RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 14 Recap, Episode 7: Soap Acting, Fart Jokes, & Chaps on the Runway

We enter this week a bit more…how shall I put this? Gay. Maddy, the series’ first cis/straight drag queen, was eliminated last week after once delivering a blah look and failing to be a match for Jasmine’s lip sync prowess. If you watch Untucked, you may have seen that we also learned this week that Jasmine Kennedy has come out as trans. This season gets Queerer and Queerer yet! Congrats to Jasmine, and cheers to living the rest of her life as her authentic self!

I was excited by the previous acting challenges, so you KNOW I’m excited for the full-on acting challenge that we got this week with a campy soap opera maxi-challenge! That’s right, the gals have to film their piece of “The Daytona Wind,” the high drama soap that Ru herself will be directing. The pressure is on! The girls break out into their teams with Jasmine as Maddie Smith O'Hara, Lady Camden as Leona, Jorgeous was Sierra, DeJa Skye played Maggie, Bosco as Fancy, Kerri Colby took on Deandra, and, last but not least, Willow Pill and Daya Betty were the Spring Break Sisters.

Watching Willow and Daya rehearse together was a blast, and we also saw some queens struggle with lines. Small mistakes like that are what start to weaken a contender at this stage in the game. Deja, Kerri, and Jorgeous film first with Ru. Deja is tasked by Ru with speaking in a Southern accent, which goes awry and throws her off her game a bit. Being a fan of the acting challenges, I do have to say that this week had a bunch of strong acting performances from a few of the gals. Having grown up watching telenovelas , Jorgeous provided some of the funniest moments of the season with hilarious reactions reminiscent of the great telenovela performances.

With drama comes more… well… drama. And this episode definitely heightened the drama that I talked about last week. Some of the girls start to lean into their more competitive instinct, with Daya acknowledging to Jorgeous that she doesn’t want her competitive instincts to stomp on anyone else’s successes. While new tensions are starting to brew on the show, at least one notable tension has now been resolved. Jasmine read a letter from Maddy where they put their differences behind them and they can now go forward as friends. We love to see it!

The main runway challenge has a theme of “Chaps,” which offers the perfect moment for some of the gals to educate some of their competitors—as well as most of the world—on the Folsom Street Fair. For those of you who don’t know, the Folsom Street Fair, or “Folsom” as it’s more commonly known, is a festival of leather, kink, and sex positivity that happens every year in San Fran. I’ve talked in previous articles about how mainstream RPDR has gotten. Similarly, many feel that Folsom has become too mainstream. While not the corporate-sponsored pride events bemoaned by Bosco, Folsom has started to attract young families with strollers to watch the zoo of Queerness. Perhaps that makes Folsom the perfect fulcrum to balance the show’s mainstream audience with the punk rock spirit that is drag and Queer sexual freedom. As an ardent proponent of sex positivity, I really appreciated the focus on that during some of the discussions on this episode.

Along with discussions of the Folsom Street Fair, Drag Race is also doing a great job at challenging its own form and its own history. Any organism that isn’t growing is dying, so it’s great to see Drag Race grow. “Chaps On the Runway” provided the perfect amount of space for the girls to play in given that historically, pants are often looked down upon by drag queens (not so much by the kings, of course) if not done incredibly well. It also became the perfect place for the gals to have a gas, as it were. Fart jokes were non-stop in this episode, and as one of my best friends would say, “you don’t have to be a genius to laugh at a fart joke… but you have to be an idiot not to.”

Along the lines of challenging the usual systems processes, this week changed the form a bit by having the top two queens Lip Sync For the Win. Daya and Lady Camden found themselves in the top, as both really crushed their acting and looked stunning the whole episode. Though both strong performances for the week, Lady Camden took home the prize.

I can’t wait for next week’s episode, but mainly because I can’t wait to see what Willow Pill does! Who are some of your favorites and what do you think of this season? Let us know!

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