ECLIPSE of the HEART
RuPaul is the drag superstar of stage and screen. But in this extract from his new memoir, The House of Hidden Meanings, he shares the story of meeting his husband, the one man he’s never had to perform for.
At Limelight, a generic dance song thumping at 128 beats per minute, I did what I always did when I first entered a nightclub: I scanned the room for the tallest person I could see, which was typically David, who was still hanging around at six-foot-three, a few inches above most people in a crowd. I always wanted to make sure I saw him first, because, if I was being honest, I was still hung up on him. I looked around and there was no sign of him. Phew.
Instead, I saw a man who was a full head above everyone else in the room – easily seven feet tall. He was dancing goofily, almost flailing. I watched him for a second from a distance, then crossed the room to get to him.
At a closer vantage, I could see that he was wearing enormous platform boots, but he was still perhaps six-foot-seven without them – a giant. He was gorgeous and a little wild, with a thick unibrow and high cheekbones. He was wearing clothes that looked homemade – layers of cotton jersey, a tunic with a cropped vest over the top, and pants that didn’t quite reach his ankles but had some type of beads hanging from them, a fringed flare. His dancing was crazy, almost feral. We made eye contact.
“I love the way you dance,” I said. “How do I dance?” he asked.
“Like an absolute freak,” I said. He laughed. I gazed up at him. “Do you mind if I put my arms around your shoulders?”
He looked at me quizzically.
“I’ve never been able to reach up and put my arms around someone,” I said. “Because I’m so tall. Can I do that?”
He smiled. “Sure,” he said.
I hooked my arms around the back of his neck and, in an instant, he lifted me off my feet. I gasped; he put me back down. Then we both burst out laughing.
Off the dancefloor, we started talking. He was there with some friends from school – he was studying fashion, he said, at FIT, and it was his 21st birthday.
“Oh my God!” I said. “Happy birthday!” We only spoke there for a minute before
I asked him if he wanted to go get something to eat.
We walked from Limelight down to Florent, between Washington and Gansevoort St. There was a light snow outside, but it was mild enough that it made the walk feel pleasant, even sweet. At the restaurant, we tucked into a booth, and he began telling me about his life.
His name was Georges, with an s at the end. He was raised in Perth in the west of Australia, the most isolated metropolis in the world. When he turned
17, he had hightailed it out of there to go to art school in Paris, then on to New York to attend FIT. His father was American, from Wyoming, and his family owned a ranch that he said he would inherit someday. To the extent that he was trying to impress me, which I knew he was, there was nothing sleazy about it. When we left Florent, we exchanged numbers.
The next day, I called him. “I have to go to London,” I said.
I was hosting the BRIT Awards with Elton John the following week.
“Oh,” Georges said.
“I was going to go with my boyfriend, but we broke up,” I said.
“And now I have this extra ticket. So if you wanted to come with me, I could use a hand getting myself together for the awards.”
I could hear him beaming through the phone. “I’d love to come.”
Ding! The elevator doors opened, and Georges was waiting for me in the lobby. This time he was wearing a fuzzy little cropped shearling jacket – black, with no collar and three-quarter length sleeves that were inexplicable for the season.
“I’ve never flown business class before,” he told me as we settled in on the plane. I laughed. He was so huge – the thought of him cramming himself into a tiny economyclass seat was torturous. I felt immediately comfortable with him, maybe because there was something goofy and sweet about him. He had no guile. I could trust him instantaneously – and I had, since the moment he lifted me up off the dancefloor that night in the club.
In the same breath, I realised on that trip that he was very little help at all, either in getting me into drag or working as security. He was an innocent, wideeyed and starstruck at everything. At the BRIT Awards, there was Kylie Minogue! There were the Pet Shop Boys! There was Björk! The excitement was whirling around us, and I could feel that this was a world he wasn’t used to. If my hope was for him to look after me, it was clear that wasn’t in the cards.
