RuPaul
In Drag, It Turns Out, There Are Second Acts
LOS ANGELES — RuPaul Charles zoomed down Sunset Boulevard in a 1979 red Volvo he inherited from his mother. He wore a pinstripe suit and an open-collar shirt revealing a wedge of shaved chest.
“Hollywood is an idea,” he said, as the Bee Gees blared on the radio. “It’s not a real place.”
He stared down the road through oversize sunglasses. “It’s more of a concept,” he continued. “So, to step behind the curtain of the dream factory, things are never what they seem to be, and that is by design.”
As arguably the world’s most famous gender illusionist, he should know. More than two decades after his hit single “Supermodel (You Better Work)” made him an unlikely pop icon, Mr. Charles is back on top. His show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” returns for its sixth season on Monday (it was just renewed for a seventh) and is the centerpiece of the gay network Logo TV, bringing drag — and its reigning queen — into homes from Sweden to South Africa.
The series, an irreverent competition to crown “America’s next drag superstar” (as if anyone else could claim the title), has garnered a rabid cult following. There are official viewing parties in gay bars across the country, as well as unofficial ones in Chelsea and West Hollywood living rooms. The show has just reached the million-fan mark on Facebook, and its devotees include Sally Jessy Raphael and Lady Gaga, whotweeted: “Can I PLEASE be a judge on drag race!” Occidental College even offers a course called “Reading RuPaul: Camp Culture, Gender Insubordination and the Politics of Performance.”
Over the years, the series has expanded into a mini-drag empire, spawning spinoffs like “RuPaul’s Drag U,” in which Mr. Charles and his “professors” give women drag makeovers. Former “Drag Race” winners, notably Sharon Needlesand Jinkx Monsoon, have become breakout stars, touring the globe under the RuPaul imprimatur. (Mr. Charles calls this his legacy work, or “legwork.”)
Presiding over the mayhem, Mr. Charles is both shade-throwing taskmaster and gentle mother hen, guiding his contestants toward sequined self-actualization even as he rates them on the show’s trademark criteria: charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent. (Runners-up are solemnly told to “sashay away.”) When he emerges, mid-episode, as his glamazon alter ego, whom he calls the Monster, he trumps them on all counts, serving supermodel realness at 53.
Out of drag, Mr. Charles still cuts a striking profile, swathing his beanpole frame in dapper suits and chunky glasses. In the car, his lightly freckled face was dabbed with foundation, though there was little trace of the killer queen within. He had been up late shooting the night before, as a judge on “Skin Wars,” a body-art competition on the Game Show Network.
He parked near the Art Deco headquarters of World of Wonder, the company that produces “Drag Race.” Upstairs, a pair of hyperorganized assistants recited the day’s agenda: noon photo shoot, 1:30 powwow, sitcom audition, recording session. He reached into a shopping bag and, unnervingly, pulled out a small resin replica of his head, complete with swooping hair and twinkling earrings: a model for a porcelain RuPaul statuette.
“I wanted Mathu to give notes on it, to make it look more like the Monster,” he said, handing off the head to an assistant.
If Mr. Charles was on a branding kick, it was perhaps because he knows how RuPaul’s popularity can shift with the times. It was only a few years ago that he seemed consigned to the cultural memory hole, a ’90s novelty akin to troll dolls and Scary Spice. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said, “and it’s important when you’re up, to hit it as hard as you can.”
He credits his pop-star emergence to the permissive mood of the early Clinton years. By then, RuPaul Andre Charles (his birth name) had already become an underground sensation.
Growing up with three sisters in San Diego, he was a sensitive nonconformist obsessed with the Supremes. After his parents’ bitter divorce, he said, he took refuge in diva worship and marijuana, which he first tried at age 11.
At 15, he decamped to Atlanta with his sister Renetta and her husband, who employed him as a used-car salesman. In the meantime, he gave himself a “dragucation,” go-go dancing in nightclubs and performing on public-access television with his backup group, the U-Hauls.
