![]() Being a gay Black man, you have to be strong. And Reggie, which is my boy name, he’s my guard. There’s a short video Symone made for Vogue UK with Quinn Wilson, Lizzo’s creative director, in the summer of 2020, called “Symone, a Black Drag Queen Finding Ways To Be Free,” which Symone told us was “almost like a therapy session.” It’s soft and gauzy, and weaves in short ruminations on identity. These days, Symone and Reggie cohabitate a little more intimately. “For me,” she said, “it was about getting out of my own way as far as gender and identity.” As long as you’re being respectful, I’m cool.” She acknowledged that, after all, gender is a construct and, in the same breath, waved off the notion of phrasing it in such academic terms. ![]() I’m not a person who’s gonna get upset about those things. “Because, in my mind, they were different, you know? But now I’ve come to a point where I’m much more comfortable being called Symone, out in public or whatever. I had to make a name for myself.”Īdvertisement Marko Monroe ROYALTY: Faulkner County queen Symone is turning the charm up to 11 on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.”īack in Arkansas, the line between Reggie and Symone had been slightly more defined, and their corresponding pronouns kept more separate, Symone said. “Here,” she said, “no one had any idea who I was. She moved to Los Angeles in early 2019, and had lived there with a consortium of other Arkansas expats for a little over a year when she got the call that she’d made the cut to appear on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” She’d come into her own in LA, she told us, completing the transformation from the “shy, anxious little thing” she says she was as a teen to the supermodel queen we see owning the RuPaul runway on the TV screen. Symone became a darling of the small but fierce drag community in Little Rock over the last several years, hosting late-night shows at Discovery and a series called “Symone Says” at Club Sway - “boot camp,” she called it - then going to classes at UA Little Rock, her two-inch red fingernails the only tell that Gavin had an extracurricular career in entertainment. 8, the feminist blog Jezebel published an article under the title “It’s a Little Early, But ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Already Seems to Have Found a Winner.” (Guess who?) After the premiere of “Drag Race” on New Year’s Day 2021, a writer from New York magazine’s entertainment blog Vulture wrote that “if anyone can lay claim to the title of frontrunner after only 10 minutes of screentime, it’s Symone.” After the second episode aired on Jan. The Faulkner County queen’s sparkle and charm have not gone unnoticed. ![]() ![]() When we mentioned to her that Arkansans back home were shamelessly rooting for her, she issued a gracious “Thank you,” then quipped that she “loves a good shameless rooting.” And, not insignificant in her line of business, Symone is breathtakingly gorgeous. She’s quick to laugh, or to crack a blue joke. Symone, born Reggie Gavin, is from Conway. And with the way the 13th season of the show has opened, the watch parties would have been as emotionally charged as they’d have been celebratory. That’s because Arkansas has its first drag queen on the long-running “RuPaul’s Drag Race” - the televised Olympics of drag. W ere there not a pandemic keeping the doors of Little Rock’s gay nightclubs shut - and its queer nightlife on ice - you can bet that Friday nights in January 2021 at Club Sway would have been lit. Marko Monroe SYMONE: The first Arkansas queen to strut the ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ runway is still finding ways to be free.
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