Trixie Mattel Is Here to Fix Her Home, Not Your Life
In the first episode of Trixie Motel: Drag Me Home, famed drag queen and multi-hyphenate artist Trixie Mattel begins demoing the kitchen of the $3 million historic Hollywood home she’s just bought with her partner of eight years, producer David Silver. David is rocking a pair of killer pink construction boots and a matching hard hat, but Trixie is in full pink Rosie the Riveter drag: polka-dot button-up tied at the waist, a matching bandana around her giant blond bouffant, pink work gloves, pink hot pants. She’s squatting with an electric rotary hammer and blasting tile off the floor. Trying to, anyway. Her size 14 white high heels aren’t making the job easy. Neither are her multiple sets of false eyelashes. They’re too big to fit within her clear protective eyewear—jammed up against her face by the frames—and it looks like invisible fingers are holding her eyes open in shock.
“Oh my God,” she says as tiles crack under the end of the power tool. Then again, more alarmed: “Oh my God!”
After a couple of seconds of pounding—David watches, smiling, but looks to the designer and contractor standing nearby, with maybe just a touch of concern—Trixie wisely agrees to hand the hammer to the pros.
“Yeah, I love to help,” Trixie says, recalling the moment in a phone interview. “And then ultimately, the people who are much better at this are like, ‘Ok, you had your turn, get out of here.’ But then again, how long could I sit there and watch them roller set a wig? I would be like, ‘Just let me just do this.’”
Drag Me Home, whose second episode premieres this weekend, is a follow-up to the popular 2022 docuseries Trixie Motel, in which Trixie and David spent four months and around $500,000 renovating a run-down seven-room Palm Springs motel they’d purchased for about $1.9 million. (Both shows were produced by Scott Brothers Entertainment, the production shingle of Drew and Jonathan Scott, the Canadian twins behind HGTV’s long-running Property Brothers franchise.)
For season two, Trixie and David (both executive producers) switch gears, from motel demo to home reno. “Our whole raison for participating in the home and garden space is to subvert it,” Trixie says. “’Cause right now it’s all straight people renovating homes because they’re pregnant and stuff. Or it’s gay people, drag queens, going to straight people’s houses and helping them with their life.”
Trixie’s not lending a manicured hand to straights in need; the show’s focus is on the renovation process and its effect on Trixie and David. The duo reveal in the first episode that they’re hoping to cap their budget at $150,000 and wrap things up within one month—“a psychotic thing to do, especially with cameras rolling,” David admits with a laugh, calling from the Trixie Motel. As for the vibe of the home: “We need this place to scream the lyrics to ‘I’m Every Woman’ or it’s not gay enough,” Trixie tells the designer in the first episode of season two, while dressed like a ’70s housewife. She and David want a space that looks like it belongs to two fabulous gay men, and is a glam melding of their styles: her penchant for pink, his love of animal print.
As she pries a marble kitchen backsplash off the wall with a hammer and crowbar, Trixie cracks that it reminds her of removing her makeup at the end of the day. Seconds later, she’s bent over, pinup-like, messing with an electrical socket. The pure camp and visual silliness of a moment like this is a sugar rush of joy because none of these things seem to belong together. Regardless of how you view drag queens—as performance artists, camp clowns, or ambassadors for the entire queer community—they’re usually there to entertain you. They’re death-dropping for tips at your local gay watering hole, or lip-synching to Ariana Grande tracks at drag brunches.
In our ADHD/ASMR world, there is something soothing about seeing a pro absolutely kill it at whatever they’re good at. What Trixie’s good at—what’s made her one of the most famous drag artists in the world, with nearly eight million subscribers across her social channels—is combining makeup artistry, comedic chops, musical talent, and general charm. Gay guys with zero interest in doing drag themselves tell her they watch her YouTube makeup tutorials to chill. Having a bad day? Watch her and fellow RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Katya losing their minds over the Rosamund Pike thriller I Care a Lot during an episode of their Netflix-produced reaction show, I Like to Watch, or dissolving into cackle fits with friends and fellow drag queens on Drag Race’s official YouTube recap show, The Pit Stop. On Drag Me Home, though, Trixie isn’t performing for our benefit—not really. She’s planning her and David’s life together, and we get to eavesdrop on all the joy, all the tears, and all the meltdowns over why they can’t just take a hammer to a hideous-but-historic fireplace mantle.
Long before she started swinging a sledgehammer and knocking down walls on national TV, Trixie knew how to change the atmosphere of a room. In 2016, she staged her first solo stand-up musical comedy show, Ages 3 and Up, in Provincetown during the popular Carnival week in August. There are few groups of potential patrons more flighty and dismissive than drunk gay men leaving a tea dance and looking to get dinner and/or laid, but multiple days a week, Trixie stood in full drag in the summer sun barking for her show at the small Post Office Cabaret.
