Jenna Wortham

Drag has been featured in popular culture for decades. Movies like 'Kinky Boots,' 'Tootsie,' 'The Birdcage' - even 'Mrs. Doubtfire' - have showcased men, some gay, some not, who dress and perform as women.

'Drag Race' has taught me a lot about how to form community, to take myself less seriously and lose some ego.

The argument has been made that smart women on screen are already enough of a minority to make up for the lack of women of color. Nope. Not good enough.

Oceans of emotion can be transmitted through a text message, an emoji sequence, and a winking semicolon, but humans are hardwired to respond to visuals.

I've long been interested in how technology mediates desire and the way that our phones, an extension of ourselves, foster intimate interactions that feel so personal and deep, despite being relayed through a machine.

There is much about the shared terrain of being a black person in the United States that is not seen on small or silver screens or in museums or best-selling books, and much of what gets ignored in the mainstream thrives, and is celebrated, on Twitter.

For all its power as a protest medium, black Twitter serves a great many users as a virtual place to just hang out.

Twitter, it can be said, completely changed the way activism is done, who can participate, and even how we define it.

Learning to live with not meeting other people's expectations has been extremely freeing and is the only gift I wish to pass on to any future offspring.

There is no picturesque version of what self-care looks like; it's different for every person who wants to practice it.

For many years, taking care of myself consisted of showering and showing up to work on time. Sleeping and eating were inconveniences at best.

Spotify, Tidal, and even YouTube, to a degree, are vast and rich troves of music, but they primarily function as search engines organized by algorithms. You typically have to know what you're looking for in order to find it.

Nonviolent, visual protests have a long history of forming images that can quickly go viral and set a powerful tone for a moment.

In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.

The most moving parts of 'Real American' come when Lythcott-Haims stares unflinchingly at her own self-loathing, writing about the racist encounters of her childhood that convinced her from a young age that there was something inherently wrong with being black.

It's becoming much more common to see yoga studios offer classes aimed exclusively at people of color who are searching for ways to cope with racism and fears around police brutality.

In person, RuPaul is warm, funny, personable - someone who thoroughly enjoys life.

As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.

'Drag Race' has become a staple of modern television for the way it skewers expectations and attitudes about gender, much as a show like 'black-ish' works to challenge stereotypes about black families in America.

When 'Drag Race' first began, it seemed like a fun window into an underground culture, but over the nine years it has aired, the show has evolved to reflect America's changing relationship to queer rights and acceptance.