Kerri Kares, the new WOWPresents Plus series, is the culmination of drag star Kerri Colby’s dreams. “I really have wanted to have a TV show,” she tells PRIDE. “But I made it very clear from the jump that I wanted something a little bit different. I wanted something that wasn’t going to be just like your sterile standard every day [scripted thing] where it’s very inauthentic, I wanted to make something that was going to be very much conceptualized and created by the community.
The new show sees Kerri taking on the role of an advice guru talking about everything from building confidence to dating and relationships, and even crafting a unique drag performance. It’s a role perfectly suited to Colby, who essentially became that guiding and supportive force for her season 14 castmates, many of whom, including Kornbread “The Snack” Jete, Jasmine Kennedie, and Bosco all credit her for helping them along on their gender journeys.
Courtesy of VH1
The new series also offers Colby an opportunity to truly open up to her fans and be raw and vulnerable about the sometimes incredibly painful journeys that have led her here.
The reason she’s willing to go there and open up, she says, is because “I look at myself as borrowed.” When pressed on what that means, Kerri elaborates. “My life has been so chaotic and crazy. And a lot of times, it made me feel very alienated and that I couldn’t really relate to anyone. I’m like, ‘Who in the fuck can i relate to my story or how I’ve been treated and my traumas and all this stuff.’ And as I started to grow up and develop and coach myself and get therapy — my best friend, I talked about that a lot in the show — but [when I started to] heal myself and start to have a healed idea of who I was.”
She continues, “I was like, ‘Okay, well, I want this, I want to be something major, I want to be something iconic, but not just because of what you might see on the outside, or what you might hear from what I say, I want to really use my life that didn’t make sense for so long to be a blueprint on how I can hopefully leave everything in this world better than how I found it.”
One of the ways she’s doing that is by crafting the show specifically about the needs and desires of her fans, aka her “KerBears.” This began, in perfect Drag Race fashion, with a pink furry box. Kerri reveals that during Drag Con, she put out a box for people to write down questions and suggestions for a possible future show. “We literally were able to build everything, pretty much the concepts to some of the joke lines to the questions to... viewers sent in questions [based on what] the KerBears wanted. And that’s literally why the show is called Karrie Kares. She cares about you. She cares about herself.”
As it turns out the fans’ questions and interests ran the gamut. Over the eight-episode season, Kerri tackles topics ranging from finding your passion to crafting a drag identity, from dealing with dating apps to combating anxiety. There truly is something here for everyone. She also invites a bevy of familiar faces to offer advice as well including fellow Drag Race stars Ongina, Silky Nutmeg Ganache, and Mayhem Miller.
Courtesy of World of Wonder
There is one episode, in particular, she is excited for fans to see. “The most near and dear to my heart is obviously my trans journey episode where I get to talk to [trans model and actress] Arisce [Wanzer],” Kerri reveals. “There’s so many different reasons for that episode to mean so much to me. Arisce is someone that way before I had the confidence, or the ability to really be honest with myself on who I was, she saw me running around a little skinny, crazy thing in West Hollywood, and she would like, ‘Come here Miss Thing, what do you identify as?’ At the time, Kerri wasn’t ready to admit even to herself that she was trans so revisiting those moments with Wanzer proved to be a cathartic and full circle moment — which proved to be very emotional for the host.
“I’m not a big crier,” says Kerri. “But when I was listening to our briefing before we were getting ready to put everything out, and I heard my own story repeated back to me, I really did break down a bit because it wasn’t necessarily because what I was hearing was so hard to hear. Because I’ve heard it, I’ve lived it. It’s been my story. If anything, I’m almost numb to it. But to hear it repeated back to me, in terms of like fact, and not just like, you know, having weird people in my life that were trying to constantly tell me that I was imagining or that I was exaggerating, or that I was causing very, very unreasonable things to happen to me because I was alternative to an evangelical lifestyle.”
Courtesy of World of Wonder
Stories like Kerri’s not only offer those with similar experiences the powerful feeling of being seen and less alone but, they also operate as empathy machines for those who haven’t been through anything similar. It’s a way to open hearts and minds, for those willing and open to the journey. And empathy is something that is desperately needed in a moment in time when right-wing politicians have set their sights on LGBTQ+ people generally, and trans folks and drag queens in particular.
It’s a phenomenon that baffles and angers Kerri. “The queer rainbow in general, like we’re not out here, usually causing ruckus unless we are provoked, or completely in the right to like, we’re not just out here, causing disruptions and causing problems to inconvenience people’s lives, we really keep to ourselves, we just want to be able to live a healthy, happy and successful life,” she says.
Courtesy of World of Wonder
It’s why allyship is so important right now, too. “My advice to people who do support and do love us is, this is a time more now than ever,” she says adding that it’s easy to get complacent, particularly when it seems as though queer representation in the media is at an all-time high. “ I’m not saying this is always the case. But I have witnessed this more recently, especially with some of the younger people where it’s like, well, now we have queer people on TV. Now we have, you know, our favorite nonbinary besties all over the place. And I think that there’s this false sense of hope, where it’s like, well, now that we see so much of it, the battle is over. The struggle is over. We won, we did it. We can go have a pride party every day and not really pay attention because we’re fine, right?” But the reality of what queer and trans folks are facing is very different.
“My biggest thing is to challenge that [complacency] and say No, everything is just beginning. And I’m challenging people who do care about us and even more so I’m holding our community responsible because if you want to be able to live a life of liberty and justice for all you have to be invested and aware of what is going on,” says Kerri.
Courtesy of World of Wonder
That in part is what Kerri Kares is ultimately about, entertaining, education, being of service, and of course having a little fun too. “ ]I pretty much bared my whole soul in some of the episodes,” she says. “When it was time to be serious. We were serious. When it was time to be silly. We were silly. And I wanted that to really be the heart of it. I kind of wanted to be like Ziwe, meets SNL, meets Oprah.
Well, Kerri, mission accomplished.
