Last year, Logo went from the channel you mocked to the channel you made a point of once a week, for the fierce and fabulous RuPaul’s Drag Race. Combining the best aspects of America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway, RuPaul and a panel of judges watched and critiques as aspiring drag superstars sashayed, shimmied and bitched their way through every episode. Now the second season is finally here, and New York City has Sahara Davenport representing.

“I couldn’t tell anyone!” Sahara said recently over the phone about the day she learned she’d be competing on the show.  “I travel to work in theater and dance, so I told everyone I got a gig in Europe. It was the only place I could go where my phone can’t work!”

But instead of Europe, Sahara headed out for California, where guest judge Kathy Griffin was waiting for them on the very first episode, one in which photographer Mike Ruiz poses the girls on a canon in a Gone with the Wind-inspired photo shoot. But the show isn’t all glitz, glamour and illusions. These girls work hard and somehow make it work.

With days that last sometimes 12 or 13 hours, the contestants not only have to wow the judges, but must also do so in towering shoes that would make Carrie Bradshaw think twice. “It’s grueling,” Sahara says. “Especially eliminations. People are in heels, and you’re on the runway forever and ever and you get picked apart or glorified. But actually Ru was very nice about, ‘OK girls, take your shoes off. I don’t want you to be tortured!’”

Of course, one of the reasons the first season of Drag Race took off were the warring attitudes that made the girls on Top Model seem like Girl Scouts. Sahara is characteristically good-natured about her rivals (“There’s a smorgasbord of attitudes,” was all she would say), but she was happy to end the days alone in her own hotel suite—none of that Atlas apartments crap for RuPaul’s girls.

To make matters worse, Sahara found herself in the bottom two on the very first episode—opposite her college friend Shangela, who, unbeknownst to Sahara, also made the final cut. And in time-honored drag tradition, Sahara and Shangela had to lip sync for their lives.  

“I was just thinking, ‘There is no way I am going home,’” Sahara remembers of the moment Ru announced that she would have one last chance to impress the judges. “I kind of felt, I don’t know, humiliated. I didn’t understand why they were calling me out when there were other girls on the panel and I had obviously been a lot more successful. And then I realized, ‘Oh, it’s television!’”

Unlike last season’s early episodes, Sahara and Shangela didn’t hold back while lip-syncing to RuPaul’s hit “Cover Girl.”

“After watching last season,” Sahara says, “I remember being on stage in that moment and thinking, ‘OK, I’m not going to be crazy because I remember watching last season and wigs were flying. And I’m not going there. I’m going to be a lady. It’s time to go to work.’” But of course, she was anything but ladylike, turning it out for the panel with pirouettes and leaps. “I think it was the fighter in me,” she admits with a laugh.

Whether or not that inner fighter is enough to push Sahara Davenport all the way to Drag Race’s final episode remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: We’ll be watching.