'Drag Race's Maddy Morphosis Responds to Controversy Over Being Cishet

Upcoming RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Maddy Morphosis is speaking out after mixed reactions to the idea of a cis, straight male joining the show.

Drag Race may have featured a wide variety of contestants over many seasons, but Maddy is something new. Hailing from Fayetteville, Arkansas, the 26-year-old has been doing drag since 2017, and joked in the recent meet the cast feature that his joining the cast for season 14 “broke that glass ceiling.”

Maddy’s message to fans that he hopes his time on the show will show the “random cisgendered straight guys watching Drag Race with their girlfriends” that embracing femininity is a positive sparked controversy, with some frustrated at the idea of a cis-het man joining a traditionally queer space, while others feel that showing you can blur traditional gender lines regardless of sexuality or gender identity is important.

The drag queen addressed comments in a post over the weekend, acknowledging briefly that he joined the drag scene after high school “because it was a safe space for me to explore my own gender identity.”

“The people I met, and the experiences I had helped me understand more about gender and sexuality, what it meant to me, and where I fit in with everything,” he said.

“The concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are arbitrary and made up. And the rigid line drawn between them just feeds the stigma of men who embrace femininity, and perpetuates the cycle of toxic-masculinity. If there’s a message that I hope to convey to people, it’s that you don’t have [to] inhabit the box society puts you in just to be comfortable in your own sexuality.”

Maddy also pushed back against the idea that straight men are “a persecuted and excluded group within the drag community,” noting that there are other far more marginalized groups within the scene.

“I think one of the best things to come out of my casting is that it’s kicking up a lot more talk about representation in the drag scene. And I hope that it helps lead to more marginalized groups being showcased and represented,” he added.

So this queen can hold his own on the Twitter PR front — next we get to find out just how good his drag can be. Season 14 of RuPaul’s Drag Race premieres on VH1 on January 7.