To help with Billboard Pride’s celebration of a decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race, season five contestant and All Stars 2 winner Alaska sat down with Billboard Pride editor Patrick Crowley to reminisce about her experience being on the show, what some of her favorite moments have been overall and what advice she would give to future Drag Race queens.
“You can tell from the first season that we were dealing with something really special and the first of its kind,” Alaska tells Billboard Pride of the show’s beginnings. “And it still is…I hope it goes forever.”
Asked to reflect upon some of her favorite moments from the show’s ten year history, Alaska names Laganja Estranja’s iconic death drop as her favorite workroom entrance to date, while her favorite mini-challenge was the Little Miss Beauty pageant, noting that challenge spawned the birth of her drag daughter, Lil’ Poundcake.
The drag queen also reminisces about the first mini-challenge she tackled in her season, which involved dunking the contestants into tanks of water, where they had to pose for photos. “I had a lot of things working against me,” she says. “I was wearing a plastic bag and so it created this diving bell that wouldn’t go under water and I couldn’t see cause I had to take my contacts out and I’m blind and I don’t really swim and I can’t hold my breath underwater…It was like a convergence of horrible things, but I’m glad I survived that.”
On the subject of everyone’s favorite Drag Race moment, the Snatch Game, Alaska notes that BenDeLaCreme was amazing as both Maggie Smith and Paul Lynde, adding, “BenDeLaChrist — I worship thee.”
She also chats about her own Snatch Game performances, revealing that had she not gone with Mae West and Lady Bunny for her episodes, she would have opted for Rue McClanahan, who played Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls.
Alaska is also asked what advice she would give to future Drag Race queens, with her telling Billboard Pride, “I think working hard is important and being nice to people because we’re all working on all this together so there’s no sense in being a bitch or a diva – which I sometimes am, but I would like to tell myself as advice don’t, but just be nice and work hard.”
You can watch the full video above to hear much more from Alaska, including who her favorite comedy queen is, who she considers to be the biggest lip sync assassin and which one trend she would love to see retired on future Drag Race seasons.