Another recent narrative that links personal growth with drag performance is Jeffery Self’s new YA novel, Drag Teen. The touching and hilarious “tale of angst and wigs” centers on JT Barnett, a young, gay, overweight high-school senior from Clearwater, Florida, who’s beginning to fear he may never get out of his small town. In the novel’s narrative, JT’s only chance to escape from a dead-end job at his family’s gas station is a teen drag competition in New York. Luckily, he’s a drag aficionado—who learned about this art form from RuPaul’s Drag Race. Just as he’d been inspired by watching “that old ’90s movie,” To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, JT finds the queens on Ru’s show to be beacons of hope: “[They] knew how to cope with their inner strands of self-doubt and sew those strands into something fabulous. Usually a dress.”

Self’s repurposing of drag as emotional therapy is all the more fascinating for the way it refuses to accept the passivity of the “It Gets Better” rhetoric that’s monopolized LGBT youth-aimed activism. Instead, he adopts the active language of drag and performance. This allows JT to stress the serious effort it took to become himself and to project himself into, in the words of the novel, an “otherwise” previously believed to be unimaginable. It’s the inverse of what viewers saw in the final taped episode of last season’s Drag Race, where RuPaul asked the four finalists to address their younger selves—a device he has deployed again this season, suggesting he’s intent on making it a staple of the show’s final episodes moving forward.

“What would Pearl have to say to little Matthew?” Ru asked the final queen standing in front of the show’s judging panel. The prompt was an attempt to, as usual, marry pop psychology with the very essence of drag. To talk back to their younger selves from a different identity in both time and kind, the queens were made to think of their personas as necessary extensions and logical responses to those bright-eyed boys whose photos RuPaul held in his arms.

In the contestant Pearl’s case, viewers had already heard quite specifically how she’d dealt with the personal demons that haunted her as a child and how “little Matthew” eventually found in drag a means through which to overcome them. “Pearl was this character that I would draw just ’cause it distracted me from, like, the horrible things that I felt were going on around me,” she’d confessed to the camera earlier during the season, “And one day I just painted her on me.” You can see why such a narrative would appeal to RuPaul: It speaks to the way he has often talked about his own desire to don a dress, a wig, and some heels.

In a way, the show’s weekly final moments, which feel like a celebration (“now let the music play!” RuPaul commands as the credits roll), can be read as a hopeful reworking of that other famous cultural landmark that brought viewers backstage to meet the queens of the ball: Paris Is Burning. Jennie Livingston’s seminal 1990 documentary ends on a decidedly dour note, with a queen putting on some more mascara on and summing up the wisdom she now espouses: “You’ve made a mark on the world if you just get through it … You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better to just enjoy it.” Her voice suggests abdication, the hardened outlook of someone who struggles just to get by. In the privacy of her dressing room, facing herself in the mirror, the drag queen Dorian Corey refuses to buy into the illusion of her own performance as anything but a provisional reprieve from her daily existence.