After nine weeks of competition, French drag queen of Ivorian origin Keiona won season 2 of Drag Race France this August 26, 2023. The enthusiasm around the program is growing.
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With her extravagant outfits, her sometimes captivating, sometimes mischievous gaze, her undeniable talent for dancing and her mastered art of lipsync, drag queen Keiona won season 2 of Drag Race France this August 26 at the Grand Rex in Paris. Accustomed to being at the top of the rankings since the start of the competition, her victory is not a surprise, although several “ possible endings were filmed upstream to avoid any leak of the result before the retransmission on France 2. She succeeds Paloma, the first winner of the program.
” I’m shaking, it’s a lot of emotion “, she said during her coronation, the sobs held back in her voice. ” It’s a long road. I’ve been doing this for ten years. Thank you to everyone who has followed me along this path “, she adds, surrounded by her competing finalists, including Mami Watta, another Ivorian drag queen.
Read alsoMami Watta, from Abidjan to the Parisian stages, the affirmation of a “queer” queen
Aged 31, she grew up between the Paris suburbs and Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, where her parents are from. It is in France that Keiona launches into the drag ten years ago now. She is a figure of the stage ball rooma facet of LGBTQ+ culture driven by black people in the 1920s and developed in New York in the 1960s. Her performances notably took her to the Élysée Palace, where she danced alongside the DJ Kiddy Smile at the Music Festival in 2018.
Television and societal phenomenon, Drag Race FranceFrench version of the broadcast of RuPaul’s Drag Race already available in several countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium and more recently Mexico, attracted nearly 7 million viewers in cumulative audiences last year. A feat for this unparalleled television UFO in the French audiovisual landscape. Like the sports competitions broadcast in cafes and bars, fans of the show Drag Race Francemore and more numerous over the weeks, gather during the viewing partyevents organized by the LGBTQ+ community to watch and comment live on each episode in the biggest cities of France.