'RuPaul's Drag Race' Producer Fenton Bailey on the Power of TV for Change

How has TV impacted our lives? If you ask Fenton Bailey (co-producer of RuPaul's Drag Race and co-founder of World of Wonder), TV has had a huge impact on our lives, and he wrote all about it in his new book ScreenAge: How TV Shaped Our Reality from Tammy Faye to RuPaul's Drag Race.

"Growing up, I always loved television. I gradually realized that my love of television wasn't shared in terms of high culture," Bailey told the Parting Shot. Listen to our chat on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Feeling like TV was a "poor imitation of the movies," Bailey felt like "I had bad taste, or I was a bad person."

"Funnily enough, it's weirdly a parallel to being queer. You just gradually realize, 'Oh, how I feel about things isn't the way other people feel about things.' Which is fine, because we all have different tastes and interests, but then when you are made to feel bad, or people start treating you badly, and you think, 'What is going on?' The natural thing is to blame yourself."

But eventually Bailey realized "there's nothing wrong with being queer. And there's nothing wrong with television, quite the reverse. They're both fabulous. And so that's why I wrote the book to set the record straight, as it were."

And considering Bailey's track record, he knows a thing or two about making good TV. Over the years, Bailey and his producing partner and World of Wonder co-founder Randy Barbato have had their finger on the pulse of so many things that have gone to define popular culture, on television and beyond. Let's just consider the evidence: The pair are behind the global phenomenon RuPaul's Drag Race, the 2000 documentary The Eyes of Tammy Faye and the 2021 Oscar-winning film, the 2013 documentary on Britney Spears called I Am Britney Jean, Being Chaz and Party Monster, among so many other projects.

Part of what makes their projects such successes is that they lean into the things to which they are naturally drawn, which in turn allows us, the audience, to understand the subject in a whole new light. And part of their appeal is that they don't shy away from overtly queer angles, which, Bailey believes, offers the viewer a different perspective on a particular subject.

He points to the reckoning society is currently having with Britney Spears and how we treated female celebrities like her during the beginning of their careers. Bailey points to Cara Cunningham (formerly Chris Crocker) and her viral "Leave Britney Alone" video.

"She was mocked and bullied for that. She spoke the truth. No one was willing to listen."

Part of what makes Bailey and queer people in general such good purveyors of culture is that the "queer community has compassion and empathy and is welcoming and inclusive of everybody."

And while Bailey has had immense success in television, it all really started back in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s when he and Barbato would film their friend, RuPaul Charles, then a little-known drag performer. The videos they made of a young RuPaul often go viral.

"Thinking back to those days, it is bizarre and sort of magical. The way that the things Randy and I were doing in the East Village in the '80s are all sort of still relevant. Ru really is family," Bailey said.

And it's RuPaul's message of we're all born naked, and the rest is drag that Bailey not only lives by, but is something that could potentially help in this current moment, where multiple states are proposing and passing legislation against drag performers.

Bailey says "we're all in drag" in one way or another, and that the people pushing anti-drag legislation and policies are just "deliberately creating fires being set to draw attention away from the complicated, fundamentally complicated, challenging problems that we face, like gun control, climate control, jobs. It's a distraction. And it's actually no different than the bullies at school, we know about the bullies at school, they can't deal with their own shortcomings, so they pick on the person they perceived to be the weakest. And that's what this is."

World of Wonder, RuPaul's Drag Race and MTV recently announced their partnership with the ACLU to launch the Drag Defense Fund.

"All these attempts to turn the clock back, the one thing we know, from all of history is that they always fail, Bailey said. "And so the outcome is guaranteed it will not work. The tragedy is people will suffer because of it. Which is why we have to fight back so that the least people suffer."

Listen to H. Alan Scott on Newsweek's Parting Shot. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Twitter: @HAlanScott