“Silky Nutmeg Ganache is fat Black excellence” by Grace Barber-Plentie
Credit: VH1/World Of Wonder
An in-depth and thorough analysis of/love letter to the lip sync antics of our new lord and saviour, the good Reverend Doctor Silky Nutmeg Ganache
On Thursday 19th August 2021, RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars herstory was made (and no, I’m not talking about the much teased ‘game within a game’ finally being revealed). After being sent packing three weeks into the competition, Doctor Reverend Silky Nutmeg Ganache returned to the main stage and committed a sextuple homicide, and one of the greatest redemption arcs ever witnessed in TV history. (A bold claim as Love Island wraps up a season featuring one of its greatest contestants yet, Toby Aromolaran, but it’s one I’m sticking to)
To backtrack a little - in a recent episode of All Stars, the ‘game within a game’ was finally revealed. All season long, eliminated queens had been returning to the main stage to battle it out. Regardless of when they were eliminated, every queen had the chance of returning, as the victor of each lip sync moved on to fight for another week, meaning that in some parallel universe out there, Serena ChaCha is now the winner of All Stars 6. As this concept has been agonisingly dragged out all season long, the day it finally arrived felt somehow underwhelming, and in a year where Drag Race seasons have felt like they’ve lasted for centuries, merely a way for Ru to stay on the air for an extra week. However… none of us could have expected nor reckoned with the power of Silky.
Silky Nutmeg Ganache is, in my eyes, Drag Race’s most unfairly villainized queen. Like many of us, I’ve tried to forget the show’s dull eleventh season, easily its worst, (not including a certain spin-off version that aired this year) and looking back, it’s hard to remember exactly what Silky’s crimes were. She was a bit too loud? She was confrontational? She stayed in the competition for perhaps too long, while other, more talented queens were eliminated? I can’t deny any of these things. But we live in a world where what feels like every other day, Drag Race queens are exposed as racist, transphobic or sexual predators, and often with little to no consequences. (And best believe that these are just three RECENT examples of those behaviours I’ve linked to….)
Credit: VH1/World Of Wonder
And what’s even more troubling about the backlash towards Silky is that, whether consciously or not, so often these critiques of her behaviour on her original season are coupled with racist and fatphobic stereotypes. What are fans of the show really trying to say when they say that Silky is too loud, when in the same breath they’re praising a queen whose laugh literally sounds like a bird screaming? Why are they pointedly using the word aggressive towards her retaliation in arguments when one of their fav queens uses barbed insult humour as her calling card? Are they really just saying this because someone is taking up space as a fat Black person who’s not apologetic about being both of those things?
We have been lucky, over the years, to have seen a roster of incredibly talented fat drag queens on Drag Race. Think of the beloved ‘big girls’ of the franchise, from Latrice Royale to Henny herself, my ‘close personal’ friend Stacey Layne Mathhews, through to All Stars stalwart Ginger Minj. Comedy queens who are also fashion-forward like the franchise’s LONG OVERDUE first fat winner, Lawrence Chaney, and Eureka O’Hara. Entertaining performers like Jiggly Caliente, Jaiden Dior Fierce and the deeply underrated Widow Von Du. And the utterly endearing... Kandy Muse-ness of my Scorpio queen Kandy Muse. But before Chaney, it so often felt like these queens were (pardon the pun) filler, making up the casts of seasons with their talent never truly taken seriously in the same way as their thinner cohorts. You see a fat queen in the cast of a Drag Race season, you go ‘ah that’s nice’ and then assume that they won’t last the season. Because the parameters of Drag Race so rarely seem friendly to fat girls. There’s either an immediate assumption that they won’t be able to perform to the same ability as other contestants because of their weight, or their dancing ability is held in a ‘shock horror! She’s fat but she can actually dance!’ moment. Again, I return to the underrated Widow Von Du, who slayed the runway, the challenges and could lip sync the house down - but never had her trifecta of talents acknowledged. Or, like Silky in her initial season of Drag Race or Kandy Muse, their progress may be at risk due to critiques about their appearance - garments and presentation often described as cheap or lazy, without taking into consideration the struggles of dressing a fat body, especially in a competition that’s regularly becoming about how much money you spend. All in all, it’s hard out here for a fat queen.