“Ru’s always been a workhorse,” said Randy Barbato, who runs World of Wonder with Fenton Bailey and has worked with Mr. Charles since the ’80s. He recalled seeing Mr. Charles one night on the streets of Atlanta, “wheat-pasting these posters of himself that said: ‘RuPaul Is Everything.’ ”
But Atlanta was a small pond, and Mr. Charles had ocean-size ambitions.
He moved to New York in 1987, not quite sure where to hang his wig. The city was punishing. As he wrote in his 1995 autobiography, “Lettin It All Hang Out”: “When I did my show at Chameleon — on Sixth and A — I only made $18. It was slim pickings for me, very slim.”
Taking strength from Oprah Winfrey’s message of perseverance, he soldiered on. He hit the clubs night after night, enhancing the fun with booze, pills, coke, acid and other substances. Amping up his grungy “black hooker” look, he became a night-life fixture, emceeing at the Copacabana for the Swiss party empress Susanne Bartsch.
In 1989, he appeared in the B-52s’ “Love Shack” video. That same year, a jury of club owners, promoters and disc jockeys crowned him Queen of Manhattan in an annual drag showdown. But he still yearned for a bigger throne.
“I said, ‘O.K., now I’m ready to get real and go for broke,’ ” he recalled. He quit partying, made a music demo and replaced his “David Bowie androg” look with cover-girl glam. He had a record deal within a year.
“Walls of Jericho just opened,” he said.
“Supermodel” was released in late 1992, and the ensuing fame seemed unprecedented. Whereas drag performers like Divine had achieved cult stardom, RuPaul was a self-styled “Supermodel of the World,” his heels firmly planted in the mainstream. He appeared frequently on VH1, guested on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and became the face of the Viva Glam line of MAC cosmetics. (The company brought back the ads last fall.)
It seems implausible in hindsight: Even before Ellen DeGeneres came out, America embraced a black female impersonator with the subversive message “We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.”
“I go into everything thinking it’s going to be a huge hit,” Mr. Charles said. “But usually the rest of the world isn’t up to speed.” He had left his offices on Hollywood Boulevard, and was promenading down the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As the stars for Eartha Kitt and Vincente Minnelli passed underfoot, a man yelled from a moving car, “I love you, Ru!”
“I love you too, baby,” he called back.
For Mr. Charles, fame — like everything — is part of what he calls “the hoax.” “There are only two types of people in the world,” he said. “There are the people who understand that this is a matrix” — he knocked on an iron gate, to prove its unreality — “and then there are the people who buy it lock, stock and barrel.” To him, drag exposes everything else as a charade. “Drag has always been under fire, because people resent anyone who breaks the fourth wall,” he said.
It was the hoax, he said, that led him to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, until he gave them up in 1999. As he entered his 40s, he felt the cultural tide (and his career prospects) receding. “I could feel the wind change,” he said of the antsy Sept. 11 era. “The same way that very few animals were harmed in the tsunami. They knew in advance to head up the hill.”
He spent the next few years lying low, hosting barbecues in his West Hollywood home and getting to know his nieces and nephews. (His longtime partner, Georges LeBar, lives on a 50,000-acre ranch in Wyoming. They see each other about every two months.) He describes his career slowdown as a time of reflection. He had been fame-obsessed or famous all his life. What was it all for?
In show business, slowdowns have a way of becoming vanishing acts, but RuPaul couldn’t stay out of the limelight forever. It was Mr. Barbato, Mr. Charles recalled tearfully, who helped coax him out of limbo. In 2007, he remade “Starrbooty,” the drag-ploitation film he had originally self-produced in Atlanta. The film went straight to DVD.
Then, in 2009, came “Drag Race,” which turbocharged the RuPaul revival. Mr. Charles had been contemplating the idea for years when he and World of Wonder pitched it to Logo. The show’s concept (14 contestants square off on everything from basketball to lip-syncing) capitalized on the rise of “reality,” which, refracted through the drag prism, became “realness.”
