[MB.]

because I'm not letting the Drag Race sub-forum go quiet during the off-season that easily.





The most ambitious crossover event of the century has arrived. Forget Drag Race UK. Forget Drag Race Canada. Forget Celebrity Drag Race and Drag Race Juniors and Drag Race on Ice and Drag Love Island (I swear I only made two of those up). This is the competition you've all been waiting for, ever since I realised the other day that RuPaul's Drag Race and The Amazing Race both have the word 'race' in the title.

Eleven pairs of men in wigs, racing around the world for a cash prize of one million dollars and a year's supply of Anastasia Beverly Hills cosmetics. Sounds like something that would go off without a hitch, doesn't it? In case you're somehow dubious...

Here's how it'll work:

In a format I saw on another forum, liked and decided to steal, this will work as a boosting game. This means that at the start of each leg of the race, you will rank the teams in order of preference from first to last. For example:

Leg 1
1st - Team A
2nd - Team B
3rd - Team C
4th - Team D
5th - Team E
6th - Team F
7th - Team G
8th - Team H
9th - Team I
10th - Team J
11th - Team K

I'll then use the results to determine the order that the teams finish each leg in. I'll do this by counting the votes for each placement (who got votes for first place, then second, and so and so forth), then running them through random.org to decide which team finishes where. For instance, if four people put Team A in first place like I did above, and one person puts Team F in first place, I'll put Team A into the randomiser four times and Team F once. This means that Team A have an 80% chance of placing first in this leg, but there's always a chance that Team F will get randomly picked instead. I'll then move on through the rest of the placements, voiding any votes for teams who've already been picked, until one team is left. This team will then be eliminated from the race/shot out of a cannon into the sun. As a result, I'm hoping that the game will be fairly unpredictable, as a team who gets a ton of first place votes could still come in last if they don't get many back-up votes further down the list. Once all of this has been decided for each leg, I’ll write some (hopefully) entertaining stuff to fill the gaps in between, such as which countries the teams travel to, which tasks they complete and which queens get kicked off which flights for being over the alcohol limit. Clear as mud? Good, let's move on!

The game itself will run much like a regular season of The Amazing Race. No worries if you're not familiar with how TAR works: Wikipedia has a pretty thorough rundown on the rules, but all you really need to know for this version is that eleven teams of two will be racing around the world from country to country, completing various types of tasks (the ones you'll be hearing about most are Detours and Roadblocks; the first is a choice between two tasks, the second is a task only one member of each team can complete) along the way. At the end of each leg is a Pit Stop, at which the team arriving in last place will be eliminated. Well, unless it's a predetermined non-elimination leg, in which case they’ll get to carry on racing. The team who finishes first in the final leg wins the race. It's hosted by a man named Phil who has a funny accent and is sort of hot if you're into that cool-church-minister-who-goes-hiking-on-Saturdays vibe. And, because I'm a bored gay, I thought it might be a laugh to imagine drag queens doing all of the above. The racing bit, I mean, not Phil.*

I'll be revealing the ten teams I've selected to run the race shortly, as well as the four teams vying to fill the final spot (which you get to choose, you lucky beggars). I'll also open a sweepstake if there's enough interest.

Until then, in the words of Phil Keoghan himself – let's go, lesbians, let’s go!

*when planning this, I didn’t give much thought as to whether the queens would be running the race in drag or not. I assume it’d be much more logistically convenient for them to run it out of drag, but if you’d rather picture Mimi Imfurst trying to hail a taxi on the streets of Dhaka in full mug and heels, be my guest!