Gigi Goode Is Drag’s Most Daring Doll

Goode is dazzling to watch on TV, as hundreds of thousands of Drag Race viewers know, and she is also lovely to look at in images, as her million-plus Instagram follower count proves. But what many people might not know about Gigi Goode is that she is also fabulous to speak to, even in the professional context of a magazine interview. Her speech is an unending chain of hilarious observations, with regular intervals of tenderness inserted like rosary beads. Her tone struts an exhilarating line between an exhausted supermodel and an ancient diner waitress in a jocular mood. (“Have a good day!” I said at the end of a phone call. “You too, sweet cheeks,” she croaked back.) 

If Gigi Goode was a doll, what kind of accessories might be included with purchase? “That’s a hard question,” she says, right before answering perfectly and definitively: “I mean, obviously, one of those plastic hairbrushes in the shape of a star, zip-tied to the back of the box.” She could not have a single head of hair — there would have to be kaleidoscopic hair options because, according to Goode, “there need to be hair options.” 

Goode grew up in Woodstock, Illinois, a city known foremost as the setting of Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. She inherited her interior designer mother’s skill for making clothes and she spent her childhood poring over sewing patterns featuring two-dimensional models. Where some might see a step-by-step guide to crafting a bias-cut miniskirt, Goode saw her fantasies playing out before her. She doesn’t know exactly when she realized that being a drag queen could be a career; she simply knew she wanted to wear beautiful things and look gorgeous in them.

The way Goode describes her entry into professional drag is so unintentional it seems to have been cosmically destined: Her fate was sealed on Santa Monica Boulevard. “I went on a Tinder date with the manager of Micky’s West Hollywood. He found my Instagram and saw a picture of me in drag and asked if I wanted to be a go-go dancer,” she says. “Someone saw me and then I ended up getting booked to perform.” 

She had no choice but to quit her day job working as a makeup artist for photo shoots and music videos. (The job of putting makeup on other people, she says, helped her realize that her favorite canvas was her own face.) A friend helped her film an audition video and Goode landed a spot on RuPaul’s Drag Race, the vehicle by which drag performers are transported into the mainstream entertainment industry.