Hulu’s Drag Me to Dinner is a deeply silly show. It’s a competition series where two pairs of drag queens throw dueling dinner parties built around a theme like “toga” or “divorce.” The food ranges from delicious (Latrice Royale’s literally show-stopping lemon chicken) to inedible (hot dogs and olives in… jello) and the prize is a golden cheese grater. There are more instances of queens tripping and falling than there are demonstrations of good advice. Drag Me to Dinner is a stupid show that will leave you with an equally stupid smile on your face — but it’s also an act of protest.
Granted, co-creators Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka probably didn’t envision their over-the-top sendup of competition shows to be a political platform. They really just wanted a place to let drag queens run amok and do what they do best: entertain, by any means necessary. But as anyone along the LGBTQ+ spectrum knows, conservatives believe that the very existence of queer people is a political act. And as long as they keep legislating our right to literally go outside, a goofy show like Drag Me to Dinner can be seen as an act of peaceful rebellion.
And dammit, Drag Me to Dinner is actually damn fine at doing it.
Drag Me to Dinner has, unknowingly to all involved, been added to Hulu in the midst of a dangerous, violent time for the queer community as Republicans have targeted drag queens as a way to attack anyone who does not conform to a Biblical gender binary — specifically trans people. Tennessee became the first of a growing list of states to pass various bans on drag shows and trans health care. People are calling in bomb threats to Target stores because they have one (1) rack of Pride merchandise, no more or less than they’ve had every June for almost a decade. A guy who is running for president has made it illegal for school faculty members to acknowledge the existence of queer people. All that is going on while Twitter is amplifying hate speech and literal Nazis threaten the queer community.
That’s why even though Drag Me to Dinner is a comedy show hosted by a drag king whose catchphrase is simply “showbiz,” it can be seen as a bit of a bulwark against slanderous attacks on the queer community. When I brought this up to Harris and Burtka, they didn’t disagree.
“In the seriousness of the drag conversation, I think oftentimes people don’t have points of reference,” said Harris. “They often haven’t experienced things, and so it is a gift for me that Drag Me to Dinner is able to come out at a time when people might not understand how positive and how fun and how enjoyable these queens are and can demonstrate.”
“I’m not grateful, but I feel like what a great time for [the show] to come out, because it is such a great show to celebrate drag,” added Burtka. “It makes no excuses at all and it shows what [drag] is. And I’m so proud of it. How could you be upset at this? It’s crazy!”
It is crazy, and Drag Me to Dinner shows just how stupid it is for anyone to be so bent out of shape about drag queens. The conservative news machine wants their captive audience to think that all drag shows are satanic stripteases where men in Victoria’s Secret lingerie burn Bibles in front of kindergarteners. That’s not what drag is. All the Bible-burning shows are strictly 18+! I have to clarify strongly that the last sentence was a joke because lordy do conservatives like to remain willfully ignorant!
In reality, drag is what you see on Drag Me to Dinner. It’s prohibitively elegant gowns. It’s wigs that they plop off and on like they have LEGO heads. It’s boobs that are so big that a queen needs literal help sitting at a table. It’s singing a song about burping Tupperware. It’s taking a golden, bedazzled chainsaw to a dinner table. It’s running a bit down into the ground, where it starts doing somersaults in its grave. Yes, there is foul language. Yes, there are approximately 69,000 dick jokes. Yes, there are some scantily clad queens — but all of it is too stupid to be offensive. You will believe that someone can have their actual whole ass out and it be funny and not sexual!
What Drag Me to Dinner demonstrates so clearly is that drag, more so than any other art form, is a mirror. Drag is, by nature, exaggeration — be it exaggerating gender roles, gender expression, or — in the case of a lot of Drag Me to Dinner — cultural expectations. The show is a sendup of cable reality cooking competitions. Host Murray Hill is a sendup of the masculine excess of old-school variety show hosts like Dean Martin and Johnny Carson. The queens’ diverse aesthetics are plays on everything from happy homemakers and ’80s businesswomen to Barbie dolls and superheroes. That’s all it is. Like how Jeff Foxworthy holds a mirror up to rednecks, drag holds a mirror up to gender and culture at large.
Also LOL — with his exaggerated accent, mullet, mustache, and denim ensembles, Jeff Foxworthy is also doing drag by playing into and sending up our ideas of what a traditional Southern man is — but that’s Drag 201 and conservatives still haven’t passed 101.
This is why Drag Me to Dinner is important. No other drag show on television has really captured the madcap, reality-stretching, head-scratching, belly-laughing silliness of seeing drag IRL. We’re Here is too raw and RuPaul’s Drag Race is a serious competition. Drag Me to Dinner lets the queens cut loose in a way that we don’t often get to see on TV — and it’s a ridiculous sight to behold. And as a political statement, the show’s authentic zaniness is the exact right counterargument to bomb threats and moral hand-wringing. Y’all are really expending all this energy to hate performers who are making a cheese volcano and doing a Golden Girls by way of Tennessee Williams monologue. To again quote David Burtka, “How could you be upset at this? It’s crazy!”