Dear haters of ‘sexualised’ drag queen Cheryl Hole after ‘inappropriate’ MasterChef appearance – get a grip

Drag queen Cheryl Hole made an appearance on Celebrity MasterChef this week. It was an hour of harmless fun, with the most offensive moment being her attempt at a passion fruit martini. Show over; let’s move on with our lives. Apparently not. 

I interviewed Cheryl on the day the show went out for an unrelated project, alongside fellow drag performer Kitty Scott-Claus (a previous Celebrity MasterChef contestant herself). You go into an interview with two drag queens and hope to learn a bunch of new swear words, have your outfit read to filth, or maybe even get propositioned if you’re lucky. 

But my 45-minute chat with Cheryl and Kitty was like being hugged by a pair of fluffy poodles. The most sexualised thing Cheryl did was to say she’d like to “smoochy-smoochy kiss” Kitty. Scandalous.

Before the episode even aired, Cheryl was met with an avalanche of online vitriol. Vile, misogynistic, and grotesque were just three of the words found in the quagmire of comments below a BBC tweet promoting the show. Yes, her name is Cheryl Hole, but this is meant as a juvenile take on her namesake, not as the awful suggestion that women are receptacles to be filled at whim, as some comments imply.

No issue with Sam Fox

Meanwhile, Telegraph reporter Ewan Somerville appeared to misquote Family Education Trust spokesperson Lucy Marsh as calling Cheryl “highly sexualised”- she instead appeared to use this as an umbrella term for drag itself. 

This made me wonder whether Ewan and Lucy had bothered to even watch the show before releasing their gammon-rays into the mediascape. 

In the episode, Cheryl shared a warming tale of how the roast lamb dish she was making was the same one her nan would make her as a child. She also said how her husband enjoyed making food for the couple at home. Extremely graphic and sexual stuff not fit for a “family show”, indeed.

Ironically, there seemed to be no issue with the one person on the show who “highly sexualised” could be vaguely applied to. That would be Sam Fox, who didn’t exactly make her name by crocheting doilies. That said, nobody on the show should be shamed for being sexualised off-screen – especially when neither Cheryl nor Sam were running around grooming viewers through the TV while waiting for their dough balls to rise.

A culture war we don’t want

For better or for worse, the UK has been importing aspects of US culture in droves in recent years, mainly thanks to the internet. We now refer to TV series as “seasons”, hold high school proms, and some even go so far as to spell those black rubber things on our cars as “tires”. 

While we can tolerate these (well, maybe not the misspelling of “tyres”), what we absolutely will not tolerate is the import of its culture war against drag performers – especially when that comes as a veiled attack against trans people. 

We don’t want – in the UK, or anywhere else in the world – the making of drag queens into pariahs, especially when they are at their core artists spreading joy into people’s lives. This will to suppress and censor drag by twisting it into something sordid is exactly what Nazi Germany did in the 1920s, when it declared art forms such as Cubism and Surrealism as “degenerate art”.

Drag is not sexual or misogynistic

Drag isn’t new; it’s not something that’s just appeared since right-wing US politicians decided that they didn’t like it anymore. How many reading this grew up getting ready for school while Lily Savage lay spreadeagled on a bed using double entendres on the Big Breakfast? There were no Lucys or Ewans to save us from the horrors back then, yet here we still stand. 

For a member of a group with the word “education” in its title, Lucy and co need to educate themselves on what drag is. It’s not sexual, it’s not misogynistic, and more importantly, it’s been around longer than any of us on this planet have – and will continue to be long after we’re gone. 

The Family Education Trust has been contacted for comment. Attitude has also reached out to Ewan Somerville to request the headline and opening line of his article be amended to reflect the apparent misquote.