I remember seeing her perform that summer. In a set suffused with self-effacing humor, she performed her soul-baring original country song, “I Know You All Over Again,” about a recent breakup. The first couple of bars, guys laughed, expecting the lyrics to devolve into dick jokes. Nope. “And I don’t call you when I cry. And I don’t stay the day in bed,” she sang with her guitar, describing a breakup so devastating that just leaving bed is a win for the day. By the end, some of the men in the audience had been moved to tears; nearly everyone else had an Oh, shit look on their face. Like, Oh, shit, this queen just booted me out of my rum-punch buzz and forced me to feel human emotion.
While other drag artists hew closer to life, Trixie is a drag version of a Barbie doll—“a caricature of a caricature of a woman,” two layers removed from actual reality. Her stylized ’60s-tinged aesthetic—thick, black wing-tip painted eyelids, eyebrows arching all the way to her blond up-dos—draws on references from Nancy Sinatra to Dolly Parton. The Milwaukee-born entertainer first hit the stage during season seven of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2015, the competition reality show in which drag performers vie for a cash prize and the title of America’s Next Drag Superstar. Drag Race, which currently airs on MTV, has become a cultural juggernaut, spinning off around two dozen global franchises—a veritable Drag Race Cinematic Universe. Back when Trixie competed, the series was in a transitional stage—still airing on LogoTV, no longer a scrappy upstart, not yet a cultural phenomenon. And by her own admission, Trixie’s performance on the show wasn’t great; she got the high-heeled boot pretty early on.
But host and self-proclaimed Queen of Drag RuPaul likes to remind contestants that by getting on the show, they’ve already won. They’re already stars, and it’s up to them to make the most of their new platform. In short: You betta work. And Trixie strapped on her big-girl pumps and did just that.
In no particular order—and this is not an exhaustive list of the accolades under Trixie’s belt, which itself is around her cinched waist—she won the third season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, cultivated a passionate fan base with multiple YouTube shows and a podcast, co-authored best-selling books with Katya, released four full-length albums and multiple EPs, launched Trixie Cosmetics, cohosted The Trixie and Katya Show on Vice TV, and kick-started a separate career as a DJ.
Drag Race’s passionate and expanding Gen Z fan base might view queens as role models, and the art of drag itself as a potentially lucrative career path, or an exercise in branding. But the millennial-and-older crew have a different experience with drag. It’s mostly for kicks. Trixie says she started doing it for “drink tickets and attention.” And while she appreciates that people get so much out of the character she plays, she says Trixie “was never meant to be a politician or a religious leader or like Buddha,” she says. She supports the queens who want to raise an age-appropriate awareness of things like gender diversity by reading to kids in libraries, but says she’s always viewed her own drag persona as “an adult art thing” Loud, selfish, obnoxious, hypersexual, Trixie’s drag alter ego is an exaggerated version of her worst qualities, like a reflection staring back from a twisted makeup compact mirror.
Trixie Motel premiered on Discovery+ in June 2022 and got somewhat of a second premiere when it hit the Max streamer in May 2023 after the Discovery and Warner Bros. merger. Suddenly, billboards for the show were plastered all over Hollywood. During the 15 months it took for Trixie Motel to get greenlit for a second season, Trixie and David had decided to move in together. Rather than manufacture drama about running the motel for season two, they decided to focus on the real-life process of buying and renovating their home—which meant putting the spotlight more squarely on their relationship.
“When we first pitched season one, it was really supposed to be ‘Trixie and her celebrity friends renovate a motel,’” David says. “And the network was like, ‘Well, we need to fill out the cast with people from your real life.’ So, I begrudgingly agreed to participate on camera.”
Wait, you were a filler queen on your own show?
“Exactly, exactly,” he agrees with a laugh.
Trixie finds it hilarious to live in a city where people would die to be on TV; David couldn’t care less. He was only on camera during season one because he was literally helping with the renovation. He gets more screen time this season; there’s even a cartoon version of him joining Trixie in the animated opener, a perfect pastiche of the credits of shows like Bewitched and The Nanny.
David also produced 2019’s Trixie Mattel: Moving Parts, a fly-on-the wall documentary that followed Trixie on the road for a year, peering behind the high-femme fantasy and flattering lighting of drag to offer an unvarnished (and often uncomfortable) look at her life. Don’t expect that from Drag Me Home, though, which is a light-and-fun renovation reality show, influenced (according to David) by Parks and Rec, Lisa Kudrow’s mind-bendingly meta The Comeback, and comic Kathy Griffin’s brilliant sitcom-reality lovechild My Life on the D-List. “Trixie and I think we’re making a sitcom more than we’re making a renovation show,” he admits. Trixie agrees: “I think I’m on The Office.”
