Suzie Toot Is Giving the Lesbians Everything They Want, Including A New Show
The Drag Race darling talks Liza Minnelli, viral fame, and ‘Suzie with a Z.’
It’s no secret that lesbians love RuPaul’s Drag Race. We go feral for our queens. But every so often, one queen occupies the sapphic imagination in a way that feels less like fandom and more like Beatles-mania-level hysteria. For Season 17, that queen was Suzie Toot.
This year, Suzie is taking her talent to the next level: Suzie with a Z is a one-woman show where she describes herself as her “most uninhibited.” Built from the ground up after her run on Drag Race Season 17, and following the success of her first one-woman show, If You Knew Suzie, the new production is, in her words, “everything Suzie can be.”
With her tap shoes, vintage silhouettes, theatrical instincts, and hypnotically unhinged sexy clown lip-syncs, Suzie captured the attention of fans well beyond Drag Race. Clips of her viral lip-sync against Joella proliferated on TikTok, and entire comment sections dissolved into variations of: “Do I have a kink for rocker clowns?”
“When that episode aired, so many people who weren’t even watching the show saw the clips on TikTok,” she says. “It really broke containment. There was this whole new audience that was like, ‘Oh, I like clowns. I like whatever this is,’” she laughs. “My following suddenly had this whole new sect of fans that were really, really cool. Like… too cool for Drag Race, which I think is cool.”
Though she did not win the season, Suzie won the Lip Sync Smackdown, taking home $50,000 and securing her place as one of the most memorable queens of the season. For many fans, it also felt vindicating — proof that the queen some viewers and contestants initially underestimated was, in fact, undeniable. “Two hundred thousand dollars? Winning the season? Whatever,” she says. “I’d already won fifty grand, and then I got to get high and meet Liza Minnelli.”
While the finalists backstage anxiously prepared for the finale lip syncs, Suzie was, by her own admission, high off “every weed pen available in the building,” emotionally unraveling because Minnelli had just walked into the room. The queens had no idea Minnelli would be at the finale — not even Suzie, who says, “Liza Minnelli, to me, is the greatest performer to ever live.”
For Suzie, this wasn’t merely a moment of celebrity worship. It was something closer to a miracle. “Watching Liza with a Z helped me dream bigger for Suzie.” When the cast lined up for photos, she strategically positioned herself beside Minnelli, hoping to say something — anything — meaningful. “I just went, ‘Uh—’” she recalls, dissolving into laughter. Minnelli glanced at her bangs and smiled. “You’re gorgeous.”
Suzie wept immediately. She described herself at that moment as “a wreck.” So much of her work is indebted to Minnelli. So much of who Suzie is comes from that undeniable drive and unquenchable spark of icons — the kind of performer who needs to perform like they need air. That overwhelming, almost painful desire sits at the center of Suzie Toot. Not ambition exactly. Want.
Her origin story begins at sleepaway camp, cast in the ensemble of Fiddler on the Roof at age 8. After the production ended, her father asked if she was upset she hadn’t gotten a bigger role. Maybe Tevye? She burst into tears in response.
“It was just… I realized I had want. A want that was overwhelming.”
She pauses. “It’s beyond language. You can only say it’s want.”
There is something about Suzie that is magnetic, honest, and human. It explains something essential about her essence — more than the technique, more than the aesthetics, more even than the now-iconic red wig she jokes “paid for itself many times over.” It’s that same childlike, immense, inarticulable longing.
It calls to mind the famous monologue from Cyrano de Bergerac — where desire collapses language entirely into: “I want. I want. I want.” When I mention this, she grins. “Look at us solving the world.”
Given her formative obsession with musical theater and undeniable performance instincts, it feels inevitable that Broadway hovers somewhere in Suzie’s future. Ask about dream roles, and she answers instantly: Charity Hope Valentine in Sweet Charity. “It’s such a core part of Suzie,” she says, citing Gwen Verdon and Shirley MacLaine as foundational influences. “It’s a queer story begging to be told in a fully queer way.”
“And Reno Sweeney. I want to do Anything Goes so badly.”
Most recently, Suzie toured alongside Kori King and Lydia Butthole Kollins on the Butt Toot King tour, a chaotic fever dream that only intensified her lesbian following. “What’s hilarious is that touring together is actually way more boring than anyone would hope,” she says. “Kori falls asleep instantly anywhere — bus, plane, train, doesn’t matter.” But the crowds, she says, are electric.
Before Drag Race, Suzie opened for Chappell Roan during an early Midwest Princess tour stop and remembers being stunned by the sheer number of lesbians in the audience. “I’d never experienced that before,” she says. She, in typical Suzie fashion, tap danced in drag. “And they went nuts for me.” There are even more lesbians in the crowd for Butt Toot King. “No better audience in the world, truly.”
Suzie learned tap dancing during a high school production of Mary Poppins, obsessed with performers like Eleanor Powell, Ann Miller, and Debbie Reynolds. It took a few months of doing drag before she realized she could combine the two. “I had to figure out how to freestyle, move between tables, get tips,” she says. “But once I started [tapping], people really responded.” Suzie’s act evolved around tap dancing until it became inseparable from the character itself. “You can’t have Suzie Toot without tap.”
When I ask what should be mandatory viewing for understanding queer art, she doesn’t hesitate. First: The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Then: Hedwig and the Angry Inch. “That’s queer doctrine,” she says of Hedwig. “Biblical to me.”
Suzie Toot, she explains, is partially inspired by her mother — specifically the image of her mother as a teenager with huge ’80s hair blasting classic rock. The musical theater references are obvious. The camp is obvious. But beneath all of it is something more subtle, more sacred: a lineage of longing. “That’s Suzie Toot too,” she says.
And now, with Suzie with a Z, she’s entering another evolution. She hints that audiences may even be surprised by how much stand-up comedy has become part of her performance style. “What surprised even me was how much I loved off-the-cuff interaction,” she says. “I was terrified of it at first. I thought it would be a much smaller part of the show than it became. But then I realized, wait — I really am comfortable up here talking to people.”
Whether Suzie is singing, dancing, telling jokes, or lip-syncing, one thing feels certain: “I know what I can do now more than ever.”
