With so much at stake in the upcoming U.S. election, five queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race season 16 are urging their fans to make their voices heard by voting.
In a PSA shared on Drag Race’s X account, the five queens — Amanda Tori Meating, Dawn, Megami, Plasma and Xunami Muse — shared what issues felt most important to them in the upcoming election, with every queen stating that they were worried about the status of rights for the trans community in the U.S.
“I am very, very concerned about making sure that my trans family are protected, and that we have someone in office who actually sees them as human beings and will fight for their rights to healthcare and to just exist as humans,” Megami said in the video. Plasma added that it was “hard to fathom” that trans people’s “right to be who they are, intrinsically [and] autonomously, is at stake in this election.”
Dawn pointed out that LGBTQ+ people are an actively important voting block in the 2024 election. “We’re such an important demographic of people,” she said. “Because our rights are under fire right now.” As Amanda Tori Meating put it, “there are a lot of us, and they don’t think that we’ll all vote.”
In closing the video, Xunami Muse called on fans to make sure they did their civic duty in November. “There are so many policies trying to take our rights just to exist away,” she said, while a graphic directing viewers to Headcount’s voter registration website appeared on screen. “So it’s not an option … it’s a must. It’s our right. It’s our duty as an American to go out there and vote.”
RuPaul’s Drag Race has a long history with presidential elections — since the show’s fourth season in 2012, every season of the show taking place during an election year has included at least one election-themed challenge, including performances in mock debates (seasons 4 and 12), creating attack advertisements (season 8) and even writing lyrics to a political anthem (season 16).
While none of the five queens directly stated which candidate they would be voting for in the 2024 election, all of them focused on the attack on LGBTQ+ rights happening in the U.S. The ACLU is currently tracking over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills across all 50 states, with the vast majority of those bills introduced by right-wing legislators.
Former president Donald Trump’s official platform includes promises to “keep men out of women’s sports” (a reference to ongoing attempts to ban transgender athletes from competing in school sports) and to “cut federal funding for any school pushing … radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” Vice President Kamala Harris’ platform, meanwhile, includes a promise to pass the Equality Act into law “to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more.”
Watch the full PSA from the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race below:
