The HBO Max reality show We’re Here heads into its third season later this year. With the first season cut short by the onset of COVID restrictions in March 2020, the show truly hit its stride in its powerful second season in 2021. The show features three former contestants from RuPaul’s Drag Race—Eureka O’Hara, Bob the Drag Queen, and Shangela—traveling around the country to the smallest (and often the most conservative) towns in America serving lewks and spreading fabulousness everywhere they go.
The show is somewhat of a “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Drag Edition” but is ultimately so much more than a makeover show. The glamorous trio does facilitate physical transformations, but they go further than that and each adopt a local member of the LGBTQ community as their “drag daughters” to prepare them for a full-on drag performance.
Throughout the rehearsal period, the pros sit down with their proteges to get a feel for the queer scene and cultural environment in their tiny towns. The story is often the same: they live on the margins, often just trying to eek by without being ridiculed, ostracized, or worse. While some towns do have a small but thriving queer community − just as many towns seem to be so conservative that LGBTQ folks live in isolation and have established very few ties to one another.
Part of what the show sets out to do is to pull individuals together if only for one evening, to begin to build that community so that queer people struggling with their identity have ties with others who understand their experiences and offer support. Whether it’s supporting someone coming out or family and friends who want to understand the queer person in their lives, Bob, Eureka, and Shangela are there to build the foundations for that community.
And it is for that reason that We’re Here can often be a deeply emotional experience. It’s uplifting and inspirational causing many viewers to wish they’d had their own Fairy Drag Mothers to guide them through such uncertain times. The trio of drag queens serves as queer Sherpas who blow into town with fierceness and fabulousness, taking everyone’s breath away, and leaving having affirmed the queer identities of their drag daughters and viewers alike.
The post-COVID lockdown second season does something similar for people with disabilities, featuring two drag daughters with disabilities.
The queens visit Temecula, California, where they meet James, a young trans man with Autism Spectrum Disorder who is learning to navigate both neurodiversity and his trans identity. James is often misgendered, and each instance can feel like a blow that denies James’s true identity. James is also fostering a serious obsession with anime, and the drag mothers prepare him for performance with this obsession in mind.
Encouraging him to lean into everything about himself that makes him unique—his trans identity, his neurodivergence, his love of anime—the queens cultivate in James' newfound confidence, a sense of self-efficacy and self-love that empowers him to give an all-out performance. Undoing some of the damage that misgendering has done, James’s We’re Here experience helps make him more confident in both his trans identity and his neurodivergent identity.
The final episode of Season Two heads to Grand Junction, Colorado, where the queens meet Dustin Holt, a trans man who uses a wheelchair due to spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy. Holt invited the filming crew to document intimate moments of his life in hopes that showing these personal moments would inspire other people with disabilities to live their lives more visibly and to feel greater self-acceptance in their disability. He also indicated he wanted to be on the show so that other LGBTQ people with disabilities could see someone else going through similar issues and know they weren’t alone. According to Dustin:
“Growing up, for me, there was not a lot of representation of people being differently-abled, let alone me being trans. That is a huge thing I had overcome when I started transitioning because it wasn’t talked about where I grew up.”
Dustin is a fan of My Chemical Romance (MCR), and his performance features him goth-glammed out and rocking out to MCR in his wheelchair. For young queer people with disabilities watching at home, seeing Dustin give an empowered performance rivaling that of any MCR show from his wheelchair is not something they get to see every day. By virtue of being on the stage and laying every part of himself bare for the world to see, Dustin gives queer kids with disabilities everywhere a chance to see someone like themselves looking like a rock star and captivating audiences.
The legacy of We’re Here
In addition to being an uplifting and identity-affirming experience for participants and viewers alike, We’re Here is also a masterclass on how to sit down, listen, and learn when it comes to understanding the experiences of someone other than yourself. While the queens themselves have spent lifetimes batting away nasty looks and combatting social ostracization for just being themselves, their experiences do not totally lend themselves to understanding what life for a person with a disability, queer or not, is like. But they are eager to learn and to understand, letting the drag daughters with disabilities tell their stories in their own words.
And that’s why We’re Here is so effective, both as reality television and as a mechanism of representation. The fab trio leads by example, lifting others up, and amplifying voices that have been calling out from the margins. Hopefully, theirs is an example the rest of us can learn to follow.
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