Amid the claims that RuPaul's Drag Race alum Miz Cracker and Kim Chi would make history by being the first drag queens to appear in a Super Bowl commercial, RuPaul herself kindly stepped in to correct the misinformation in the best way possibly.
The iconic drag queen took to Instagram yesterday to share an old commercial she did that aired during the big game back in 2000, and it’s…kind of amazing.
The ad starts out with a bunch of boring and bored af dudes sitting around a conference table listening to the dullest man of them all give a presentation about, well, no one is paying attention so who knows.
With a LITERAL FLASH, RuPaul appears in a fantastically early 2000s lime green and bright blue dress, declaring the meeting “a real drag.”
The whole thing is a ruse to sell WebEx, a video conferencing software from before the days where remote work setups were simple and common.
“Girl, you could be at home, sipping latte in lingerie,” she tells one happy guy with a wink, “and still make this meeting. Don’t you have better places to be?”
It’s kind of mind-blowing to think that an ad featuring a drag queen, acknowledged as being a drag queen, aimed at straight-laced white businessmen aired during the biggest sport event of the year a full twenty years ago. For context, this was only three years after Ellen Degeneres came out as gay, and just two years after her sitcom was canceled because of how much the ratings dropped afterwards.
But WebEx is still around, and obvi RuPaul is thriving, between Drag Race, AJ and the Queen, and, well, all the other million things Mama Ru has going for her.
And this Super Bowl, we’ve got plenty more to look forward to. Lady Gaga is playing the pre-show, Demi Lovato is up for the national anthem, J-Lo and Shakira are headlining the damn thing, Katie Sowers will make history as the first openly gay coach at the Bowl, and, of course, two of Ru’s Drag Race queens are starring in a commercial of their own.
Times have certainly changed, but it’s nice to see the groundwork that was laid twenty years ago.
