Strictly’s La Voix is already getting hate – and the reason is depressing

Finally, Strictly Come Dancing has its first drag queen contestant in a regular season – La Voix.

Real name Chris Dennis, the 45-year-old Drag Race star is reality TV royalty and the perfect choice to throw the first heel and wig through the glass ceiling of Strictly.

She competed on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK just last year, but has long been an icon in the community — easily one of the most well-known queens in the country.

Unfortunately, the predictable hate she’s received just for being her loud and proud self is a sign of the awful times we live in now. I truly hope it doesn’t get to her, and that she can make history on the BBC’s flagship entertainment show. 

I was familiar with La Voix before Drag Race. She’d competed on Britain’s Got Talent in 2014, reaching the semi-finals with the London Gay Band — long before drag was as popular in the UK as it is now.

Even without the platform that is Drag Race, she still managed to land big TV gigs on WOW’s Queen of the Universe and ITV’s Queens For The Night.

But I didn’t truly know her until Drag Race. I knew the name, but I didn’t know the full extent of the talent.

To say she was robbed of winning her series feels unfair – given the innovation and brilliant mind of champion Kyran Thrax — but La Voix was one of the best queens Drag Race has ever seen, on either side of the Atlantic.

She’s going to bowl Strictly fans over, if not with her moves, then with her soft heart and.

La Voix is a triple-threat performer — dancer, singer, and actor — and has the sharpest humour of anyone who’s taken to the BBC ballroom.

But the importance of her appearance on Strictly Come Dancing can’t be underestimated, even if it feels long overdue.

In 2019, Courtney Act made history as the first ever drag queen on Australia’s version of Strictly, called Dancing with the Stars. Unsurprisingly to anyone who watched her on Drag Race, she was sensational and an enormous hit with viewers, finishing in second place with her partner Joshua Keefe.

It wasn’t until a year later that Strictly welcomed its first same-sex couple, Nicola Adams and Katya Jones, then John Whaite and Johannes Radebe the year after that.

Then on Christmas Day last year, Drag Race’s Tayce competed in the show’s annual one-off special. Not only was she absolutely sensational — she won.

It was a pivotal moment for drag, but part of me felt disappointed that it was happening in the special and not the main event. The latter is watched by so many more viewers and their names become fixed in people’s homes for months.

If there hadn’t been a drag queen in this series, it would have felt like a kick in the teeth. It’s a shame Tayce wasn’t invited back — not only for the viewers’ benefit, but because she clearly deserved it too.

But thank god for La Voix, who will be the perfect representative of the drag community — a queen who was destined for Saturday night telly. And it’s needed now more than ever.

The drag community has been under attack for years. As soon as the culture started to become mainstream – through drag brunches and drag queen story time – it was deemed a threat to society. 

It’s a heartbreaking battle and it’s nowhere near over. Earlier this month, two drag queens were escorted out of a library by police because the overbearing chants of protesters won.

Lady Portia Di’Monte — known as ‘Northern Ireland’s First Lady of Drag’ — and Miss Dora Belle were booked by the library to read to children.

Many parents would have taken their children specifically for drag story time, and I have no doubt their kids loved every second of it. But no matter how harmless — even beautiful — drag proves itself to be, its protesters seem to win more and more.

Northern Ireland’s Communities Minister, Gordon Lyons, later said the event was ‘not appropriate for children’ and ‘should not have taken place’. The queens were reading The Chronicles of Narnia and Dear Zoo, yet they were treated as though they were performing explicit excerpts from gay erotica.

Naturally, then, it was no surprise to see the reaction to La Voix being announced as the seventh star signing up for Strictly 2025. I don’t think any of the comments on the BBC’s announcement are worth repeating — we’ve heard them time and time again — but they were devastatingly predictable.

I’m thrilled the BBC is making a statement with this line-up — that it won’t bow down to the loud minority who complain week after week, pitchforks sharpened, that La Voix has no right to be on its biggest show. A show that is camp as Christmas and celebrates diversity more than any other. 

But I hate that it’s still a statement at all. I’m so tired of the LGBTQ+ community — particularly the drag and trans community — being a statement simply by existing.

I hate that the response to La Voix taking part in a dance contest was so predictable. Thank god she has the resilience of a warrior.

Perhaps if Strictly Come Dancing had welcomed a drag queen to the stage sooner, there would be many viewers who haven’t experienced the joy of drag that might have been won over by now.

Six years behind its Australian counterpart feels like a long time, but at least it is time. This is a landmark moment for the LGBTQ+ community and if there is a drag queen out there who can take the crown, it’s La Voix.

Strictly Come Dancing returns to BBC One later this year.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. 

Share your views in the comments below.