I've seen a word dropped a couple times recently, and it's my new favorite word: glamp.
Glamp is, of course, a portmanteau of "Glamour" and "Camp." There are a lot of ways to define the total package in drag, and glamp is a fresh name for a particular flavor of total-package drag queen, a style that seems to be rising in both popularity and success.
nb: Alaska credits Detox with the word "glamp."
The concept isn't new, just the word: the glamp queen delivers polish and entertainment in equal measure. She has the beauty and glamour of her more-traditional pageant sisters, but she also came here to put on a goddamn show. She's a crowd-pleaser. She's smart drag.
I certainly don't intend to disparage queens who don't have glamp in their wheelhouse: there are a thousand ways to do drag, and the refrain "If you're not ____, you're not doing drag" is very rarely true. There's also a difference between being an excellent drag queen, and being the sort of queen who excels specifically at the game of RuPaul's Drag Race (or, for that matter, at any given drag competition/pageant). Finally, you don't have to be campy to be entertaining, and I don't mean to imply that, either--many drag queens are captivating performers without being comediennes.
All that said: glamp has absolutely become an unspoken gold standard on RuPaul's Drag Race, favored by the fans and RuPaul alike.
Because what does RuPaul want? Beautiful, magnetic queens who deliver highly-polished, top-notch en-ter-taint-ment value. In a single word, glamp.
Glamp wins challenges (and lip synchs).
During Season Four, when the judges began clocking Chad Michaels for being "too perfect," where did she take her next challenge performance? Glamp.
The challenges themselves have begun favoring glamp, particularly in Season Five--with a different set of challenges and judging criteria, we would have probably seen a different Top Three.
Perfect example: remember the Top Four challenge from All-Stars? Drag queen heroines and super-villains. In other words, glamp, down.
And, through the many styles of drag that RuPaul has rocked over her long and illustrious career, isn't Ru herself going through a bit of a glamp phase?
Manila Luzon said recently in an interview, "I consider myself a camp queen, but everyone says, 'Oh no, you're too glamorous to be a camp queen.'" The only new thing about glamp is the word itself--it's a concise name for style of drag that's only growing in popularity, and rightly so. Okay, granted, "glamp" also sounds like slang for an STD ("Look out, he's hot trade, but he'll give you the glamp"). I don't care. Glamp! It's the new buzzword for Summer 2013 and RuPaul's Drag Race Season Six. Get into it.