The Montréal queen talks to IN Magazine about her favourite look she wore, the future of drag, and the art of not having a strategy…
Uma Gahd brightened up the competition with her campy style and sunny disposition since she first stepped into the werk room of Canada’s Drag Race. The self-proclaimed clown brought the laughs with her and shocked her competitors when she showed out, and won her lip sync during this season’s slayoffs. Uma was eliminated in the sixth episode of the fifth season (you can read IN’s recap of “Surviving Snatch Game” here). Following her elimination, Uma talks to IN Magazine about the challenge she was bummed to miss, if she still stands by her opinions on that divisive Snatch Game, and what she wishes she could have talked about on the main stage.
During this week’s Untucked, you mentioned that sometimes your strength can betray you when it comes to being in a competition setting. If you had a hypothetical time machine, and as a comedy queen, what would you go back and change about your snatch game performance?
One of the hard parts about being on this show is trying to remember what parts they showed and what parts they didn’t. But when we were in Untucked, I made sure to tell all of the girls that I thought that Brooke Lynn was incorrect. And that the Snatch Game actually had some really great moments. There was a lot of really great energy, and if I’m honest, I don’t think that I should have been in the bottom.
That’s what I would change, because maybe it wasn’t the best performance I’ve ever put on, but I did not think that it was nearly as bad as they were making it out to be. I really had a great time doing it, it’s terrifying in that moment, but I still had a good time. And so, I don’t know that there’s really that much that I would change.
You did mention that you didn’t think the Snatch Game was as bad as the judges were making it out to be. Has your stance changed with time, and with watching it back?
Oh, no, actually, because we all know that there are certain parts that they can’t show because you know, they have to edit the show down because we film for hours and hours and hours every day and they have to condense it into a one-hour episode. But I think that there were jokes in there that they didn’t even put in that I thought were fantastic. Particularly ones from Perla and from Helena. And so, I think that it was actually even better than they let everyone see. If anything, like it just confirmed for me, I was like, this is all they showed and it was still quite good and it could have been even better in my opinion (laughs).
You were knocked out of the competition at the midway point, so you had the chance to compete in a lot of the iconic Drag Race challenges. Was there a challenge you were bummed that you didn’t get to participate in?
Since the very beginning, the one thing I always wanted to do was a makeover challenge because people have big feelings about my makeup and I knew I could put it on someone else and we would be twinning and we would be winning. Like it would be a gag. I can put this on anyone, doesn’t matter what they look like and they’ll look just like me. So, I knew I really wanted to have a makeover challenge, but you know, while I was there, we didn’t get to have one. I don’t know if there’s one that’s coming out.
You wore so many different and interesting looks on the runway, which one was your favourite and why?
Oh, I think my favourite look just in terms of aesthetics was my entrance look, which was designed and made by Pythia, who has been on Drag Race twice now. She was also on Global All Stars. I went in and I kind of gave her a really confusing Pinterest board. And I was like, “Here’s some things that I like. What do you think?” And she just went, “Oh, I know what you need.” and she was correct. So, my entrance look. It was perfectly Uma. It was everything that I needed it to be. It was purple, it was campy, it was silly, it was retro, it was fashion, it was perfect.
But other than that, everyone knows that Michelle the Ostrich was literally a dream come true for me. I got really close to being on season one. I got really close. And I was already ready, like, I was like, “I’m going to get some things that I know are going to work well on this show” and that ostrich costume was one of those things. And It’s a 25-year-old costume from a nightlife legend here in Montreal named Monsieur Michel, and he made it 25 years ago. And when I got to buy it from him, I said, “I’m going to wear this on Canada’s Drag Race, and I’m not going to wear it until then.” So, getting to walk down the runway in that crazy costume and hear the judges laugh and hear everybody backstage tell me just how dumb and incredible it was, was literally a dream come true. It was the moment when I said, “I did this”.
And you’re the only Montréal Queen this season. I’ve been asking all of the eliminated Queens what makes drag in their city different from everywhere else in Canada. So, what is it about the Montréal drag scene that makes it so uniquely Montréal?
Montréal is a really arts focused city and it always has been. One of the things that we have is drag cabarets. You know, in Toronto, they are athletes and they do marathon drag because they’re performing in the nightclubs and they’re competing with the bar and the dancing and the cruising and the whatever. In Montréal, people come to sit down and watch a show, so that means that we get to do concept numbers because people are paying attention. They will get that there is a joke, and we’re not doing 16 songs in one outfit. We’re going to change our outfits so we can commit three and a half minutes to one look that tells a fantastic story, and sometimes it’s an emotional story, and sometimes it’s a stupid joke, and sometimes it’s just for fun. We have cabaret drag. It’s a lot like vaudeville. It’s really theatrical, conceptual, kooky, and weird. That’s what makes Montréal drag so special.
Taking it back to this week’s Untucked, you also mentioned that you would have loved to talk about your thoughts on drag on the main stage if given the chance. What would you have wanted to say if that platform was for more than just receiving critique from the judges?
It was about wanting to have an opportunity to show the judges that I’m passionate about what I do. And you know, when you’re there getting a critique, you don’t want to sound like you’re being ungrateful and you don’t want to argue. You just want to hear what they have to say and be like, “okay, well, I’m going to try to apply that”, you know. But if they got me in a moment where I felt great about what I was doing, I was going to be able to tell them about how fantastic it feels to have created this outfit, or worked with someone to make this dream come true and to get to be in this experience.
