Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life

A definitive deep-dive into queer history and culture with hit reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race as a touchstone, by the creators of the pop culture blog Tom and LorenzoNPR’s Best Books of the Year 2020 pickA New York Times New & Noteworthy bookOne of Logo/NewNowNext’s “11 Queer Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Spring”From the singular voices behind Tom and Lorenzo comes the ultimate guide to all-things RuPaul’s Drag Race and its influence on modern LGBTQ culture. Legendary Children centers itself around the idea that not only is RuPaul’s Drag Race the queerest show in the history of television, but that RuPaul and company devised a show that serves as an actual museum of queer cultural and social history, drawing on queer traditions and the work of legendary figures going back nearly a century. In doing so, Drag Race became not only a repository of queer history and culture, but also an examination and illustration of queer life in the modern age. It is a snapshot of how LGBTQ folks live, struggle, work, and reach out to one another–and how they always have–and every bit of it is tied directly to Drag Race. Each chapter is an examination of a specific aspect of the show–the Werk Room, the Library, the Pit Crew, the runway, the Untucked lounge, the Snatch Game–that ties to a specific aspect of queer cultural history and/or the work of certain legendary figures in queer cultural history.