(L-R) Randy Barbato, RuPaul, and Fenton Bailey. Photo / Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images.
The producer of RuPaul’s Drag Race talks about his career, his new book and how TV has shaped the culture.
In the foreword to Fenton Bailey’s new book ScreenAge: How TV Shaped Our Reality, TV host Graham Norton writes: “Fenton is like the Forrest Gump of popular and tabloid culture. If it created headlines, he was there. Britney, Cher, Monica, Anna Wintour – he seems to know everyone.”
This is true. Bailey does seem to know, and to have worked with, a very large number of very famous people but you only have to read the acknowledgements in his book to see who are the people that really matter to him, who have played the biggest part in his success as a maker of hugely popular, award-winning television and film. So many names packed into so few pages and yes, a few famous ones, including Oprah and Madonna, but mostly people you’ve never heard of. As he writes, “It really does take a village, people.”
Nevertheless, it is to one name that his own has become most attached, and probably always will be, because the show he co-created and still produces, RuPaul’s Drag Race, has, over 16 US seasons, become one of the biggest and most socially transformative shows on television.
Bailey first saw Ru, as he calls him, in the mid-1980s. Bailey was driving down a street in Atlanta at night and rounded a corner, to see, lit up by his headlights, “RuPaul himself, an extraordinarily tall creature in thigh-high waders, football shoulder pads and a huge ratty wig. He had a bucket of paste, and a roll of posters that declared: RuPAUL IS EVERYTHING.”
From the moment they met, he says, he knew RuPaul was going to be a star. At the time, Bailey and his boyfriend Randy Barbato had a band called The Pop Tarts: “Ru came on stage to introduce us and his introduction was so good and got such a response that our show was just anticlimactic,” Bailey says. “And it was that sort of realisation that Ru just excites an audience, and just knows how to command an audience in a way that . . . there’s nothing wrong with what we did, it was fine, but we just weren’t that.”
When RuPaul was trying to launch his music career, he asked Bailey and Barbato to manage him. Bailey says they sent his demo round to all the record labels, but got no response. “At that point, we’re like, ‘Well, maybe this isn’t such a good idea’.” But then Tommy Boy Records, a rap label, offered him a deal, and the resulting album Supermodel of the World produced the hit track Supermodel (You Better Work) and a career was born.
“I think Ru has always been such a force of nature,” Bailey says. “If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. He would have found a way.”
Bailey was born and brought up in England and briefly studied English at Oxford University before winning a Harkness Fellowship, which took him to New York University, where he enrolled in film school in 1982. It was there he met Barbato, beginning both the working relationship that continues to this day and the romantic relationship that ended in 2003, although his sexuality was something that was rarely discussed with his parents.
“I don’t believe my parents ever said anything negative directly, but it was pretty clear that they thought gay people were a bit funny, not in a comedy sense, and that it wasn’t the right thing to do or to be.”
He didn’t tell them he was gay until he was 35.
“I was like, do you really need me to tell you? Isn’t it obvious? Randy and I lived together. We had a band called The Pop Tarts. It’s hard to imagine much more camp. I played all the female roles. Looking back on it as a parent now, it must have been obvious to them. It’s very British, really. They didn’t say anything for or against it, really, but they also didn’t really ever talk about it. I would say it was never really quite resolved.”
When he moved to New York, it was a time of great cultural change in the city. Hip-hop culture was starting to go mainstream, MTV had just launched and Madonna released her first single.
Attitudes to sexuality were changing too. The New York Police Department made one of their last raids on a gay bar, sparking protests. The following year, RuPaul performed at famed East Village gay and drag bar the Pyramid Club for the first time.
“It benefits from the nostalgia,” Bailey says of the New York of the early-mid 1980s, “because at the time it was kind of s***. You can see with the distance that it was this moment, yes you can, but you couldn’t at the time. We weren’t sitting there going, ‘This is so special’.”
Along with Barbato, whom he met at film school, Bailey became firmly entrenched in the LGBTQIA+ downtown scene in New York.
In 1991, they began their production company World of Wonder, which has gone on to produce more than 250 shows including documentaries about Monica Lewinsky, Heidi Fleiss, Carrie Fisher, the movie Deep Throat, and many, many more issues and figures not so well-known and has won a mass of awards, including 13 Emmys for RuPaul’s Drag Race. In 2015, World of Wonder launched DragCon in Los Angeles, which has now spawned sister conventions in New York and London, to become the world’s biggest drag event.
By making shows and movies that celebrate people who have long been pushed out of the mainstream and forced underground, Bailey, Barbato and World of Wonder have helped change the way the rest of the world thinks about those people.
Across the enormous range of shows they’ve made, it’s been the one uniting theme. As Bailey told the Hollywood Reporter in 2021: “It’s a recognition that the outsider voice is the true mainstream voice. That’s been our DNA on pretty much every project. Normality doesn’t exist — it’s an illusion.”
Maybe the debate about the impact of screens on our brains and lives has been misguided: That is to say, it’s not the medium but the message.
As Graham Norton writes in the foreword to ScreenAge: “Marginalised people are that because they exist on the edges. The television that World of Wonder makes shifts our gaze and puts everyone on the main stage.”
Television has been Bailey’s life, and in ScreenAge he celebrates everything about it. He felt compelled to write the book, he says, not just to defend TV, but also because, to some extent, it’s been the story of his life. “I’d never really stopped to think about it but I think in the same way that gay people, you grow up gay and you think that you’re just not good or that you’re a bad person or you’re not going to have a happy life – and it’s similar with TV. You grow up with TV watching, thinking it’s not a very good thing to watch or it’s rubbish, and it’s not true”
Today, the idea of TV as brain-destroying rubbish is in many ways yesterday’s news, having been usurped in the race for parent-baiting headlines by social media video content, and TikTok in particular, which might – at this very moment! – be turning our kids’ brains to mush. Are these effects and our concerns about them different from those previous generations expressed about television?
“I think it’s different,” Bailey says. “I don’t think it’s possible for us to know if it’s good. I don’t know how, if you think it’s bad, how do you stop it? You kind of can’t. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, and I suppose I am more inclined to be optimistic than pessimistic. Neither of my kids is academic the way I was, but I don’t know that that’s . . . I mean I think about my own education and how much time was wasted learning ridiculous stuff. I had to search the scriptures. I had to read four chapters of the Bible every week and then know them so well that for a single verse you could write a paragraph: Who said it? When did they say it? Why did they say it? I suppose it’s good I read the Bible mostly then, but it’s not something I really bring with me usefully. I don’t think it makes me smart that I know the order of the books of the Bible.”
An interesting thought experiment is to imagine the people who taught Bailey to memorise the scriptures sitting down to watch an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, his lasting contribution to the culture. What would their feedback be? What do they think Jesus would say? Another way to think about this: The person who has the platform to speak to our kids gets to shape the way they see the world.
ScreenAge: How TV Shaped Our Reality is available now.
New York Times: Our are devices distancing us from real connections?