Who’s the little lady with her curls on fire? The cutest little tootie all the boys desire? Why, it’s Suzie Toot, of course. After a fifth-place finish on the latest season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the 25-year-old drag queen is ushering the art form into the future by harking back to the past.
Like many next-gen drag artists, Suzie discovered drag through Drag Race. As a sophomore in high school, she watched her first-ever episode: the show’s inaugural musical theater-inspired challenge, “Shade: The Rusical” from Season 6.
“I think Courtney Act as Good Penny was the first iteration of Suzie Toot,” she says. “That was the first, like, ‘Oh, you can be an ingénue? That’s incredible.’”
Her other inspirations include “the older guard” of drag, she says, including icons like Charles Busch and Varla Jean Merman, along with the iconic leading ladies of classic movie musicals: Shirley MacLaine in Sweet Charity, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, and Ellen Greene in Little Shop of Horrors, to name just a few.
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Suzie started drag as a supplement to her acting career in Fort Lauderdale, where she moved after dropping out of college. “I was studying musical theater, if you can believe it,” Suzie says. “But everyone calls me a BFA weaponizer, and I dropped out, so I don’t have one! I’m too cool for a BFA.”
Suzie’s Drag Race package was unlike any contestant’s on the show before: from her makeup to her wardrobe, she rarely deviated from the aesthetics of the 1920s and ‘30s. Though her look has shifted throughout her drag career, Suzie’s never conformed to conventional standards of drag — and why should she? After all, “conventional drag” reads like an oxymoron.
“My favorite kind of drag is drag that does not give a sh*t about who is in the audience,” Suzie says. “I love when I’m sitting at a drag show and the rest of the audience is not feeling it, because it makes me lean in harder.”
Suzie’s no stranger to having been in that position: she recalls performing a (debatably too long) mix of the Saturday Night Live skit “Liza Minnelli Tries to Turn Off a Lamp” and the real Minnelli’s song “I Gotcha.”
“I did it twice in Fort Lauderdale, and both times, just crickets,” she says. “So I just really went crazier. It was a good time. I look back on that fonder than, like, doing some mix that people liked.”
It all led up, of course, to her run on Season 17 of Drag Race earlier this year. Suzie’s unique take on drag would have made her a fan-favorite even if she hadn’t dominated the early days of the competition — but she did, winning the talent show in the premiere and the SNL-inspired “RDR Live” challenge just a few episodes later. (Regrettably, it didn’t feature a reference to “Liza Minnelli Tries to Turn Off a Lamp,” which only would have made the challenge even easier for Suzie to nail.)
“Everyone calls me a BFA weaponizer, and I dropped out, so I don’t have one! I’m too cool for a BFA.”
– Suzie Toot
But after her early lead, Suzie didn’t snag another win prior to her elimination at the final five, leaving her just one episode short of making the finale. Along the way, she ruffled feathers and inspired memes, from being told to go home by nearly all her castmates to “doing good” in the roast — though Jewels Sparkles might disagree. Now looking back at her time on the show, Suzie admits she might have been a touch more intense than Drag Race called for.
“There’s tons of places where I wanted to just grab and smack the person on the screen and be like, ‘Girl, it’s okay. Nothing is that serious,’” she says. “And I don’t take things seriously, but I also love to compete. Like, when I play Mario Kart, I’m a different woman. I’m a different person. I’m evil. So there’s a bit of Mario Kart energy on the show.”
Suzie’s elimination ultimately may have worked out better for her than a spot in the finale would have. It put her in the running for the season’s reunion lip sync tournament (in Drag Race parlance, the Lalaparuza), and three lip syncs later, Suzie took home the title and the $50,000 prize.
Drag Race’s lip sync tournament was far from Suzie’s first rodeo. Prior to being on the show, she competed multiple times in a local nightclub’s battle royales — and she never lost. “It was always Britney songs. They would never give me anything that I would want to perform,” she recalled.
