'Canada's Drag Race' star Uma Gahd: 'Fighting an uphill battle' with Snatch Game that didn't impress
"I actually think that Brooke was wrong. I think that our Snatch Game actually had so many good laughs in it," Uma said
A Drag Race episode with a Reading challenge and Snatch Game combo usually brings out a lot of excitement, but in Season 5 of Canada's Drag Race (on Crave), the queens couldn't impress the judges, particularly Brooke Lynn Hytes. While Brooke didn't hesitate to address the overall underwhelming performances, Uma Gahd, The Virgo Queen and Makayla Couture found themselves in the bottom, but it was ultimately Uma who had to leave the competition.
Looking back at the Snatch Game in last week's episode, Uma isn't entirely in agreement with Brooke's assessment. The Montreal-based artist believes they were fighting an "uphill battle."
"Brooke was really disappointed in the Reading challenge and then I think some of that carried over into the Snatch Game," Uma told Yahoo Canada. "So we were fighting an uphill battle."
"I actually think that Brooke was wrong. I think that our Snatch Game actually had so many good laughs in it, Helena [Poison] and Perla and Minhi [Wang], they were so funny in that moment, I was in love with all of them."
Performances from Helena, Perla and Minhi also made Uma want to really celebrate how funny she thought they were.
"When I got into Untucked, that's what I spent all of my time really talking about, was how much I wanted these other girls to hear that," Uma said. "Despite what Brooke felt, I felt that they did fantastically."
"They were so funny, Helena and Perla and Minhi, they never broke character once. They were just so flawless and they didn't get to hear the love that they needed to hear, and I just wanted to give it to them. That's really what was most important for me."
'Still too scared that these people were playing a game with me'
As Uma was saying goodbye to her Canada's Drag Race castmates, she highlighted the importance of the connections and friendships she made on the show, particularly after doing drag for so many years. Uma celebrated her 10th anniversary of doing drag in November.
"When I started in drag it was a very different space and drag artists were always in competition with each other, and so there were a lot of people in my local scene that actually didn't want me around," Uma shared. "So when I came up in the drag world, I always felt like I had to prove myself and I had to be on guard, and I never knew if someone really was happy I was at the show, or not."
"When I was there on Drag Race, every morning all of the girls were excited to see me. Like we're competing with each other in one of the most real ways a drag artist can compete, and every morning they were still happy to see me, and they wanted to give me a hug, and they wanted to tell me how much they loved what I was doing. And at first, I couldn't get into it. I was still too scared that these people were playing a game with me, or I was going to say one little thing and ruin our relationship. ... But by the end, they had lifted me up so often and they had made me feel so much love that I realized I am not giving as much love as I am getting, because I'm scared, and I don't have to do that anymore."
'I tried to bring a little bit of weirdness to the show'
While Uma recognized that she'll never be entirely certain about why she was the one eliminated last week, she highlighted how great the opportunity was to bring her art to such a large audience.
"I've watched a lot of this show and one thing that I always knew is that you can never make sense of the judging," Uma said.
"I tried to bring a little bit of weirdness to the show. I'm also a big fan of the show Dragula, ... and one thing that they always say is that drag is art and art is subjective. So I wasn't going in there to argue with anyone about whether my art was valid or not, because I already knew did it was, and if it wasn't for them, then that's fine. But now I've gotten to show a billion people all over the planet that this is my art, and if it speaks to them, then we found each other."
If you also can't get enough of Uma, just like us, she'll be bringing her one-woman play, "Are You There, Margaret? It’s Me, Gahd," back to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and she teased that she's had some conversations with additional theatres as well.
