The haters need to sashay away!
RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Silky Nutmeg Ganache is opening up about the horrific online bullied she’s received since appearing on the show.
She said that she’s been the victim of death threats, and some have gone so far as to threaten the well-being of her family as well.
Source: YouTube, RuPaul's Drag Race
In a Gay Times interview after her stint on RuPaul’s Drag Race’s 11th season, Silky Nutmeg Ganache opened up about the abuse she received from “fans” of the show.
“The response is like, ‘You knew what you signed up for’. No I did not, I did not sign up for someone to threaten my life,” the reality star told the outlet in 2020. “I feel like until the producers put their foot down and offer more assistance that this going to continue to happen. People do not deserve to be treated this way. What is it going to take? Is it going to take a queen to kill herself?”
The outlet asked the star about how her life has been since appearing on the show, and she said that things have been getting better.
“Life has been fabulous. I am getting the opportunity to see the world, in addition to showing my family the world, which was one of my main goals on Drag Race, to show my family a great life. And I am excited to show them my career.” Silky Nutmeg Ganche said.
As for her time on Drag Race, the performer said she wished that the show would showcase drag culture more.
“I think drag culture should be shown. Because of Drag Race, you don’t really have to necessarily be a performer. To get on Drag Race, you don’t have to actually have to do a show and you don’t even have to be a drag queen to know the culture of drag,” she explained. “I just went on the show to show myself, be myself. Unfortunately a lot of the moments that made it seem that like I was shady, I was just acting like we do in the dressing room.”
She added that sometimes the show made her appear hateful, but she was just trying to be authentic. The queen explained:
I was never hateful, I never had alternative motives, I never had the intention of going out and hurting people. Before the show, I had never dated a guy out of the closet and I talked about that experience you know the importance of not dating people when they’re in the closet. RuPaul called me Reverend Silky Nutmeg Ganache and nobody else knew where she got that from, because I talked about being raised in the church and someone that feels humiliated as a Christian. I wanted to let gay people know if you chose to still be Christian, and if some people have ridiculed you for it, then there is still a place for you in Christianity. Now, you get to see the real Silky.
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Silky said that a lot of those moments were never actually shown on the show, probably because they didn’t “make good TV.”
“You saw snippets of those human moments, but I never got a real opportunity to tell my story and what it’s like to be plus size and what it would have meant for me to be the first plus size winner,” she told the outlet. “But I’m not mad about it, you’ve got to think about all the opportunities I’ve got since doing Drag Race, I’ve been on Germany’s Next Top Model, I was in a Lizzo video, I got to perform with Iggy Azalea, so I’m not mad about it at all.”
As for the other contestants, Silky said that some of them were putting on a show for the camera and being inauthentic.
“I think a good majority of the girls censored themselves,” she said. “On camera in the work room they were all really nice, but when they got into interviews, they really showed their true colors… I’m glad that I didn’t, and after the finale a lot of girls reached out to me and said, ‘I wish I’d done what you did and just been my authentic self and I would have probably stayed on a lot longer’. I think it was a true learning experience for all of us.”
But being authentic came at a cost for Silky, especially once she was out in her community. She had a lot of negative fan interactions during Drag Con, and said that a lot of fans are hateful because the network allows them to act that way.