Rachel Slawson Wants to Be the First Openly Bisexual Miss USA
“The number one place money should go in our country is to our mental health care system,” she says. “A healthier society is a healthier economy. I can’t think of anything that would be better for western civilization than investing in our mental health care and also giving access to mental health care to everyone. And I don’t just mean like the dirty, gross clinics that even the doctors don’t want to go work at. I’m saying everyone deserves quality mental health care.”
The Latter-Day Saints, the church she grew up in, doesn’t accept LGBTQ people who act on same-sex attraction. And competing in pageants has brought Slawson to some of her lowest lows. So why is she a Christian Miss USA competitor? Christianity, she argues, isn’t too different from pageants—the values the Bible and pageants preach are beautiful. It’s unhealthy cultures that twist them into something ugly. The secret, she says, in pageantry, in Christianity, in your mental health journey, is that you need a coach, a teacher, a person who will help you become “the best version of you.” That’s the goal—not to beat everyone else, but to grow yourself.
Faith is a cornerstone of Slawson’s work—she no longer identifies as Mormon, but she is very much a Christian. “I grew up learning about Jesus, and Jesus to me is someone who talked about unconditional love for everyone,” she says. “Jesus literally hung out with lepers and prostitutes; he kicked it with everybody!” She doesn’t see inequality as having any place in Christianity. “Sexuality is such a beautiful part of being human and it’s such a beautiful way that we connect to each other,” she says. Her queerness is an opportunity “to really just celebrate that all forms of connection with consent are beautiful and a special part of being alive.”
To those who think pageants send a bad message or promote poor self-esteem, Slawson, who has struggled herself, understands, but she is emphatic that the problem is not pageants themselves.
“To me that’s kind of like saying I’m worried that if my son sees these really strong fast football players that he’s going to feel insecure about himself, because he’s not tall and he’s not that body weight,” she says. “I think that there’s a deeper problem where we’re not teaching ourselves self-esteem in a different way—if your self-esteem really has anything to do with anyone else, what anyone else is doing out there, I think that’s where we’re missing the mark a little bit in how we teach self-esteem to children.”
She loves dressing up and putting on makeup. She loves how pageants make her feel. “I deeply enjoy celebrating my beauty and the beauty of all the other contestants through pageants,” she says. She loves the sparkling gowns and giant lashes of the pageant world, but she's also probably the rare beauty queen to obsess more over Glossier products than pressed powder.
Still, the preparation process for her looks a little different than it might for her competitors. She doesn’t work with just a trainer or a makeup artist. She works with a psychiatrist, a trauma coach, a therapist who specializes in eating disorders, and fitness experts who focus on improving her health, not slimming her body. Every resource she has goes into doing this work safely.
