How Canada’s Drag Race All Stars’ Juice Boxx builds community through gaming
When it comes to Canada’s Drag Race, few contestants have made an impression quite like Canada’s Drag Race All Stars’ reigning Miss Congeniality, Juice Boxx.
A competitor on the hit drag competition’s inaugural season, Juice Boxx was the first queen to lose a lipsync, making history as the program’s first ever eliminated contestant. It would have been a heart-wrenching end for some, but not for Juice; she used this episode to showcase her unique fashion sense and open up to the audience about her struggles with anxiety. Since then she’s taken the Canadian drag scene by storm, traveling across the country with her performances and becoming a mainstay in Toronto’s world-renowned gay district.
It was this ability to turn a loss into a phenomenal career that earned her a spot on Canada’s Drag Race All Stars, with Juice returning to the competition with a renewed confidence that earned her 7th place and the title of Miss Congeniality.
Fans learned so much about Juice Boxx during her time on the series, with the queen’s vulnerability starting an important conversation about mental health within the international Drag Race community. But while folks may feel like they know her from this showing, there’s a huge part of Juice Boxx that never really got spotlighted onscreen: her love of gaming.
A passion that is influencing the next stage of this all-star’s career, and one that she’s excited to use to build community with her fans all over the world.
“I’d always been a bit of nerdy kid,” Juice Boxx reminisced, thinking about her early days as a burgeoning geek. “Sailor Moon was my first kind of [entrance] to that sort of world — seeing how powerful of a badass woman she was, and finding strength in her femininity.” Juice described her many other nerdy passions from childhood, with little Boxx finding comfort in all things Pokémon, Dungeons and Dragons, and so much more. “I didn’t have a lot of friends at school,” she continued. “None of us really had alot in common…I never really had people to game with. I never really had people to kind of do [anything] with, really.”
Even as she grew up alone, younger Juice found joy in video games and fandoms, with recent years seeing her embrace this nerdiness onstage as much as she does in her personal life. She’s even begun bringing cosplay into her onstage performances; she laughed at memories of donning a Nurse Joy outfit for a lipsync or stomping the stage in a Harley Quinn costume.
As shown in her promo for Canada’s Drag Race All Stars — which sees her wearing a stylish gamer headset — she has used her passion for gaming as a way to guide her artistry in recent years.
This has led to a whole new era of exceptional drag for the Queen, as well as some of the closest friendships she’s ever had.
“With my Twitch stream, I was able to build a really beautiful community,” she said. “I haven’t streamed in a bit because life got busy, but I still have a connection with [that] community. I was even able to meet one of my best friends, Flannel Jacks!”
Juice met Jackson — or Flannel Jacks, as she lovingly calls him — through one of her streams, with a simple DM turning into a multi-year friendship and an award-winning podcast about gaming news. “It’s called It’s Dangerous to Go Alone, where we talk about friendship and gaming,” the queen described. “It’s an hour that we put aside every week for us to connect, for us to hang out, and for us to have friendship. The fact that other people want to listen and enjoy that is great — and if they don’t want to listen and enjoy it, that’s fine too! It’s mostly for us to just kind of enjoy it, and have a good time, and then be able to create content that people might like.”
It’s a trend that Juice realized has filled her life more and more: using gaming to develop close friendships with others. It’s an experience that is becoming more and more common for queer gamers online, with Juice explaining, ”I think it’s just community…I find alot of people are really asking for co-op games. They’re easy games, they’re fun games, and they’re meant to just sort of be chaotic, and meant to be played with friends. And I think right now, with the rise of conservative ideas, I think queer people — especially queer gamers who are already kind of on the outskirts of things — are trying to find community and find connection.”
It’s why gaming has not only become such a huge influence on her drag, but one of the main ways that Juice connects with her audiences. Because she personally knows the power that LGBTQ+ gaming has in helping people find the communities where they belong. And it’s why she’s committed to being the queerest, geekiest queen she can be, all in the work of building more spaces where LGBTQ+ nerds can connect today.
Follow Juice Boxx on Twitch and check out all her socials here.
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