That trend continued on Drag Race, where Suzie was dealt songs by Dua Lipa, Rihanna, and Bruno Mars, all far cries from the musical theater songs or oldies fans would expect her to excel with. Nevertheless, she handily dominated all three performances. “When the audience is aware of who you are, and they’re like, ‘Ooh, how is she going to do this?’, I think that adds a layer to the performance,” Suzie says. “So it was exciting to see that translate on an international stage, when that whole same scenario has happened before. I’m a three-time undefeated battle royale champion.”
Suzie not only won the Lalaparuza; she looked drop-dead gorgeous while doing it. In a clown-meets-Rosie the Riveter fantasy made by Casey Caldwell and a now iconic red shag wig styled by Bitchcraft, Suzie became the stuff of sapphic dreams — just as she’d expected.
“I wore that wig three total times before we filmed the Lalaparuza, and I didn’t post anything in it. I kept it hidden,” she says. “But the lesbians freaked for it, and there was fan art of that look before I even left to film. So in my mind, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to be big. I’m so excited.’”
Suzie first discovered the power of a sapphic fan base with a little help from the Midwest Princess herself, Chappell Roan. Back in October of 2023, Suzie opened for Roan in Fort Lauderdale and found an entirely different audience than the ones she’d grown used to in the nearby gay haven of Wilton Manors.
“Wilton Manors is a very male community. It’s an old gay retirement town — love it so much. It’s the best ever,” Suzie explains. “But its one issue is that there’s just not enough queer space for women and femme-presenting people.”
Chappell Roan’s concert crowd, as you might imagine, was the exact opposite. “It was the biggest crowd I’d ever performed for, and just all women, all lesbians, all sapphic, all femme,” Suzie recalls. “And I was like, ‘Oh my god, these are my people.’ Like, ‘Oh, they get it.’ The response that I got after that show was so cool. And I was like, ‘Wow, I’m understanding for the first time the impact that Suzie Toot can have on lesbians.’”
After being introduced to the wider audience of Drag Race, that impact has only grown. The show’s massive sapphic fan base has embraced Suzie, and she embraces the lesbian Tooters right back.
“They’re my favorite fans. They pay attention, they spend money, and they just genuinely care,” Suzie says. “Where — maybe I’m bitter and jaded because of my years in Wilton Manors — but like, gay men sometimes are so awful about drag and they’d rather be humping on the dance floor. And that’s so valid, like, go off diva, but the lesbians want to see art. So my message to lesbians is that I love you and I will never let you down.”
Since filming Drag Race, Suzie’s relocated to Brooklyn to launch her post-Drag Race career. That includes releasing an original short film (with a teaser out now on YouTube), going on tour, and premiering her one-woman show this summer, which she says will be an “all-live singing, true cabaret, Suzie Toot experience.”
“That’s going to jump start the theatrical part of my career that I’m very excited to get more into,” Suzie adds. “Everything Suzie Toot can do, she will be doing.”
“My message to lesbians is that I love you and I will never let you down.”
– Suzie Toot
As Suzie proclaimed in her winning talent number, a great depression cannot get her down — and neither can the fraught politics of 2025. As America suffers through a conservative backslide, with corporations pulling out of Pride events and slashing DEI programs, drag is only leaning further into its countercultural roots.
“The drag artists now, the girls that are coming up, are completely taking the piss out of it, because that’s the point,” Suzie says. “Because drag is irreverent, and it has to be irreverent in order to stay around through darker times, through the companies that are dropping us and don’t give a sh*t about us.”
That attitude is exemplified, Suzie says, by artists like her Season 17 castmate Lydia B. Kollins, as well as fellow Brooklyn queens like Miss Ma’am She and Julie J.
“There’s a ton of drag queens that I’m obsessed with that have this energy of like, ‘We’re f*cking around. We’re doing whatever. We are young and stupid and we don’t have money, and that’s the point. Like, the art is for us. It’s not for them, it’s not for the people, it’s not for companies. A company? Ew!’”
“I hope that people consider me of that same ilk, because drag is about doing what you love and holding on to your uniqueness — and being cringe!” she adds. “I embrace the cringe. Don’t kill the part of you that’s cringe; kill the part of you that cringes.” ♦
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