She might live in LA, but SC drag queen Kornbread has roots in Columbia. This is her story.
She’s not just another LA queen.
Kornbread “The Snack” Jeté’s roots go far deeper. The drag queen taking season 14 of RuPaul’s Drag Race by storm right now has roots in Columbia, South Carolina — if her southern food-inspired name wasn’t enough of a hint.
Jeté, whose real name is Demoria Elise Williams, currently calls Los Angeles home, but we can forgive her. She did adopt the drag name “Kornbread” after all. She hasn’t forgotten where she came from.
“The bakery is open and Kornbread is being served! This LA queen is a performance powerhouse with a deliciously sassy personality,” Jeté’s Drag Race bio says. “She will leave you gooped, gagged and gandered and you will want a taste of what she’s cooking!”
Jeté is competing against 14 other drag queens for $100,000 and the title of “America’s Next Drag Superstar.”
Every second of her time on the first four episode’s of the show that have aired so far has been filled with iconic performances, plenty of shade and her powerful personality. On the first episode, Jeté introduced herself by walking in and asking, “Is you hungry? Because b---- I’m baked.”
A critic at Vulture called her “the obvious front runner.”
Jeté won the first episode’s competition — “The Charisma, Nerve & Talent Show” — with her own original song, a fully-mixed and produced rap single. She wore a massive red, white and pink wig with a snakeskin-print blouse and jean shorts with dozens of bangles hanging off of them. From head to toe, it was fashion extravagance.
In LA, Jeté comes to the show as the city’s premier impersonator of Lizzo, the icon who stole the music scene of 2019 with hits like “Truth Hurts” and “Juice.”
And on the first episode of the season, when Jeté one the “Maxi-challenge,” Jeté got to meet the real Lizzo, who was serving as a guest judge on the show.
Jeté is part of the youngest cast ever for Drag Race, but at 30, she’s one of the older queens in the room. The youngest is 21 and everyone is under 32, a first for the show. She’s also one of the first trans women to ever compete on the show. But, at the time she was cast, she was still early on in her transition and not yet fully out.
“I kept everything to myself,” Jeté told the TODAY Show. “I wanted to go in and just deliver everything that I had, but I also did not want to have that conversation too much out loud until I sat down and talked to family about it because it was more of a personal thing ... Everything was new for me and it was a very fresh kind of situation.”
This story was originally published February 4, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "She might live in LA, but SC drag queen Kornbread has roots in Columbia. This is her story.."
