I was in the closet when RuPaul’s Drag Race premiered on television.

It was 2009, and whenever I caught a glimpse of the show—the low-budget, glittery and blurry first season—I would switch the channel as fast as I could. I thought I’d be doomed if someone found out I was watching a show that was unabashedly gay—nevermind the fact that during that same period I read homoerotic romance novels and binge-watched America’s Next Top Model. Somehow, my teenage mind thought getting busted watching a show filled with sequins and drag queens was worse than openly smizing.

Years later, in 2014, while folding sweaters at my retail job, my manager asked me if I watched RuPaul’s Drag Race. “No,” I answered. “You should check it out, I think you’ll like it,” she said. That same week, I tuned in to RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6 and fell in love with the art of drag and the heart of the performers. The show gave me the feeling of finally seeing myself in North American media—and it led me to actively revisit and seek out other queer content, like the documentaries Paris is Burning and How to Survive a Plague. I told my friends—gay and straight—to watch Drag Race, too. Soon it became a communal thing: We would head out to bars in Vancouver’s gay village to watch Drag Race screenings together. We’d do this weekly until I moved to Ottawa for graduate school.

But the community that Drag Race created followed me to the other side of the country. During my last year of studies in 2017, my roommate and I entertained each other during Ottawa’s ruthless winter by putting on face masks, drinking cheap red wine and watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. We distracted each other from homesickness and the impending pressure of defending our final project by dancing, prancing and pretending to death drop to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” It allowed us to escape to another world, one with drag queens and special lingos, a world made accessible by RuPaul Charles, a Black gay man and one of the first drag queens to achieve mainstream fame with his 1992 dance club hit “Supermodel.” I could summarize the last semester of graduate school in three things: wine, thesis and lipsync.

At that moment, I looked back to my younger self and the missed opportunity of embracing the show when I was still a teenager. Maybe if I’d watched it back in 2009, I would’ve reconciled the gaps in my identity sooner. Maybe I would have ventured earlier into a world where being different was celebrated. By that logic, perhaps, I would have embraced my true self sooner, too.

In 2014, when I finally indulged in everything Drag Race, I also revered everything that RuPaul Charles embodied—the unapologetic, Black gay man unafraid to flaunt himself to the world, an icon who reminded queens and viewers alike that if they didn’t love themselves, then how in the hell would they be able to love somebody else? Drag Race was one of the first times I’d seen myself being represented on TV, in a media landscape that already lacks accurate and positive representations of LGBTQ2 people. As a gay Asian man, seeing a Black drag queen teach other queer people to love themselves was, at the time, the representation I needed.

As the years have progressed, and the show has gained success on a mainstream television network, Drag Race has toned itself down the exact opposite of drag’s history and intention. Where early seasons of the show were full of sexual innuendos, they are now minimized and replaced by narratives of self-love and empowerment—themes that appeal more to the show’s wider demographic. Charles, who used to excitedly talk about the politics of being a Black gay man in interviews, seems to have abandoned this for vague comments on LGBTQ2 acceptance.

It seems that Charles has become less of an advocate for Black and brown queens, historically marginalized people, and became more of a champion for gay male representation for a largely white and increasingly straight audience. The Mama Ru I loved on the show turned out, like most mothers, to be flawed.

Charles has, for example, made bizarre comments about the gender identity of contestants in a 2018 interview with The Guardian, when he said that drag is a political statement because it’s an act where men dress up as women. He added that drag “loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a big f-you to male-dominated culture.” Days after the article was published, Charles tweeted, “You can take performance enhancing drugs and still be an athlete, just not in the Olympics.” His Guardian interview and tweet were perceived as transphobic, which resulted in public backlash, including from Drag Race alumni.

“The Mama Ru I loved on the show turned out, like most mothers, to be flawed.”

That same year, in a conversation with Johnny McGovern and Lady Red Couture on Hey Qween, Season 7 contestant Pearl recounted telling RuPaul how much it meant to be on the show. “She turned to me and said, ‘Nothing you say matters unless that camera is rolling,’” Pearl said, admitting it was one of the reasons she seemed disconnected on the show. “It was so heartbreaking because I idolized her, I worshipped her, and I felt like it was so disrespectful… so Hollywood, rotted and gross. How could you say that to someone who’s just, like, obsessed with you?”

Charles’ treatment of Black queens has also been troubling at times: Consider the way he treated The Vixen during the Season 10 reunion show, when The Vixen pointed out that white queens on that season, like Eureka, got a pass when they committed racist acts, including toward her, while she was painted as an aggressor. “Everyone is telling me how to react rather than telling them how to act,” she said. She ended up leaving the reunion show and Charles told the remaining queens: “People who find themselves in situations similar to The Vixen’s need to be accountable for themselves.”

RuPaul Charles with the mostly white crew of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ at the 2019 Emmy Awards.