India Willoughby has hit out at RuPaul’s Drag Race UK contestant Sum Ting Wong over the racist vernacular associated with her stage name.
In last night’s launch, the Brummie queen proclaimed proudly that her name was ‘a reclamation for those little microaggressional racist digs that people give out’.
One person who didn’t agree, however, was the former newsreader, who is transgender. She argued that Wong’s name – and the name of fellow contestant Cheryl Hole – was ‘horrible’.
‘[On] any other show, people would be screaming about demeaning women and racism,’ she said in a now-deleted tweet. ‘But because it’s drag [thumbs-up emoji].’
India – who previously claimed to have a phobia of drag queens – had a stern reply, however, from one of the drag queens that she had so publicly bashed, who hit back at her remarks, saying that ‘drag is about bending the realms and parodying reality.’
My name is a pun on Cheryl Cole- someone who inspired a hell of a lot of my childhood, my creativity and my work. Would you prefer it was Cheryl Mole, Pole, Troll, Soul, Bowl, LOL. Drag is about bending the realms & parodying reality… But sure India 👍🏻
— Cheryl Hole (@CherylHoleQueen) October 4, 2019
Regardless of the critiques, the story behind the name Sum Ting Wong is a genuinely lovely tale in using your hobbies to deflect and re-shape traumatic experiences from your past.
‘When I started doing drag five years ago, I wanted a name that was cheeky but also reflected my British Vietnamese heritage,’ the performer said. ‘So I browsed the internet and came across a meme about an American news report which turned out to be a prank.
‘It was about a missing Asian plane and all the names of the missing crew were plays on Chinese names, such as Sum Ting Wong and Wi Tu Lo, and another was Ho Lee Fuk. It was wrong in so many ways, and that was why I chose my name, as my own act of reclamation.’
If you missed Drag Race UK’s effervescent launch on the iPlayer last night, what were you doing instead?
Some truly iconic television was made – from Andrew Garfield’s bizarre stint as a judge to Alan Carr bringing down the house with his Regent’s Park Zoo joke, which will now go down in history.
No matter what, though, we can safely say Willoughby wouldn’t be up for a stint on the judging panel for the next series.
RuPaul’s Drag Race UK episode 1 is now available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
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