Denver drag queen Willow Pill is the new champion of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”

For the second time since 2019, a Denver drag queen has gained “RuPaul’s Drag Race” competitors, essentially the most prestigious and visual drag-queen occasion in the US.

Denver-raised drag queen Willow Capsule grabbed the crown and a $150,000 money prize through the Emmy-winning present’s Season 14 finale on the Flamingo in Las Vegas, which aired on Friday, April 22. She beat out Angeria Paris VanMichaels, Bosco, Daya Betty and Girl Camden in a “showgirl glitz extravaganza,” as Billboard wrote. (The “RuPaul’s Drag Race Dwell!” stage present is at the moment working on the Flamingo.)

Twenty-seven-year-old Willow Capsule hails from the identical Denver drag household as 2019 winner Yvie Oddly, she stated in an interview with Leisure Weekly. And, like Oddly, her attention-getting designs for the competitors once more pushed drag spectacle past its conventional borders, with seems that had been based mostly on two fingers rising out of her head, blood-red fungus eyes, and “a mould of her personal head mounted to her crotch.”

“I’m an adorably twisted little doll,” she instructed CityCast host Bree Davis in an April 21 interview that preceded the large win.

Willow Capsule is the first out trans winner of a non-All Stars season of American Drag Race, “a title she wears proudly,” Leisure Weekly wrote, however has stated prior to now that it could really feel overwhelming to be “hoisted into the highlight because the face of illustration for any group.”

The 2019 “Drag Race” winner, Yvie Oddly, is Willow Capsule’s mentor and good friend. Whereas Oddly is scheduled to carry out as one of many headliners at this yr’s Denver PrideFest, Willow Capsule just isn’t but on the roster (and relies out of Chicago as of late).

Nonetheless, she got here up in Denver’s drag scene with different nationally identified queens akin to Nina Flowers, and loves that she was capable of finding her area of interest in an open, experimental setting, in response to her CityCast interview.

“What makes Denver drag so particular, or not less than on the time I used to be form of developing, is that there wasn’t an entire lot of construction or guidelines. It’s a type of mid-sized cities for drag …,” she instructed Davies. “The through-line with Nina and Yvie and myself is that we’re all type of people that subverted the expectations on our season. And I believe Denver does that fantastically.”

It’s arduous to overemphasize that final be aware, as Denver’s aggressively aggressive, national-quality comedy, music, theater and different performing-arts scenes have discovered comparable success by punching up and ignoring conventional ladder-rungs of their industries.

Denver queens specifically have come up in opposition to — and overwhelmed — names from a lot larger, extra established scenes on the coasts, even when not successful whole seasons of “Drag Race.” In Season 14, Willow Capsule was in a position to impress Grammy-winning visitor judges starting from Lizzo and Alicia Keys, in addition to acclaimed actors Taraji P. Henson and Nicole Byer, amid different style, drag and leisure trade specialists.

“I by no means took the time to consider what it might imply to win, or be one in every of solely two Colorado queens to signify the state (together with Season 1 runner-up Nina Flowers),” Oddly stated in a 2019 Denver Put up interview, simply earlier than enjoying that yr’s PrideFest. “I hope it makes all the women right here that a lot hungrier. I’ve all the time been a really stern critic in the neighborhood, to say the least, so I hope folks have a fireplace lit below their (expletives). Should you work arduous sufficient and you’ve got a imaginative and prescient, you actually can obtain some insane issues.”

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