The reality-TV signifiers are all here. There are confessionals, and camera-ready looks to go with them: Trixie, a lilac confection in a marabou-feather-trimmed dress by her longtime costumer Amie Sarazan and David in a matching-hued All Saints leopard print button-down. There are bits—David jokes that he and Trixie are like Kermit and Miss Piggy, but people don’t realize he’s the one who’s actually Miss Piggy—and the usual reno-show hand-wringing: How are we going to stay within budget? What fire do we have to put out now? There’s levity, thanks in part to guest stars including pal Orville Peck, Katya, and drag artist Juno Birch, but there are also tears, both joyful and stress induced. And while some of the concerns Trixie and David run into are specific to their situation—Where is Trixie going to store all her wigs?—their interactions will feel familiar to any couple that’s ever merged their lives.
This might be the most subversive thing about the series. You can’t really get more heteronormative than the home-reno shows that Drag Me Home spoofs, which generally feature stock characters right out of the 1950s—the housewife (but maybe she’s quirky and loves chunky jewelry and hats!) and the bread-winner husband (who has to keep his flighty wife on task, clenching his jaw about the budget!). The genre as a whole is both straight-coded and low-key Christian. And as Trixie points out, “It’s not just Christian. Let’s just say it: It’s also white. It’s a white, Christian, straight world, right? So much of the impetus for renovation is ‘We got married under the eyes of God.’ Or ‘We’re having a baby.’ Or ‘We’re blending families,’ or whatever.”
Home renovations are so emotionally loaded because it’s all about planning a future. Here’s where we’ll celebrate holidays. Here’s where we’ll host family barbecues in the backyard. That dining room is not just a dining room, so we’d better love it. As Trixie tells it, “You’re setting the table for the rest of your love story.” But the families on these shows are free to obsess over these things because they’re not also obligated to represent themselves to the rest of the country in a certain way—and their love stories have never been politicized. No one’s passing laws that impact their feelings of safety in public. No one’s trying to ban books about families like theirs from libraries. They aren’t concerned with changing minds and being examples for the children of America; they just want to pick out wallpaper.
There are other queer folks in the home-reno universe, sure—there are queer hosts and contestants on house-flipping shows, and in the adjacent makeover space there are shows like Netflix’s Queer Eye and Max’s We’re Here, which feature queer stars sweeping in and improving the lives of those in need. It’s hard to ding the sincerity of these shows; like Drag Race (which itself has taken on a more feel-good bent the last several years), they’re doing important work just by putting queer people on TVs in homes across the world, showing them as humans and not political footballs and moving the needle of social progress. That said, the casts of these shows are still inhabiting very specific roles; more than two decades after the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy premiered on Bravo, mainstream media still tends to be more comfortable with queer people when they’re here to fairy-godmother the straights.
“So much of media is about ‘Drag is here for straight people. We’re here to help you. We’re here to tell you you’re fierce,’” Trixie says. “And this show is like, no, ‘What if my partner and I just are ready to move in and make our dream home?’”
Buying a house is a luxury. And if straight couples in by-the-books home-reno shows can enjoy the added luxury of not having to turn their lives into a Masterclass, then queer people should absolutely get to do so, too. As David sees it, “Just showing a gay couple being fabulous and successful and thriving is aspirational and important to see. And on renovation TV, especially.”
“My Miss America answer is, yes, I want young queer people to see me and be inspired,” Trixie says. “But the real answer is I just like acting foolish on camera. And like, if I have to do a big expensive project like this, I’d rather film it and act foolish.”
In short, Trixie Motel: Drag Me Home is about renovating a home and not your life. And like a drag queen trying to work a rotary hammer, sometimes you have to leave the work to the pros, so don’t look to Trixie for therapy.
Besides—she and David are busy. They’re developing other projects, like a horror comedy with drag queens and zombies. They’ve still got the Palm Springs motel to run, and they’re planning other properties—another Trixie Motel, maybe a bar in Palm Springs. Once the show finishes airing, though, Trixie is hitting pause. “I’m gonna withdraw a little bit and, like, go do things like go to Alaska and Wisconsin and just like, fuck around and vibe,” she says. “Maybe I’ll grow a beard.”
And on second thought, maybe she does have some life advice to dish out. “If they ask you to take your top off,” Trixie says, “get the money first.”
Originally Appeared on GQ
