Briar Blush made an unforgettable impression on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 18. Known for her confidence and a unique perspective on drag, the Boston-based queen faced a dramatic episode filled with cast tension, a vulnerable moment of honesty and a scary fainting spell that ended in her time in the competition being cut short.
But Briar isn’t letting the outcome define her. Instead, she’s focused on how far she’s come, as well as the direction she’s taking her drag career moving forward.
On workroom tension after winning the lipsync againt Mandy Mango
Coming back into the workroom after surviving the lipsync in the previous episode, Briar was hit with unexpected friction from her fellow queens, and according to her, it caught her off guard.
“I would say that I was confused. I would say that I was really confused because the interaction that you saw with me and Mia [Starr] in the workroom mirror that they showed was our only negative interaction at that point,” she said. “And we just hadn’t talked until we were back on the couches.”
“And so when she started, I was confused. And me and Athena [Dion] had already talked, and we were like, ‘Oh, we’re good now,’ way earlier. And so when that happened, I was like, ‘What? Huh?’”
Even then, Briar said she wasn’t interested in dragging the moment out. “And I honestly, I don’t want to have any malice with my sisters. So really in that moment, I wasn’t fighting them because I didn’t want to fight. I was like, ‘Aw, what’s going on?’ You know?”
That tension later led to a more emotional conversation with Mia, when Briar opened up about feeling othered by her family and leaving home as a teenager.
“I think for me, that’s not necessarily something that I was shy to tell people about in my life,” she said. “I think really, I think I consider myself a success story in the idea that people don’t have to love and accept you for you to love and accept yourself.”
“So when we were talking about it, and I was being really vulnerable with her, I felt like I was getting to a place with her where we had more understanding of each other.”
The faint heard around the world, and what comes next
The episode took a dramatic turn when Briar fainted on the main stage — right before the judges revealed who they thought made the best outfit between her and Juicy Love Dion.
“Not much. I’m not going to lie,” she said when asked what she remembers from that moment. “I remember getting critiqued. I thought my critiques were what they were. I don’t even remember really what… I remember a few things [of] what Law Roach was saying. But I remember in that moment, I just remembered my head feeling so warm, and I was getting so tired.”
“And I remember just waking up to Juicy shaking me, tears in her eyes, scared. And I didn’t know that I had passed out. I just remember thinking that she was looking at me sideways above me. She’s above me, but I thought she was just leaning her head over.”
After filming, Briar learned there was a serious reason behind what happened. “Well, after the season of Drag Race, I have really considered how I approached drag because I wanted to mention that the reason I ended up fainting was because I had pneumonia during filming,” she said. “I was diagnosed later after getting home.”
Looking ahead, she said the experience has pushed her to rethink how she approaches drag and her health. “And so I really want for my drag in the future to be… I want to make sure that I take care of myself and do things that are artistically fulfilling with my drag,” she said. “And that’s my mantra going forward, that I think me first always to make sure that drag is something that I love and is not putting me in a position where I’m doing things just because to do them.”
Despite any on-camera friction, Briar said she’s in a good place with the cast today. “Yeah. I would consider me and all the cast friends. Me and Mia talk, me and Athena talk, we FaceTime. We are all good friends now and whatever fights we may have, we did resolve that there and that was real,” she said. “And we became better friends afterwards.”
RuPaul’s Drag Race airs Fridays at 8 p.m. on MTV.
The post Briar Blush On ‘Drag Race’ Fainting And What She Remembers: ‘I Thought My Critiques Were What They Were’ appeared first on Blavity.