Credit: VH1/World Of Wonder
Plus as we all know too well, people… do not exactly enjoy fatness. I know, huge shocker. So as Ginger Minj pointed out herself on this season, fat queens are just as likely as non-white queens to be subject to abuse from so-called fans of the show. And just imagine what that’s like when you’re fat AND a queen of colour. As a fan of the show, I come across racist, fatphobic abuse towards Silky and Kandy on a regular basis, whether it’s in the comments of a review of a new episode, on their social media, or even on the incredible, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin meme page Simpsons Drag Race… the people of Simpsons Drag Race sadly REALLY do not like fat non-white queens. Numerous queens, including Silky have gone on the record about how debilitating this abuse is. And her competitors on this week’s episode have already called out their ‘fans’ for sending her abuse! When you’re a fat black queen and you’re doing badly, you get abused. When you’re a fat black queen and you’re doing well, you get abused. It feels like it’s really a lose-lose situation for these incredible queens.
But sometimes, like on this episode of Drag Race, revenge can be so sweet. Because yes, I know, on one level, I am analysing an episode of a TV show, a show that is at this point essentially light and fluffy entertainment for the masses rather than the underground queer cult show it once was. But do you know what else this episode was? A moment of fat excellence. A moment of Black excellence. A moment of fat Black excellence.
Because as I said in the opening of this… whatever this is, when returning to the game within a game, Silky Nutmeg Ganache came for blood. In her brief time spent on this season, she embodied all of the criticism made against her in season eleven, leading to her to, to use a popular Drag Race adage, get ‘too in her own head’ and get eliminated. But I can only assume that being cooped up in a hotel room for several weeks listening to Cher and Aqua on repeat changes a person, because the Silky Nutmeg Ganache we saw was neither a villain nor a shell of her former self. Instead, she was simply pure entertainment. Any one of the six lip syncs that she performed in would be meme-worthy gold, deserving of inclusion in the lip sync hall of fame. But what was utterly remarkable about this episode is that, with some editing magic, she delivered them one after another, growing in power as the weeks passed.
Credit: VH1/World Of Wonder
Something that I loved about Silky in her original season, even as she began to grate on me, was her commitment to her body shape. As we know, there have been other fat queens on Drag Race, and all of them have of course celebrated their body shapes. But maybe these other queens have been round the block longer and seem to be more confident with a corset and padding, giving a coherent shape. Silky instead (and isn’t this really her to a T?) relished chaos. Sometimes her entire belly would be out. Her outfits would be shoddily made. But she always gave us something entertaining to look at, and the way in which she presented her body felt refreshing to me. And this felt like something that she carried over to this episode - I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a queen so casually baring their stretch marks on the main stage before. Like so many fat women whose style I love and envy, Silky doesn’t seem particularly interested in covering or flattering her fatness - instead if anything, she’s actively striving to enhance it. It’s like she’s watched that ‘it’s the stomach for me actually’ video and taken it as her mantra.
And then there are the actual lip syncs themselves. The sheer stunts of them. The chaotic messiness born of someone so desperate to return to the competition. The use of props. Drag Race fans, myself usually included, have long bemoaned cheap prop and reveal-heavy lip syncs. Whilst also still holding up Sasha Velour’s ‘So Emotional’ lip sync as a pillar of excellence. We are made of contradictions I guess. But in a season where the lip syncs have been relatively stunt-free, aside from Laganja Estranja’s Dua Lipa Extravaganza Bonanza, it felt earned. Silky has been sitting in her hotel room for weeks getting cabin fever! Why shouldn’t she be allowed to wave a flag around! Plus, up until the last fateful last lip sync, her potential downfall, all of the props felt cohesive, and fun. They didn’t necessarily make you gasp like Velour’s rose petals, it was more a hearty laugh of joy and acknowledgement because yes, of course she’s got an entire cocktail bar in her tiddies! Of course she’s dressed as Barbie AND Ken! Of course she’s got a cardboard guitar!
But what I loved most of all about Silky’s redemption hour (or whatever the episode was actually called) was that it was her night. At least 90% of the episode was given over to a fat Black drag queen. Unless you were skipping through the majority of the show, you were liking her, and I’ll bet that a lot of you, like myself, were won over. This is the RuPaul’s Drag Race I fell in love with - a dumb silly show where drag queens entertained in the most over the top ways. But to see that space being held on the show in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, especially after recent periods of such intense hatred targeted at both fat and Black people? It was the redemption arc that we all deserved.
Long live Reverend Doctor Silky Nutmeg Ganache, and thank you for the entertainment and taking up space. If you, like me, can’t stop thinking about that Barbie Girl lip sync, throw Silky some coin over on her Paypal!!!!