They would hear about my passion because on television, they want your passion to be out here, big, exciting, flashy. But my passion is that I am someone who is lazy. I am someone who is emotional, but on the inside often. So as a lazy person, my passion is expressed by the fact that I show up on time every day in a good mood, bringing you my top-quality drag. It’s not me getting mad at somebody because they got something I thought I deserved. It’s not me pissing in people’s wigs. It’s not me, you know, cat-kitty-kacking. It’s me showing up and bringing great art and being dedicated to it. That is my passion. It looks different than some other people, but it was there.
And if they had gotten the time to talk to me about something other than telling me that my bra looks terrible, which let’s be real. If that’s the only thing you can complain about my outfit, it was still pretty damn good. But if you talk to me about something other than that, then you would see that I’m very passionate about drag. It’s my full-time job. I’ve been doing this for 10 years. I am passionate about drag and I am passionate about my community.
And rolling off that, you’re all about community building and lifting others up. With drag becoming more mainstream with every passing year and every new season and franchise of Drag Race, what do you hope for the future of drag?
That’s a real good question because mainstreaming drag is a blessing and a curse. It means that we have so many more opportunities, but it also means that we’re confronted with so many more opinions about what we do from people who appreciate drag from people that don’t appreciate drag from people that, you know, don’t really care about drag. But then, you know, it’s there.
There’s so many opinions in the world right now and some of them are horrible. I try to always keep an element of politics in my drag. And so, part of that is that we have to keep showing up for ourselves. We have to keep showing up for our community because if we can show people for a long enough time that we are, We’re not just like everybody else.
This (referring to herself) is not like everybody else, but I am a human. I am an artist. I am valuable. I am worthy of respect. I am demanding respect. And if you give it to me, then we’re all going to be able to keep coexisting beautifully. And I, that’s what I’m praying for, with the future of drag.
This week we were also introduced to the wooden beaver, which kind of threw everybody for a loop. What is it like being in a high-pressure setting like that, where there’s a formula to the competition that you’ve been following for weeks that’s already so unpredictable. And then there’s kind of a wrench thrown into that formula?
When you watch enough Drag Race and you meet enough artists who have been on this show, you know that you can never expect anything except the unexpected. Already going into it, I was like, we’re not going to try to plan too hard because we know that that’s not going to work. The other thing is that I don’t know how to strategize. I am here to be pretty, and hopefully be funny. So, I already wasn’t going in with a plan of how things were going to work.
I have a terrible memory. I don’t remember how any of this works. So, every time the rest of the room would be going “Oh my god!” I was like, “Can someone explain this to me? What’s the difference compared to last time? Do I need to remember? Someone put Auntie Uma in the loop!” So, for me, all of it was unexpected. All of it was new. All of it was a wrench in my non-plan.
You should put that on a t-shirt. “I don’t know how to strategize. I am here to be pretty, and hopefully be funny.”
It’s truly what I live by.
We saw you hold your own during the slayoffs, but this week you were lip syncing for your life against two performance powerhouses like Makayla and the Virgo Queen. Eventually every queen in the competition has to lip sync. Is there a point in the lip sync where you kind of know it’s not going to be your night and or do you fight tooth and nail to the last note of the song?
Because I did the slayoffs and then I had two lip syncs, in my experience, there’s no point for me during the lip sync when I turned around and thought, “oh, it’s over”, because you cannot see the other person. You are so focused on the other person, not falling over, not losing your wig, maintaining eye contact with the judges, giving them a great performance. Here’s the parts that I choreographed. Here’s the parts that I planned a gag for. Oh, and the other person’s doing the same thing and you’re just trying not to walk into each other and so at no point was it like, “Oh wow, look how great they’re doing. I’m done.”
I never had that moment because I was like, you know what? I’m still turning it out even in this laughable moment. I saw Makayla and Virgo on the ground being sexy, sultry, fantastic performers, and I could have thought, “oh, well, it’s over”. And I thought, no, here’s an opportunity for me to show the world what kind of lip syncing I do. So, I pulled out my video camera and I said, if you’re going to be that hot, I’m going to put it up on the OnlyFans. I’m going to make this a moment. So, it was not a failure moment, it was a moment for me to say, let’s knock it up another notch, my way.
Aside from being booked, a booked and busy queen, you’ve also performed a one woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is amazing. In your wildest dreams, where do you want to see Uma in a year’s time?
Honestly, just still doing that. We’re already booked this summer to go back to the Edinburgh Fringe with my one woman play “Are you there, Margaret? It’s me Gahd”. And I want to travel more. I started in the Fringe Festival. That’s where I started in drag in the theaters doing plays and things like that. Going back and now getting to perform in the world’s biggest fringe festival, the world’s biggest arts festival, I never thought I would get there. And now I have people from fringes in Australia and New Zealand that are contacting me and asking me to bring my play there.
My dream is to travel and bring my art to all different kinds of places. Because I come from a tiny village. I come from a village of 250 people, and so I know what it’s like to not necessarily have the same access as everyone else to arts and culture. And as a queer person, (the importance of) having that community. So, if I could spend the rest of my life traveling around anywhere that will have me do my silly little goofy clown dance, then I would be thrilled. That would be a blessing to me, to keep doing my art anywhere that I can.
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