Los hombres con bigotes

Como se dice en WowPresentsPlusDotCom...

Author

Aaron Weber
March 24, 2026

To keep up my Spanish, I recently started watching Drag Race España, the Spanish version of America’s favorite televised drag queen competition. I’ve watched a few episodes of several local adaptations, and although the format is nearly identical — costume design, dancing, singing, celebrity impersonations, musical theater, pop divas, daytime TV parodies, lip-sync performances, makeovers, roasts and readings — that continuity highlights the regional variation in approach.

In the US, the vibe is showbiz-professional and the budgets are huge. The contestants tend to already be full-time performers, and spend tens of thousands of dollars on costumes in preparation for what can be a career-making moment that leads to national tours and enormous sponsorship deals. Canada is similar but lower-budget and more friendly, with catty jokes that fall lightly, while the contestants in the Australian version are so cutthroat that I gave up after just one or two episodes. In the UK, possibly in response to anti-trans news and legislation, production spends a great deal of time on heart-to-heart conversations about homophobia, transphobia, and the importance of family and community support.

Spain’s version has roots in both American drag and in the Spanish travesti subculture, which in turn is rooted in Spanish traditional dance and costume, especially flamenco and the bullfighter’s glittering traje de luces. The queens also talk incredibly quickly, and often emphasize their use regional dialects, which makes it a challenge for someone with Spanish as rusty as mine. On the plus side, I’ve learned tons of new swear words, few of which I feel comfortable repeating.

What most fascinates me about the Spanish version is how it approaches Spanishness. You can expect local culture in every local reboot of every international reality TV franchise, of course, but it’s generally still recognizable as international pop culture. A bubblegum pop song, TV personality, or scandal-ridden politician isn’t that different from one country to the next, even if the details and language vary. But I think only Drag Race España would produce an all-drag-queen musical theater comedy based on Federico García Lorca’s 1936 tragedy La Casa de Bernarda Alba.

And while drag everywhere thrives on subverting our expectations of taste and beauty, I think only Drag Race España could produce a performer like Laca Udilla. Laca means hairspray and Udilla means nothing in particular, but spoken aloud the name sounds like “La Caudilla,” a feminized title for the late dictator Francisco Franco.

She’s a hairspray dictator, with a signature look that’s a mustached and miniskirted take on the Franco-era Guardia Civil uniforms. It’s a rare queen who keeps her facial hair, and Caudilla jokes that los hombres con bigotes, o son maricones o son fachas: men with mustaches are faggots or fascists. (I disagree, but it’s an amusingly outré line).

Laca Udilla in a blonde wig with a pencil-thin mustache, smoking a cigaratte. She's wearing an olive-drab military jacket and hat, a miniskirt, and thigh-high black patent leather boots.

It’s the most tasteless thing I’ve ever seen on Drag Race, and I love it.

Tech News

At the very beginning of my career, I was fascinated by a contest to design a high-quality, ultra-light web page. I don’t remember the details, but it was something like a maximum page size of 50 kilobytes and a prize of one cent per byte, or $500. Maybe it was less. But the overall idea was that a page should work for low-bandwidth connections and slow machinery, because the web should be a universal communication mechanism. It was charmingly retro even at the time, but today’s web is so much more data-intensive it’s hard to comprehend.

It’s a long piece, but I highly recommend checking out this article about The 49MB Web Page. The phenomenon seems to be universal for ad-supported content, but the author highlights newspapers and in particular the fact that at his last visit the New York Times home page was 49MB, larger than the entire Windows 95 operating system. Why is it that huge, and why does it grind my CPU to a crawl? A lot of the burden is code that runs in your browser and conducts real-time auctions to sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder.

If you’ve wondered why trying to read the news is such a terrible experience these days, the collapsing returns on internet ad space explain it pretty well. This piece points out that the mobile display for one major newspaper devotes a mere 11% of the screen to the news, while the remaining 89% is ads, newsletter subscription requests, and irrelevant notifications. At that point, even your most loyal customers must be tempted to use AI summaries. Sure, they aren’t necessarily accurate, but at least they’re not yet filled with modal dialog boxes that block you from seeing the damn news.

Shocker, I know.