RuPaul might have Drag Race, but she’s not the only mogul in the drag world.

Several years ago, after spending hours listening to a Golden Girls recap podcast while stuck in a Burning Man traffic jam, two former Drag Race contestants—Alaska and Willam—decided to strike out on their own. “We were like, ‘Why don’t we do this about Drag Race?’” Alaska says. Soon, the pair had a producer, Big Dipper, and a whole new show: Race Chaser. 

They started pitching the podcast to various studios, including the comedy upstart Forever Dog, where it eventually landed. “Race Chaser was an immediate success,” says CEO Joe Cilio. “We had never seen anything like it. Forever Dog was a young company then, and it was amazing to have a bonafide hit on our hands.” Big Dipper says the podcast’s success was confirmation of what he and Race Chaser’s hosts already knew: that “there really was a market for drag fans who wanted to experience the queens in a different, long-form way, and in a more personality-driven way … and in an audio way.”

Fast-forward about a year and Cilio, seeing Race Chaser’s large and loyal fan base, started pushing the idea of Willam and Alaska creating their own podcast imprint under the Forever Dog umbrella, and that’s how the Moguls Of Media (MOM) Network was born. MOM launched during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and was an immediate success. A lot of that is due to its programming, which included shows like The Chop with Latrice Royale and Manila Luzon, Very That with Raja and Delta Work, and Sloppy Seconds with Big Dipper and Meatball. “Basically,” says Alaska, “we were like, ‘This has been great. We want to share it with our sisters,’ so we reached out to our very famous drag queen friends, and they said ‘Sure, why not?’”

Pivoting to podcasts represents a significant shift in the world of drag. It’s traditionally an art form based on live performance and on visual spectacle; podcasting is almost always strictly audio—the performers are rarely ever seen. What MOM is doing, then, is taking the inherent talents drag performers have for charismatic storytelling and entertaining and channeling them into a new medium—a necessity during the height of the pandemic, when bars, nightclubs, and theaters were often closed and queens needed to find other sources of income. “We were really lucky that we had a podcast because we could stay connected to people even after all of our normal avenues of connecting with our community were completely closed off,” says Alaska. “It definitely got me through the pandemic, and it definitely helped ease things a little bit for a lot of people listening.” The duo also leveraged the power of the pod to raise more than $120,000 for queer-friendly charities like For The Gworls.

Podcasting also helped the MOM queens connect with their fans on a deeper level. “We’re talking for long periods of time, every single week,” says Alaska. “That’s a very intimate, personal way of getting to know someone. Early in my drag career and right after Drag Race, all [fans] got was what I was saying on stage or what I was saying in my music.”

Raja agrees. “​​There’s a certain freedom and honesty that comes out of a podcast,” she says. “It just feels easier to talk about everything.” Jinkx Monsoon sees her MOM podcast, Hi Jinkx!, as both a place for candid conversation and a way to, as she puts it, “showcase things that don’t get talked about a lot in our industry,” like how trans performers have redefined their careers after coming out, the diversity (or lack thereof) of gender expressions in media, or what it’s like to be an adult film star. “It feels like this fun responsibility,” she says, “or this fun thing that I get to do that can possibly have an impact.”

According to Big Dipper, that’s all by design. MOM is meant to be a place for queer talent, but also one where drag performers can talk about ideas beyond drag. “We are excited that Delta [Work] wants to complain about drive-thru service and talk about perfume,” he says. “We are giving queens a platform in a way that they’re not often given one, because it’s about their thoughts and opinions versus about their looks or their lip-syncs.” Recent additions to the MOM family include Famous This Week with Drag Race Canada winner Priyanka, Hall & Closet with Jaida Essence Hall and Heidi N. Closet, and Shea Coulee’s Wanna Be On Top, about her love of America’s Next Top Model.

The expansion has worked, too, with shows pulling in more and more listeners every week, all while sending organic listeners to their sister casts. “You don’t have to leave MOM,” says Cilio. “If you’re there for Race Chaser, you’re going to love The Chop. If you love The Chop, you’re going to love Very That.”

While Big Dipper says making shows like Race Chaser “can feel kind of frivolous” when it’s just three people goofing off on a Zoom call, “to get feedback from people that it has such an impact on them is a really eye-opening experience.” At the MOM Podcasts booth at RuPaul’s DragCon in LA last month, a letter carrier approached Dipper and burst into tears while talking to him. “She said we have been in her ears keeping her company for months, and it has been such a support system,” he says. “We don’t even know her, and she doesn’t really know us, but she felt so connected to us. It was incredible.”

There’s more to come from Team MOM, of course. They’ve recently launched MOM Plus, a Patreon-like service that gives subscribers access to exclusive bonus content, ad-free episodes, and presale tickets to live MOM events like the upcoming Race Chaser UK tour. Subscribers also get access to video podcasts, which Alaska says is particularly important because “We all sound really great, but we also all look really great.”

For the MOM crew, continued success encompasses a few things. First and foremost, Big Dipper says, queens have to get paid, and they have to maintain ownership of their own content. Beyond that, Dipper says his goals are a little more amorphous. “I want us and all of our shows and our listeners to feel like this famous podcast meme of the kid sitting next to the billboard of the three smiling people and they’re cracking up as if she’s with them inside the billboard,” he says. “That’s how I feel when I listen to my favorite shows, and that’s how I want all of our listeners to feel when they listen to MOM.”