After a season of explosive drama and going viral for homophobic comments, Kamuela “Kamu” Kirk has been booted from the Big Brother house and is now digging himself an even deeper hole by speaking out about the process.
To catch you up in case you haven’t been glued to the TV screen for the entirety of Big Brother 28, Kirk and Jason De Puy (known as Salina EsTitties by RuPaul’s Drag Race fans) got into a couple of verbal altercations over strategy and shifting alliances early in the season, but things got personal when Kirk made disparaging comments about drag. “Bro, miss me with the drag stuff. Miss me. I’m still an MMA guy, and I have an image to uphold,” he said to another competitor.
Once he was eliminated from the show, De Puy told Out that watching the episodes and live feeds after leaving the house proved his intuition about Kirk was correct.
“Queen Kamu! What he did to me in the tea party felt personal. To learn outside the house he was saying these things and that it wasn’t necessarily about the game… I was like, ‘Okay. I’m not crazy.’ That’s what felt more validating for me,” De Puy said.
Now that Kirk has been eliminated, he’s also looking back on the season, and while he told Entertainment Weekly that “on a personal level, I love Jason,” he also made some comments that had LGBTQ+ fans raising their eyebrows.
“And Jason and all those guys, they can dress however they wanna dress. And that’s cool with me,” he said in the new interview. “But I also wanna be able to dress the way that I wanna be able to dress and feel comfortable dressing without people putting pressure on me to dress a certain way either. So I love Jason on a personal level, man. And he can do whatever he wants to do. And I just ask for that same respect, that’s all.”
At first glance, his statement seems innocuous, but rather than really embodying a “live and let live” mentality, some fans have pointed out that it’s playing into anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric about how the queer community is trying to indoctrinate other people and force them to “dress a certain way.”
“Tell me you’re not comfortable with drag without telling me you’re not comfortable with drag,” someone commented on a video clip from the interview posted to X (formerly Twitter).
Another person wrote, “notice at no point in that response did he say ‘I support drag performers’ or ‘I support the trans community’ – this was, at best, a punt. BYE KAMU!”
Someone else commented, “no one has ever pressured him to dress in women’s clothes….in his life.”
Kirk’s comments also come after he chose to wear a blue leotard and tutu during a themed Power of Veto (POV) competition on the show. “The guys at home are going to make so much fun of me for this,” he said at the time.
