All hail
For over three decades RuPaul has sashayed from underground royalty to mainstream megafame. We meet the queen of drag.
Meeting the queen of drag: RuPaul
It’s a dewy, not-quite-spring morning in March, and I’m lingering outside a soundstage on the Warner Bros lot where RuPaul will be photographed for this story, waiting to behold him in full drag.
This studio is where Judy Garland filmed A Star is Born, and it is now where RuPaul is shooting AJ and the Queen, a forthcoming Netflix series he created with Michael Patrick King, the head writer and executive producer of Sex and the City. (Ru is a down-on-her-luck drag queen named Ruby, travelling across America with an 11-year-old orphan named AJ, played by the young actor Izzy G.) I’m not sure which Ru to expect.
Will he be an outsize Barbie-superhero who fell to Earth, à la RuPaul’s Drag Race, or a throwback incarnation of a ’90s runway glamazon? Golf carts full of crew members cruise by, and I scan them for signs of a blond bouffant. Then, with no warning, a honey-smooth, startlingly assertive voice rings out from within the soundstage: “The titties aren’t gonna get any higher than this!”
I make a beeline inside. Most of the studio consists of a nightclub set, which itself gets a constant makeover: because AJ and the Queen is a road story, its drag numbers are set in different clubs across the country. Right now, however, all bodies are hovering around a small cloth backdrop. Annie Leibovitz is standing on top of an apple crate, peering through her camera lens.
If you approach Mother Ru from the side, as I did, the first thing you will need to process is the eyelashes. The skull-to-eyelash ratio is so physiologically improbable that it’s a good 30 seconds before I realise that Ru is not dressed as any of his familiar alter egos. Rather, he’s a modern facsimile of Queen Elizabeth the first, clothed in a billowing gold-brocade skirt, a corset and a halo of red dreadlocks.
He knows which side is his good side. He knows how the light is hitting. He knows to lower the lashes to half-mast and let them hover there as the camera clicks. And when, after a while, Annie suggests he remove his headpiece, he knows to object.
RuPaul and Annie have just unwittingly re-created one of the photographer’s most memorable shoots. You see, 12 years ago, when Annie took official portraits of Queen Elizabeth II in full regalia at Buckingham Palace, one of America’s most well-known portrait photographers asked England’s longestreigning monarch to remove her ‘crown’ (it was a tiara.). A BBC film crew captured the exchange.
Annie: “It will look better – less dressy – because the garter robe is so.…”
Queen Elizabeth II: “Less dressy? What do you think this is?” The queen of the United Kingdom didn’t want to take off her headpiece. And here in beautiful downtown Los Angeles, neither does the Queen of Drag.
When RuPaul first sashayed into the national consciousness, in 1992, with the release of his single ‘Supermodel (You Better Work)’, there was nobody like him in mainstream culture. There were androgynous pop stars (David Bowie, Prince, even Cher), but none who bent gender nearly as far. And there had been a few drag characters in major films – Some Like It Hot, Tootsie – but RuPaul’s use of drag was new.
Two days after his shoot, I meet RuPaul for coffee at a hotel in West Hollywood. He arrives looking nothing like a queen: 1.9m tall in black jeans, a black polo neck, black ankle boots, a pale trench coat, a vintage Gucci belt and a black biker’s cap. At 58, he’s ageless. If he’s wearing any makeup, it’s not enough to cover his smattering of freckles.
It’s difficult to describe the aura of civilian RuPaul. Michael Patrick King likens him to “an Egyptian cat” – but also “an encyclopedia”, and I know exactly what he means. Spend a morning with Ru and you will believe it possible that he is an alien-anthropologist sent to conduct an ethnography of the American subspecies. In telling me his life story, he will cite – and this is an extremely abridged list – Bewitched, Coty cosmetics, Yardley cosmetics, the history of wheat-pasting concert flyers, Dolly Parton and Clash of the Titans.
“I’m a drag queen who understands camp and who understands how to comment on what’s happening within the matrix,” RuPaul tells me. He means the culture at large and the masses who consume it. “My job, our job as drag queens, has always been to remind you that this outfit you’re wearing, or this label you put on yourself, is just a label. Drag queens are the shamans or the witch doctors or even the court jesters – to remind you what is really real.”
RuPaul Andre Charles was born in San Diego in 1960. His mother, Ernestine Charles, who went by Toni, worked in the registrar’s office at San Diego City College. His father, Irving Charles, was an electrician. They separated when Ru was five and divorced when he was seven.
Toni was accepting of her son. “There was no shade to me playing in makeup,
“The queen of the United Kingdom didn’t want to take off her headpiece.
