I first encountered RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2011, when the early seasons of the show were streaming on Netflix. I remember two things about my first run-in with the queens: Shangela (halleloo) and… apathy. I’m a gay man. Drag Race was exquisitely chiseled from gay marble by a gay Michelangelo for gay men — but not this gay man.

Coming out is a process. There are phases to it. It’s hard. When I first heard RuPaul utter her immortal catch phrase — “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” — I’d only been out for six years. So many gay men say they’ve always known. Not me. My conservative Christian upbringing in Tennessee placed a pretty thick blindfold over my internal perception. I had a massive didn’t-know-it-was-a-crush on Jurassic Park’s Dr. Alan Grant at the age of 9. High school me made Microsoft Paint collages of Whose Line? performer Tony Slattery. In college, I developed a fierce devotion to the eternal memory of Charles Nelson Reilly. Still, I was straight — because all straight 20-year-old guys are terrified of dating women and crush hard on The Office’s Tim Canterbury. My gayness finally hit me during my senior year of college, and I spent the following years wracked with anxiety about what being gay — what me being gay — meant. When I first saw Drag Race in 2011, I did not love myself, so, to paraphrase Mama Ru’s immortal saying, “How in the hell was I gonna love Drag Race?”

Homophobia — it’s not just for straight people! I spent the first five years of my coming out process convinced that being gay made me immune to hating gays. Real talk: any time a gay man says “I’m not like those gays,” they still got some stuff to work through. I grew up in the South, where performative masculinity is an Olympic sport and everyone is a judge. Any form of femininity, no matter how slight, earns you deductions. I grew up in a state of constant, low-key denial, perfecting an expression of masculinity that felt comfortable to me: jeans, band t-shirts, Chuck Taylors, but no sports! I kept the things I wanted to use to express myself (neckerchiefs, accessories, speedos, purple Chuck Taylors, pink anything) locked in a metaphorical box labeled “Too Sissy For The South.”

Watching Drag Race for the first time was like watching people compete in the Performative Masculinity Olympics — and earn points for all the things I spent a lifetime getting deductions for! Why were they so proud?! They were just proving every gay stereotype, stereotypes I’d spent a lifetime exhaustively sidestepping! Why weren’t they as obsessed with passing for straight as I was?

I didn’t see the Season Two queens as flawed, beautiful, full people because I didn’t yet know myself as a full person. Drag Race is the only show that I know of that features queer people telling their stories (in-between Snatch Games and lip-syncs). I hadn’t lived yet, so I couldn’t relate. I watched a chunk of Season Two, and then Drag Race disappeared from Netflix and dropped from my radar. My coming out process over the following years included:

Getting checked for my homophobia by other gay men that found power in the things I dismissed as stereotypes Coming out to my conservative family Cutting open my “Too Sissy For The South” box and putting all that pink and purple into rotation

I checked back in with Drag Race in the fall of 2016 after learning about Dax Exclamationpoint, a queen seemingly as obsessed with the X-Men as I am. I mean, I’ve pulled off an expert Banshee cosplay before, but I could never rock the full-on punk Storm look like Dax. With Drag Race on Hulu and my gay pride at a high, I figured I’d give the show another go.

RuPaul’s Drag Race was a totally different show, but only because I’d changed. I’d lived over the last five years; I now saw my story — my grappling with masculinity rules (Chi Chi DeVayne), my appreciation for offbeat gay icons (Jinkx Monsoon as Little Edie), my struggle to come out to my family (Nashville’s own Jaidynn Diore Fierce), my legitimate love of Party City (Sharon Needles). My fiancé (now husband) initially resisted watching the show, citing his dislike of reality show awkwardness and a similar confusion about things that are Super Gay. The show resonated strongly with him, too, and Drag Race became a show that we had to watch together. Every episode (even the unjustly maligned season seven) taught us a lesson in a Gay Self-Love crash course.

I realized after binging seasons four through eight (and both All Stars seasons) in just a few months that Drag Race is a vital part of gay culture — and that culture is my culture to claim. I’m not a minority within a minority like I used to believe. Just like how there are pageant queens and comedy queens and art queens, I’m my own kind of gay. Drag Race tells my story just like it tells the stories of other queer people from different backgrounds — and we’re all in this together. Yeah, Drag Race is a competition show, but it’s also the only hour every week where I get to see a dozen (or more) queer people standing together, their diversity and differences highlighted by their proximity to each other. In any other show, they’d be the token gay; on Drag Race, each queen gets to be unapologetically themselves.

The gay man that I was in 2011 saw the queens as caricatures. The gay man that I am in 2017 sees the queens as ambassadors, champions, comedians, artists, and survivors. Since discovering Drag Race, I try to incorporate their fabulous individuality into my life — which manifests in floral-print shirts, pink pants and a Charles Nelson Reilly iPhone case (I’m my own kind of gay!). I even have a new personal style icon in Ross Mathews, wearer of the boldest blazers on television. When I worry that something I want to wear or do or say might be “too gay,” I think about Katya and Bob the Drag Queen and Ginger Minj and Alaska and Kim Chi — and I decide that whatever I want to do probably isn’t gay enough.

Following the election and two months of rushed planning, my husband and I got married on the last Saturday of President Obama’s term. We were surrounded by our family and found family, all gathered together to celebrate our love as well as our right to publicly declare it. Not everyone showed up. For decorations, we placed framed pictures of the pop culture women we love throughout the venue. My husband and I, without hesitation, made sure to include the person that kept our pride alive during the most emotionally trying months of our relationship: RuPaul.

“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” Now I love myself, and I love Drag Race.

Where to stream RuPaul's Drag Race