We were staying at the Halcyon Hotel in Holland Park, a converted Georgian townhouse with a rock ’n’ roll reputation; it was where I’d been staying since I’d gotten famous and begun travelling to London often. I’d been there four weeks earlier, in the exact same hotel room, and I’d hidden a spliff in the bathroom ceiling – weed being my only remaining vice after swearing off booze and chemicals. Georges came to my room, and I showed it to him proudly.
“Look what I have!” I said.
“Go ahead,” he said. “I don’t smoke.”
I lit it, smoking out the window. Then I looked over at him. Suddenly, I realised I didn’t like myself high in his presence. I felt selfconscious. He was too sweet for me to be stoned around. I stubbed out the joint. “I’ll finish it later,” I decided.
The next night, I went to his room, and we talked until late into the night. At one point, I was telling him about my breakup with Steven, and I began to cry. “I keep falling into the same pattern,” I said. “With every man I’ve ever dated, it always ends up the same.” I wasn’t much of a crier. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried in front of someone, let alone someone I hardly knew. It was unusual that I felt comfortable enough with this man to reveal my inner feelings.
From London, we flew with Elton to Düsseldorf, where we had another appearance. Elton had chartered a private jet. At one point, in flight, Georges stood up and went to the cockpit to look at something or say hello to the pilot. The look on his face when he came back – pure elation, shock at the absurd good fortune of his life – was priceless. He was 21 and enormous in this tiny plane.
When we arrived in Germany, we pulled into an airplane hangar as an officer jumped onto the plane to check our passports. Then we were ushered into a chauffeured car and driven away without so much as a pause at customs.
I’ve always been capable of experiencing excitement through the prism of someone else; this is lucky because I found myself habituating to things, getting overly familiarised to them quickly. It wasn’t until the moment was reflected in the mirror of another person that I could appreciate it anew. So it was with Georges, who revealed himself to be puckish, playful as a puppy, as we navigated this new world of mine.
The sheen on fame had already begun to
“I trusted him. I was safe with him. I could not say how I knew that, but I knew it. He adored me, he admired me, he respected me. Maybe I had never felt that before from any man. So I said yes.”
tarnish for me, but not for him.
Not long after we returned to New York from London, we were walking home one night, having been out dancing.
“I really like you, Ru,” he said.
“I like you, too,” I said.
“Maybe we should go on a real date,” he said. His eyes were bright. He was very open.
“Georges,” I said. I hesitated. “I like you so much, but I think you are too young for me. I’m 33. You’re 21.”
He looked briefly abashed. “Can we still be friends?”
He nodded. “Of course,” he said.
Ding! The elevator doors opened. I walked through the lobby out to Morton St, then took a left and walked up 7th Ave to Georges’s new apartment on Jones St. It was March, and spring was starting to come to New York, the flowers in bloom again. He was still unpacking when I walked in, long limbs splayed out on the floor, a box of CDs making their way into a bookshelf. The apartment was a studio, a sort of cylinder with a tiny bathroom attached to it.
“Hi, Ru,” he said. “Look!” He showed me one of the jewel cases. My picture was on the front.
We sat on the floor. I realised, sitting there, that I really liked him. I got along with him. He was gorgeous. I felt so close to him.
What was I doing? So when he leaned in and kissed me for the first time, I kissed him back. And it felt right, even though it felt different from the way men had felt before, because he felt young. Even though he was 21 and very much a man, there was something boyish in him that made me want to protect him from the cruelty of the world.
Every time I had fallen in love before, it required me to lose myself, to be entirely subsumed by a fantasy of what could be, which would just as predictably crater once reality set in. I had always thought love would be a Nancy Meyers’ movie, some head-over-heels elation that would complete me – that in an instant, I would feel the love I had been looking for from my father and be made whole. But those feelings were always one-sided.
It only worked for a short time because I was looking for those men to give me something that my father had withheld; if they had given it freely, I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. All those other men had found it easy to be cruel in a way that I knew Georges could not. The most novel thing about him was his goodness – it radiated from him.