Styled on “America’s Next Top Model” and “Project Runway,” the show is a winking sendup of the genre, with Mr. Charles in the dual role of Tim Gunn and Tyra Banks. But it also has heart-rending moments, as when the contestant Roxxxy Andrews revealed that he was abandoned at a bus stop as a toddler.
Of course, being real and in quotes simultaneously is a drag specialty. “Drag culture and witch doctors and shamans — they deal with the hoax by making fun of it,” said Mr. Charles, sitting in a corner park on Selma Avenue. Still, it is remarkable that drag, and RuPaul, are resurgent in the era when same-sex marriage is becoming mainstream. Is drag still relevant? Is it still transgressive?
Mr. Charles insists it is, describing himself as a wrench in the cultural system. He has never appeared on “The Tonight Show” or with David Letterman, he says, because “I represent something that threatens their whole identity.” (Also, they haven’t asked.) And his MAC ads never ran in Vogue, he surmised, because they would be “the antithesis of what their message is.” He added: “Anna Wintour is a very smart woman. She’s a Scorpio, like me.”
Even on “Drag Race,” he spreads a countercultural ethos, schooling the young contestants, and the viewing public. “I lived through the ’60s and the ’70s,” he said, “and the mentality to question authority, the anti-establishment, anarchy idea I grew up with, those kids don’t have that. They want to look exactly like Beyoncé and Britney Spears. I’m like: ‘No! Be yourself.’ ”
The lessons have sunk in. “He taught me a lot of drag lingo I didn’t know,” said Jerick Hoffer (a.k.a. Jinkx Monsoon), the 26-year-old winner of Season 5. “He would always start our conversations saying, ‘How’s tricks?’ and I didn’t know what tricks was at first. I said, ‘Trix are for kids, and I’m a lady.’ ”
That evening, Mr. Charles was again driving along Sunset, this time in a white Mercedes S.U.V. and a blue linen suit. He pulled into a ramshackle lot on Hollywood Boulevard, under a sign for Jumbo’s Clown Room, an exotic dance club.
I had asked what he did for fun, and this was the answer.
Inside the punk-era bar, guys in trucker hats and beards were scattered at red cocktail tables. Mr. Charles ordered a Sprite with cranberry and sat at the lip of the stage.
As Violet, Lily, Nico, Jenna, Bev and Sadie worked the pole in rotation, Mr. Charles chuckled along, as if enjoying an episode of “Gilligan’s Island.” “It’s a certain brand of debauchery that is just so L.A.,” he said, lightly headbanging to the music. “It’s actually dirtier since they don’t take their clothes completely off.”
A tattooed brunette in a ripped shirt climbed onstage. She writhed on the floor, smirking at the chic 6-foot-4 patron in the front row, then slapped her platform heels in his face like a whip.
“Woo hoo!” Mr. Charles hooted, tossing a cache of dollar bills onstage. He leaned over: “She looks like a movie star.”
Next up was a stern-looking Asian woman in a shimmering purple bikini. She lay on the stage and extended her right leg past her head, like something out of Cirque du Soleil. I noted out loud that she was a skilled contortionist.
“Exactly,” Mr. Charles said, then deadpanned: “And yet she still can’t manage a smile.” Points for talent, none for charisma: sashay away.
Watching this pageant of heterosexuality unfold next to the world’s pre-eminent drag queen was surreal, but it also made perfect sense. Mr. Charles is a world-class arbiter of the female form, and, like the pole dancers, he commands an audience with little more than attitude. And yet his presence seemed to destabilize his surroundings, with its raunchy exchange of butt shimmies and dollar bills. Was this all part of the “hoax”?
Driving home, Mr. Charles passed under palm trees and billboards, the kind he would gawk at as a kid visiting from San Diego. “I used to walk up and down Sunset looking at all the billboards: Diana Ross and Cher,” he said. “Back then, every act — big act — had a billboard on Sunset.”
As if on cue, he drove past a billboard for “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” There was the Monster, in vamping mode, posing alongside a panther. He rolled down the window and catcalled into the night sky: “Hey, girl!”
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