Yvie Oddly on All Stars 7, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and True Drag Sisterhood – Them

When prodded further, Yvie admits that what many viewers thought to be All Stars 7’s crowning achievement — its focus on positivity and friendship, and its embrace of different kinds of drag — was actually painful for her. Not because Yvie was opposed to having her drag celebrated but because she thinks that was a disingenuous portrayal of what actually took place. According to her, the judgment was just as tough for the all-winners edition as it had been for any other season. 

“Literally, from the jump, from the first week, the first runways, the first performances, I was getting comments [from the judges] like, ‘Oh that’s your boy-body,’ ‘Oh, why are you wearing tiny hair,’ ‘Oh, I don’t really understand what you’re doing,’ ‘Oh, I don’t like your style,’” she shares. That these comments never made it to air didn’t erase them from her memory.

Looking back on it now, Yvie says she didn’t understand the confusion around her style. “I thought we already played out that I’m the weirdo… that I’m going to do the drag that got me here in the first place, and that it’s not going to be the curvy woman body fantasy that you’re always looking for,” she says. “Drag is so much bigger than that. Not only to me, but to all the people I’ve gotten to meet around the world.”

She had thought her win was a testament to this more expansive definition of drag, describing her 2019 victory as “a crack in the mirror” of the larger franchise. “It literally was. It was a crack in the perfection of it,” she stresses. “We’ve had weird queens win before me. I was far from the first. But I think what I did was do it so chaotically, so unpolished, and with only one win, to show people that the odds are always unpredictable, and that sometimes, the most exciting thing in life is the problem. I was the problem of season 11.”

Returning for All Stars 7 was always meant to be a continuation of that. “I wanted to come back and throw up a middle finger and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s right, you crowned me for being a fuck-up,” she says. “But then, from the jump, the judges were like, ‘Why are you fucking up?’”

Yvie thinks that at least some of this treatment stems from the judges’ overall lack of familiarity with her brand as a drag artist, which she blames in part on the show becoming “oversaturated.” Season 11 “was literally the last season that those judges filmed before they started doing two and three, four, five, six seasons a year,” she points out. “When I went on the first time, it made sense that they didn’t know any of us because they don’t know any of us. But coming back is supposed to be [about] giving you a platform to celebrate what you do and show who you are. It was very strange for me to have people who were treating me like it was my first time, like this is my first experience, like I’m a baby all over again.”