For the first time, I found myself wondering: What would it feel like if I was the one being chased, instead of the one doing the chasing? And, even more radically, what would it be like to give someone else everything that I had ever wanted to be given to me? My whole life I had been sceptical – a dubious inheritance from my mother that I could never quite shake, a suspicion of people’s intentions. I was intuitive to a fault: I could feel into someone’s strengths and weaknesses and navigate them like an obstacle course to get exactly what I needed. And I could feel Georges, but there was nothing to navigate. I trusted him. I was safe with him. I could not say how I knew that, but I knew it. He adored me, he admired me, he respected me. Maybe I had never felt that before from any man.
So I said yes. Yes, Georges, let’s be together. Let’s see what happens.
After that March, Georges and I would go out every night and do things together: Chicken marsala at Stingy Lulu’s in the East Village; dancing at the Limelight, which I hated but returned to night after night; long walks out to the piers. New York can be so lonely, but it didn’t feel that way anymore. Having a person somehow unlocked a whole new level of New York for me, in a way I hadn’t known existed. On the nights we didn’t spend together, we would kiss goodnight at the corner of 7th Ave and Bleecker St and go our separate ways. It was fun having a boyfriend. Every man I’d ever been with, it had always felt fraught – I was never truly myself with them. I always felt like I was performing. With Georges, I felt like me.
Once, in those early months, there was an eclipse in the middle of the day. We were lying in my bed in the apartment on Morton St, and as it happened, we could see how the light had changed, in this psychedelic fugue. It felt like we had stepped through a portal together that would forever change how we saw New York and how we saw each other.
Holly Murrell is a fourth year bachelor of fine arts student at University of Canterbury, majoring in painting, and already exhibiting her work. Murrell’s evolving oeuvre has moved from a focus on “glitch” art to scientific representations of things such as subatomic particles and lightwaves. Murrell, 22, lives at home in Mt Pleasant, Christchurch with her parents and two brothers, one older, one younger.
HOLLY: I was born and raised in Christchurch. We’ve been in this house since about five years after the earthquakes. I’m quite fortunate to have a healthy relationship with my parents and siblings. A lot of my friends have moved out because they can’t stand their parents.
Financially it works out as well.
My parents say they love having me around, which is nice. They tell me they don’t want me to leave. They’re very supportive parents.
My older brother is 25. He’s working for Silver Fern Farms in the meatworks. My little brother, who’s 20, is studying computer science at Ara.
Brothers and sister don’t always mix. I love (one of my brothers) to death but we butt heads sometimes. We’ve both got strong beliefs that don’t always match.
It’s wonderful here. I love the view. From my bedroom you can see the awesome view of the city and New Brighton. You can see the pier from my room.
I’ve only lived in Christchurch, but I was thinking at some point of maybe moving to Melbourne. I have family there, and friends.
Arts-wise, Christchurch is a bit of a small pond.
If I’m selling art online, I can do that from anywhere.
I have some pieces in the Windsor Gallery. They were having a competition when I was in year 13 and a painting I submitted got third place. It definitely was a big piece of validation. I still feel like I’m an emerging artist.
I also sell through Art Start, an organisation that reaches out to high school students who are taking NCEA art. Instead of throwing out or storing away your work, they have you submit, exhibit and have a chance to sell original works and prints.
My subject matter changes in each painting. Sometimes it’s landscape, sometimes it’s portraits, but the thing that ties them all together is: I love painting with very vivid glowing colour, having light that reflects from one thing to another. All of my paintings are very saturated. I like to use dynamic lighting.
I hope I don’t sound too pretentious.
At Ilam, there’s a big emphasis on doing lots of research and finding contemporary and historical artists. I’m looking at futurism – around the time of cubism – and I’m looking at Luigi Russolo. He does a lot of cool stuff to do with colour and shape. His pieces are energetic and full of movement.
I also considered studying physics, but at the end of high school I was so burnt out I didn’t think I was smart enough to do physics. But I still loved painting. The math was going over my head a wee bit.
The concepts are what I love about physics, so this way I get the best of both worlds.
These days you can get a degree in anything and not be certain you’ll get a job, so I figured I would rather do something I love and fail at it than succeed at something I hate.