\n\tOn the night her elimination aired, Jane Don\u2019t was in Las Vegas. She was performing at a local gay nightclub, Piranha, co-hosted by a queen who didn\u2019t know what was coming. The audience didn\u2019t know either. Jane knew. She\u2019d known for a year.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWatching it back was probably the worst part,\u201d she says now, calling in via Zoom from Seattle, a hoodie tugged down over her forehead, her cat climbing into frame. She\u2019s been home for three days \u2014 a rare stretch of stillness in what has become a suddenly very loud life. The consistent odds-on favorite to win this season\u2019s crown, the drag queen from Spokane, Washington, is still very clearly processing her startling elimination in the improv challenge that would prove her undoing.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI\u2019d done the emotional work to process how things played out. But watching it, I just didn\u2019t have a ton of information, because we didn\u2019t see each other\u2019s scenes. I didn\u2019t even see my own scene. So there were a lot of questions about what the judges were even talking about on stage,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\n\tThat disorientation \u2014 performing blind, being judged on something she never got to watch \u2014 is at the center of the Jane Don\u2019t story. It is also, she would tell you, completely beside the point.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe facts are almost absurd in retrospect. Jane Don\u2019t placed in the top for the first ten consecutive weeks of RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race season 18. She won three of those challenges. That was the strongest track record not just of this season but of the entire franchise. No queen in the show\u2019s history had ever done it.<\/p>\n
\n\tShe arrived polished, prepared and slightly terrified. She proceeded to dismantle the competition week after week \u2014\u00a0while quietly falling apart in the confessionals.<\/p>\n
\n\tThere was the episode where she cried because she was doing too well. She laughs about it now, but only a little. \u201cIt\u2019s hilarious and it\u2019s completely delusional on some level,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I genuinely just don\u2019t know how to compute that kind of feedback. I\u2019ve never been the person where everyone\u2019s like, \u2018You\u2019re amazing.\u2019 And so to be in a situation where I could feel that that was the turn things were taking just felt really overwhelming.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI just didn\u2019t grow up in an environment where I was constantly told I was great. It\u2019s just never been my mindset,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\n\tShe traces this back to her upbringing. Her grandmothers were teachers. Her grandfathers were military. Her father ran a working-class ski school. The ethos of her childhood was not praise; it was correction. There is always something to fix, always something to do better. She absorbed it so completely that even when the judges were handing her wins, some part of her brain was looking for the flaw.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cJuicy [Love Dion, my season 18 competitor] would always say,\u201d she recalls, \u201cthat when we did walkthroughs, \u2018Jane is the only person that Ru talks to like a colleague.’\u201d RuPaul would ask what she was planning on doing in a challenge; Jane would tell her; Ru would say: \u201cYou\u2019ll make me laugh. You\u2019ll be fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI did connect with her a lot,\u201d Jane says, carefully. \u201cI think she genuinely enjoyed me. I just think in that moment [of my elimination], she\u2019s the host of a show. Sometimes she has to make a decision.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t***<\/p>\n
\n\tThe challenge that ended her run was called \u201cKarens Gone Wild.\u201d The five remaining queens were asked to perform improv scenes opposite RuPaul, playing variations of the viral \u201cKaren\u201d archetype \u2014 the entitled, screaming white woman demanding to speak to a manager, calling the cops, weaponizing her tears.<\/p>\n
\n\tJane Don\u2019t found the premise morally repellent. She says so plainly, and then immediately tries to walk it back, and then says it again anyway. She was there. \u201cMy friends were getting tear-gassed in the street. I got gassed by the cops. Every night the air was still hard to breathe and spicy because the cops were just gassing the entire neighborhood,\u201d she recalls.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 2020, during the George Floyd uprisings, Seattle became one of the country\u2019s most volatile flashpoints. The anarchist district \u2014 the CHOP zone \u2014 was blocks from her house. She was out protesting every day. The Karen videos that went viral during that period, she says, were not comedy to her \u2014 they were evidence. <\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI don\u2019t think a white woman crying and weaponizing her anger or her tears against people is particularly funny. I have a lot of residual baggage with that,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n
\n\tNone of this, she insists, is an excuse. \u201cI\u2019m not saying I\u2019m better than the challenge. It\u2019s Ru\u2019s show. She picks the challenges.\u201d But she went into it unable to find the joy, and built her Karen as a Christopher Guest character \u2014 characteristically cerebral, specific, actorly \u2014 in a challenge that demanded chaos.<\/p>\n
\n\tDrag Race judge Michelle Visage told her she was trying to control the scene. She acknowledges the critique \u2014\u00a0but standing on that stage, she never saw the footage that led to the critique. As best as she can remember, she did the most with what the scenario presented.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI think I didn\u2019t personally feel like I was getting a ton to work with from Ru as a scene partner,\u201d she says. \u201cSo I fell back on the story beats I\u2019d built in my head. But yeah, I just don\u2019t think any drag competition is ever judged in a quote-unquote fair manner. It\u2019s not the Olympics. There\u2019s no score sheet.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tShe went into the lip sync against Nini Coco to Lady Gaga\u2019s \u201cGarden of Eden.\u201d Cartwheels. Backflips. Everything she had. Nini stayed. Jane sashayed away.<\/p>\n
\n\tShe does not call it unfair. She almost seems allergic to the word. \u201cNobody \u2018deserves\u2019 to win Drag Race,\u201d she says firmly. \u201cNobody\u2019s entitled to win. The show has never presented itself as some ultra-objective situation. Ru says it herself: The final decision is hers.\u201d She pauses. \u201cIs any drag competition fair? What is fair when you\u2019re judging something completely subjectively?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThere is one thing she will say, however, and she has said it in every interview since: she believes that her own track record worked against her. \u201cI set myself up for a more difficult challenge by doing so well so consistently. My critiques for the Karen challenge essentially boiled down to: \u2018We expected more from you. We know you\u2019re capable of delivering more.\u2019 Whereas other people\u2019s critiques were essentially: \u2018We thought you were going to do badly and then you didn\u2019t.’\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThe one episode where I decided to let go of the neuroticism \u2014\u00a0to trust my talent, to just believe it \u2014 was the episode I got eliminated. I guess I was right. I guess if I let my guard down for even a moment, the axe was going to fall,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n