Life is still a drag
RuPaul’s latest memoir is an earnest look at fame as destiny, but it leaves several mysteries unsolved
An autobiography is nothing if not a performance, a way of projecting (and therefore producing) a self. That is to say, an autobiography is nothing if not a kind of drag.
It is fitting that famed drag queen RuPaul Charles, better known by the memorable mononym RuPaul, has written three of them. First came Lettin’ It All Hang Out, in
1995; next came the largely aphoristic and lightly confessional GuRu, in 2018. And now, RuPaul (or, possibly, his ghostwriter) has written his most earnest foray into self-fashioning yet, the cryptically titled The House of Hidden Meanings.
If anyone has a life exuberant enough to support three chronicles, it is RuPaul, who rose to international celebrity in the 1990s as a singer, model and all-around personality, in emphatic italics. The key to RuPaul’s queendom was the hit television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, now in its 16th season.
RuPaul’s Drag Race is a window on the tender and uproarious sensibility of drag. Its contestants are irreverent, quick to poke fun at the outrageous farce of gender but also committed to their craft. They know that jokes are no joking matter — that a parody of reality can become a better reality, that a persona can outshine and save a drab self.
The House of Hidden Meanings strikes a very different and altogether less congenial tone. It, too, is an exercise in self-making, and it, too, ponders the construction of identity, but it does so by way of platitudes culled from self-help. It could stand to take a cue from the iteration of RuPaul who presides over the work room of RuPaul’s Drag Race and tells the queens preparing their performances, “Make it funny!”
Curiously enough, The House of Hidden Meanings ends before several of the most eventful chapters of RuPaul’s life — before the first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race aired in 2009, for instance, and before his marriage to Georges LeBar in 2017.
It leaves many mysteries unresolved, but it also permits fans a peek behind the curtain. RuPaul cuts a poised and magisterial (albeit fun-loving) figure today, but there was a time when he was lost, confused and broke.
He was born in San Diego in 1960 to an absentee father and a mother so sharp-tongued that the neighbourhood kids called her “mean Miss Charles.”
While his family crumbled around him, the young RuPaul coped by watching television. He was so eager to appear on television himself, so certain celebrity was his destiny, that he had no patience for the drudgery of elementary school. Instead of attending classes, he played hooky and got high, and when he moved to Atlanta with his older sister in 1975, he was quick to make a name for himself on the party circuit.
The crowd he ran in was edgy and arty, and the looks they sported were androgynous. Sometimes he danced, sometimes he sang, sometimes he just existed. RuPaul is everything, including an art unto himself, and his true vocation has always been fame.
Few of the plot points in The House of Hidden Meanings are new. Almost all of them already featured in Lettin’ It All Hang Out, though that book was framed as a how-to guide for would-be drag queens and this one is framed as a serious if uplifting story of self-discovery.