen” because she had more than 1,000 friends on MySpace. “I’m grateful that I was on season two because we had no idea what we were doing… Catchphrases weren’t a thing. Merch wasn’t a thing,” she says.
“We just went there to have fun. This is not dogging any of the girls that are doing what they’re doing now, because as we all know, drag could be a huge business and fantastic career. But I do feel that it is the perfect stepping stone for a lot of the performers out there. You could do whatever you want because of drag.”
It may have taken 15 years and four goes at the crown, but Jujubee is finally doing whatever she wants, because of drag. We’re wrapping up, as she’s got Drag: The Musical rehearsals to get to. “I’m absolutely living my dreams right now, and I’m constantly in the moment, and that’s all due to drag,” she says. “I have a really great life.”
New episodes of Drag House Rules are streaming on Fridays on OUTtv.com in the US and OUTflix.com in the UK.
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