Trinity the Tuck Has A New Drag Competition Starting this Week

If you're afraid that there's not going to be enough drag in your life with RuPaul's Drag Race: All Stars season five having recently ended, don't sweat. After passing off her All Stars crown to Shea Coulee, All Stars season four winner Trinity the Tuck is ready to preside over a terrain all her own: Welcome to Love of the Arts.

As a digital drag competition, Love of the Arts pits nine drag performers against one another to win $5,000 sponsored by Twitch. Each week, the artists will appear episodes competing in themed content creation categories as well as runway challenges. These artists were selected in part by social media as Trinity and her team fielded over 500 applications, which they narrowed down to 30 and allowed followers to select the finalists (which they did through over 150,000 votes.)

Fans will be able to watch on Twitch as episodes will air live on Tuesdays at 4:30 pm PT/7:30 pm ET. For those who don't catch the episodes live, reruns will be available on Trinity's Patreon account. After episodes air, fans will be able to vote on their favorite performer at TrinitytheTuck.com for two hours to select a winner. The show will also feature guest judges like Isis King, Alaska, Adore Delano, Landon Cider, Shea Coulee, Peppermint and more!

Here, we talk to Trinity about the competition, why she loves pageant drag, and that All Stars 5 lip sync.

Can you tell me a little about where the idea for this show came from?

I've always used my platforms in season nine to help uplift local entertainers, wherever they are because I was a local entertainer for 14 years before I got on Drag Race. I know how it is -- you're trying to make a name for yourself, you're trying to make a buck here and there -- so it's super important that we use our platforms to uplift other people that are in our industry. That's where Leo and I decided to do this digitally.

Can you tell me a little bit about that first tour and then how this will be different?

Yeah, so the tour originally was just me going to different cities in the US and contestants would sign up to do a talent competition. They would come in and they would do one number. From that number, the audience would vote, who they wanted to win and I would give away, $1,000 in every city that I went to. Then the winners from every city that I went to went online and the fans voted for their favorite.

It's an all-inclusive competition. So, all kinds of entertainers, whether you be a drag king, you be AFAB, you be a cis male who does drag, you be nonbinary, you be trans, it didn't matter, you could enter. We wanted to do that because there's not a lot of platforms that allow for all-inclusive entertainers. Digitally, this also gives them that platform, you know, because they get exposed to my fans and also now Twitch is going to be promoting us on their social media, as well as the main Twitch channel so it's really a lot of exposure

This year will they be uploading their talent just online and it will be voted on that way?

We actually have gone a step forward with this. Instead of it being just one number, this is actually a digital competition. This is actually turned into a digital competition, we have a set cast of nine contestants from all over the world. We have people from South America, Central America, the UK and all over the US. They range from drag kings to AFAB, to trans, to other drag queens. They have to do different challenges each week that they have to produce themselves film themselves, edit themselves, and then submit.

Plus, they have to produce a runway look for themselves according to the theme, film that themselves, edit that film themselves, and send it in. We edit it all together for a show. So the first show is called "Lights, Camera, Drag." The challenge is based around them recreating an iconic clip from a movie and they have to play all the parts themselves. We've already it all together and when I tell you it's going to be amazing! All of the contestants have like went above and beyond, it's so good.

This really a challenge about being a modern-day queen right? You not only have to be able to give a performance and pull a look but you have to create your own content which is really what queens have to do today?

That's actually part of the judging, part of it is about how good are you at being creative and being innovative for the pandemic that we are in. It's about what can you do to elevate your drag during quarantine.

It's really interesting because this comes as one in a wave of Drag Race winners that have created platforms that support and show an inclusive portrayal of drag. I'm thinking about Sasha Velour with Nightgowns and Alaska with her pageant. It's really interesting to see that from you all as a group.

Well, I think that it's important you know drag is not one thing, and drag and different everywhere you go. Even in one city, you have a multitude of different drag artists like here in Orlando alone. When you think of Orlando, you think of the fact that Florida is a huge epicenter of amazing trans artists. But we also have a ton of horror drag: Dollya Black is from here, Victoria Black from Dragula. They're based here. There's a ton of club kids like Axel Andrews. You have regular drag artists. You have so many different types of drag artists here and that that that the same every city wherever you go and with my platform, I want to include as many as I can.

If I remember correctly you were doing a World of Wonder show around the local Entertainer of the Year pageant you were taking over. And you're a bit of the Pageant Queen of Drag Race, right?

Yeah, so I signed a contract with World of Wonder to follow the process for putting on a pageant. I bought the rights to Florida Entertainer of the Year Entertainer of the Year, which is a preliminary to National Entertainer of the Year, and we were going to hold a pageant that was supposed to be in April. They were just going to follow the process through the preliminary, all the way through nationals That's still supposed to happen whenever things get back to normal.

But yeah, I definitely am a pageant queen at heart. There are so many things about me that aren't just pageants but pageants are what built me and I want to still give back to that community. So I definitely have interest in creating several more pageants; I want to create a whole other system that's just completely my own, that's a national system, which is in the works. We'll see how that goes.

I can't have you on the phone right after All Stars 5 and not talk about the season. What did you think about the lip-sync assassin aspect? I remember you said you were booked when they asked you.

The thing with All Stars is that when we think of a reality show, like in a competition, it's even more of a reality show than regular Drag Race because you really have to be strategic. Strategy is part of the game there. What I love about All Stars is they change it up a lot, like they give you twists and turns a lot to keep it interesting. At the moment when you're competing it's awful but when you're watching it is super fun and it's super unexpected. I love the fact that they added the lip-sync assassins because now you're getting one clear frontrunner for each episode. And it's easier for me to keep track, even though, you know track record obviously doesn't mean anything for Drag Race now.

But, I love the aspect of the lip-sync. I was supposed to do it. They asked me to do it but unfortunately, I was on tour in the UK and there was just no way. I was literally doing a show every day there, and there was no way I could fly back for just to film a lip-sync.

It was an interesting cast of assassins!

If they are really going to utilize the lip-sync assassins I think that they need to pick people specifically for the song. I think they totally wasted Kennedy's time and the viewers' time really for that Reba song. She was just not the right choice for the song. She is the dancing diva. She is probably the best live performer-dancer, out of any Drag Race girl, and for them to give her that song was a waste of her time. I think that they could have picked a ton of other girls who would have done that song justice that would have been an unconventional lip-sync assassin. That song is truly about lip-syncing, not dancing. So I hope that they pick queens specifically for each song that they choose in the future.

You can watch Love of the Arts on Trinity the Tuck's official Twitch channel.

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