And here in beautiful downtown Los Angeles, neither does the Queen of Drag”
wearing my sisters’ clothes, doing whatever I wanted to do,” he says. “I never had to ‘come out’, because I was never ‘in’. It was understood that Ru was Ru.”
The twins (Renetta and Renae) taught Ru-Ru about Diana Ross and Cher. Renetta showed him how to walk a runway. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was pivotal. He was drawn to the irreverence – and to the nudge-nudge, wink-wink way the show seemed to break the fourth wall.
His own music career officially began with RuPaul and the U-Hauls, an art band he formed in the early ’80s. Soon he was fronting a new wave/punk band called Wee Wee Pole, combining a loincloth, a Mohawk, thigh-high wader boots and American football shoulder pads.
Two years later, while living in New York’s Meatpacking District, surviving on free popcorn and drinks from the Film Forum, he recorded his first demo. In 1992, on the day of his 32nd birthday, he released ‘Supermodel’, which he’d written with his friend Larry Tee. The single rose to number two on the US Billboard dance-song chart, and designers like Isaac Mizrahi and Todd Oldham featured it in their runway shows. Kurt Cobain declared it one of his favourite songs of the year.
By 1994, RuPaul had become the first drag queen to land a major makeup deal, as the face of MAC Cosmetics in a campaign that declared: “I am the MAC girl.” Then came The RuPaul Show on VH1, which ran for 100 episodes and placed him on the cusp of the mainstream.
The second reign of RuPaul has already lasted twice as long as the first one – and shows no signs of weakening. It began, of course, with the 2009 premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race, yet another perfectly executed piece of satire, this time of our reality TV era. The series, now in season 11, took what had been a subculture and exploded it, minting dragqueen stars, mainstreaming idioms, remaking Ru into a kind of self-help guru – and winning nine Emmys along the way.
Because this is 2019, RuPaul also has a successful podcast, What’s the Tee?, through which he broadcasts Ruisms, teaching the good people of RuWorld how to “listen to the universe’s stage directions.”
Ru divides his time between LA and Wyoming, where his husband, Georges LeBar, owns a farm. Georges is from Perth, Australia – he inherited the farm from a grandmother – and at 2m he is even taller than RuPaul. When Ru is at the farm, he tells me, “I usually wear fabulous Westernwear: denim concoctions, turquoise jewellery, gorgeous hats, Italian cowboy boots.” The couple don’t have kids, nor plans to have any. “I like peace and quiet a lot,” Ru says. When Ru has time off, they like to travel – often to Las Vegas to see the latest big residency on the Strip (Cher, Jennifer Lopez), or to Paris. (Ru jokes that his Aussie motherin-law pronounces the Champs-Élysées “Chomps Elsie”.)
Georges, who has never given an interview and declined one here, met Ru on the dance floor at a nightclub in 1994, and they’ve been together (mostly) ever since, aided by the fact that they keep the relationship open. “I love him too much to try to put shackles on him,” RuPaul says, again with tears in his eyes. “Love is free. It’s not that sort of romantic surface thing we all bought into. He is my most favourite person that I’ve met.” Besides, he adds, “Gore Vidal said you should never pass up an opportunity to have sex or be on TV.”
Which brings us back to AJ and the Queen. It’s based on the 1941 Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan’s Travels, a favourite of both RuPaul’s and Michael’s – which they discovered when they met for the first time, in Michael’s office, where the movie still hangs on his wall. (That, right there, is what you call a cosmic stage direction.) When fashion designer Zaldy, responsible for RuPaul’s looks for Drag Race, saw the script, “my jaw dropped,” he tells me. The drag numbers require ‘performancewear’ – for, say, flying through the air on a harness.
There’s another element of surprise, Michael tells me, one that longtime RuPaul fans might find shocking. The series shows Ru’s character getting into and out of drag. “You’ve seen Ru, and you’ve seen Mama Ru,” says Michael. “Here you see him midway.”
The day before I met Ru for coffee, Michael had shown him the first completed episode of AJ and the Queen. “In my career, I’ve been able to show certain angles. I’ve been able to paint on a face and edit what I presented,” Ru explains. “I thought by doing this acting project, I would be exposing myself to the world: the raw, unfiltered self.” He goes on: “But what I found out yesterday was that I was exposing myself to myself. I got to see the parts of me that even I didn’t allow myself to recognise or acknowledge. I had thought, ‘I’m going to be naked to the world.’ No, I was naked to myself.”
“I never had to ‘come out’, because I was never ‘in’. It was understood that
Ru was Ru”