When the cast of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 14 was announced, Maddy Morphosis stood out as the first-ever straight cis man to compete in the series. While there was an initial pushback from the fans for the inclusion of a straight guy in a franchise all about highlighting LGBTQ+ talent, Maddy quickly proved herself to be a great ally, a hilarious entertainer, and a fascinating queen.
Two years later, Maddy has become one of the most popular Drag Race queens in recent history, accumulating over 330,000 followers on Instagram. She then launched the hit talk show Give It to Me Straight on YouTube, which has already surpassed 7 million views on her channel. In an exclusive interview with PRIDE, Maddy reflects on her time before, during, and after Drag Race, as well as her newfound success with a digital series.
“I feel like it was kind of a gradual shift,” Maddy tells PRIDE. “I understood the reservations people had about straight people in the community because that is a problem that some venues have, especially with bar owners taking advantage of their own clientele or queens… and just in media, too, like straight actors playing queer roles and such.”
She continues, “But I kind of noticed a shift with positivity whenever I got more involved with posting on TikTok and Twitter, being able to showcase my personality. I didn’t get to show [that] on the show because I was only there for three episodes. And then the big followers started rolling when I started my YouTube show, that’s when I suddenly noticed that I was going from 150,000 followers now up to over 300,000, which is insane to me. I remember fighting for 10,000 followers.”
Before getting cast on Drag Race, Maddy was still struggling in her career. And even after getting that coveted casting call, her expectations for the show were rather low. “I was just working at Target at the time. I was bouncing from retail job to retail job,” she explains. “I saw a couple of other local queens that were getting to travel to gigs and get paid for. [They were] able to make a living off of doing drag. That’s all I was hoping for. I was like, ‘I’m going to go to Drag Race’ and I had literally $2,000 saved up for the whole thing.”
Maddy was convinced that she’d be the first-eliminated queen of the season, but the opportunity to be on Drag Race could potentially allow her to do drag on a full-time basis – traveling the world and making enough time. “I hadn’t even been on an airplane. I didn’t go further west than Oklahoma,” Maddy notes. “So I don’t know, being able to travel to different cities was just something exciting to break the monotony of the boring life that I was experiencing.”
When it comes to crafting a post-Drag Race career for herself, Maddy knew early on that she wanted to be very active online. That way, she could engage with fans and show the public the full scope of her personality and sense of humor.
“I knew I wanted to be active on social media the moment I got on the show, because you automatically just have a built-in audience with the show,” she says. “I always had this plan. For me, I was just [missing the] resources. I had the name for Give It to Me Straight way before I even came up with the idea of the show.”
She adds, “I always knew I just wanted to do something, and I kind of weaponized the blue check mark that I had to try to build something with it. I pretty much spent that first year doing shows, traveling, and living that fantasy that I had for myself. And then the moment that was done, so I used what resources I had to move across the country closer to where all the action was.”
Maddy currently lives in Las Vegas, meaning that she’s close to any film and TV opportunities in Los Angeles, as well as to several other queens who live in the region. When asked if World of Wonder (the production company behind the Drag Race franchise) approached Maddy for an original series on WOW Presents Plus, Maddy says: “I think they missed out. I’m not going to divulge too much, but I’ll say that I was talking with someone at one point about the possibility of moving [Give It to Me Straight] to WOW, but that didn’t go through. I feel like the forgotten child sometimes. I’m over here making these moves online, but they haven’t even asked me to do Binge Queens. I’m just like, ‘Mom, notice me!’”
Nonetheless, Maddy couldn’t be happier of the work that she’s doing and the path that she is carving for herself. “The way that I do the show and the fact that I do everything in-house, that’s something that I’m proud of. But it’s also something hard to replicate without putting a team together. I spend a lot of time on the computer. To replicate something like that, I don’t know. (…) But I also recognize that World of Wonder has their own thing going on. They have their own studio, they have their own team that puts everything together. So for me to expect them to just scoop up my bedroom show would be very presumptuous.”
As of this writing, an audio-only podcast version of Give It to Me Straight is available through the Moguls of Media network created by Alaska and Willam in association with Forever Dog. During her interviews, Maddy isn’t afraid of asking questions based on very deep research – finding things that seem unbelievable to the queens being interviewed – and throwing some casual and unexpected shade at her guests. As Very That becomes a huge hit at the same time as Give It to Me Straight, we ask Maddy what she thinks is behind this resurgence of drag-hosted digital talk shows.
“I think people involved in the drag scene know the questions that we’re tired of answering,” Maddy explains. “So that’s why you don’t see me or Very Delta asking things like, ‘So how long does it take you to do your makeup? Would you go back for All Stars?’ No shade to the drag interviews out there, but I feel like a lot of the drag fans don’t really care about that. They want to know deeper stuff. They want to know what your thoughts and opinions are. They watch my show, they want to know where you came from, what happened. They want to see queens being friendly with each other, being shady with each other.”
She goes on, “We have an opportunity to now be the interviewers and take the reins over, ask the questions that we want to ask, have the conversations that we want to have, and the stuff that entertains us. And what entertains us oftentimes entertains the fans. I don’t know, I’m excited. I feel like we’re in this little renaissance of drag interviews.”
You can watch Give It to Me Straight on Maddy Morphosis’ official YouTube channel.
