The Vixen introduced herself in Season 10 of RuPaul’s Drag Race by telling everyone in the workroom that she was “just here to fight.” For the rest of the season, many people misinterpreted that line to mean that she was there for petty squabbles and reality TV drama. But what she fought was actually much, much larger: The Vixen is now remembered as the queen who bravely spoke up about racism both within the show’s optics and its fandom. She’s also known for creating a space for Black drag queens to display their talents with her ongoing event series Black Girl Magic.
But it’s what she’s recently decided to share with her fans that’s turned the most heads. The Vixen, under the name Tony Untucked, has become the first Drag Race alum to join OnlyFans and give her supporters a taste of the barenaked man underneath the makeup. A number of other Drag Race performers have since followed her lead — namely, Season 7’s Sasha Belle (who now goes by Frisbee Jenkins); Season 12’s Dahlia Sin; and Season 9’s Aja, who no longer performs in drag and has transitioned to a career in music. Each of them uses OnlyFans to not only post thirst traps but express themselves in a way much different from drag.
The Vixen says that both of her personae — The Vixen and Tony Untucked — allow her to break rules she feels have been unfairly placed on her since birth. “I really do want to live without the rules that we were taught as kids,” she tells me. “I want to, you know, feel my oats.”
Unfortunately, in the past, drag queens who appeared in gay porn weren’t exactly allowed to feel their oats — or anything at all, for that matter. “When porn wanted to interact with drag, it didn’t consider drag queens as sexual beings,” The Vixen explains. “[Drag] puts you inside a box of patriarchy and respectability and all of the things that come with being a lady. And so, as a drag queen, to turn around and say, ‘I’m also sexy, I’m also sexual and I’m also desirable,’ it’s the pendulum swinging back.”
For a long time, gay porn hauled in a drag queen only for name recognition and punchlines, a la the 2017 film Justice League: A Gay XXX Parody, Men.com’s send-up of the DC Comics blockbuster superhero fest. Francois Sagat, famous for his tattooed bald head, plays Aquaman, and the Green Lantern is played by controversial Trump supporter Colby Keller. (When the video came out, there was a blowback that Men.com excised Justice League’s sole Black superhero to replace him with Keller.) Meanwhile, Drag Race alum Manila Luzon plays Wonder Woman in full makeup. Luzon doesn’t participate in the sex, though; she’s merely there to play the role that straight women often play in gay porn. She watches the two men have sex and then wanders in once they’re done to shame them for their indiscretion. The scene ends with Luzon tossing out flat puns — “Did Aquaman make you wet?” — and offering herself sexually, only to be turned down. “Girls don’t do it for me,” Sagat/Aquaman tells her.
#MENteaser Men exclusives @JohnnyRapidATL, @ryanbonesxxx, @Brandoncodyreal, veteran superstars @colbykeller & @SagatFrancois and @RuPaulsDragRace breakout @manilaluzon unite in "Justice League: A Gay XXX Parody". November 24, only on https://t.co/NcNj5G5AwZ! pic.twitter.com/eEBBKkCozf
— MEN (@Men) November 20, 2017
Still, once Luzon and her Lasso of Truth showed up on Men.com, it wasn’t long before other Drag Race girls began doing the same. In 2019, Season 9’s queen Farrah Moan appeared in the Men.com film Girls Night. She played a fairy godmother who grants three young men their biggest wish — to live one night in a straight woman’s body to hook up with straight men. (Okay, whatever.) Once more, though, like Luzon, she remained clothed and in a nonsexual role, only really getting to speak once the men have finished their business.
The message is clear: Drag queens are funny, but no one wants to have sex with them. Historically, queens’ own unabashed willingness to be feminine has meant that men often don’t want to date or fuck them. To that point, when The Vixen started doing drag, she considered it another minority identity that would make her less sexy to the general public. “Guys didn’t want to date me because I’m Black, because I’m femme, and now guys don’t want to date me because I’m a drag queen,” she says. “It was a barrier.”
Surprisingly, however, that wasn’t necessarily the case for Aja. “I’ve always felt like sex was a part of my brand,” Aja says. “I feel like I’m a very sex-positive person, and I’m an openly sexual person.” Also, given that their nudes were already in circulation on Reddit and other sites, they figured, “Why not cash in?”
“I was like, ‘What if I made money off of giving people this fantasy?’ Because I know I look good naked, and if other people want to see me naked, it’s just a fair exchange,” they continue. Aja did say that some fans criticized them for charging $20 a month, to which they replied, “This is my body and you can’t put a price on my body, but I can.”
Aja and The Vixen also differ as to whether their OnlyFans’ personae are all together different from who they were previously. “I don’t have a character,” Aja says. “I didn’t have a character when I was doing drag either. I’ve always been sort of me. So for me, it’s not different because it’s just me being sexual without the wig on.”
Either way, the experience has been extremely liberating for The Vixen. “It’s really, really freeing to be like, ‘Okay, this is my body. Here’s my dick. Here’s my ass,’” she tells me. “It’s opened up an avenue for me to love myself in a different way. In drag, it was, ‘What can I transform into to express myself and love myself for that?’ With OnlyFans, I’ve just learned to love my body for what it is.”
Case in point: For the first time in years, her chest hair isn’t shaved. “As a full-time drag queen, you’re always putting a cap on your manliness. And so, being able to explore that has been really fun, and I think I see myself as more of a man than I ever have,” she says. “As a Ru Girl, I shaved every morning, so I’m getting to see what my body does naturally.”
Along those lines, she laughs, “Before OnlyFans, I had never taken a hole pic. So that was like, ‘Oh wow! That’s what it looks like — wow!’”
Mathew Rodriguez
Mathew Rodriguez is an editor at the Body. He is a former staff writer at Out, INTO and Mic. His writing has been featured in Slate, Complex and POZ. He loves Flannery O'Connor and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'
