RuPaul’s new memoir is an earnest look at fame as destiny
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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. In the video for the 1993 single “Supermodel,” RuPaul towered above a crowd of adoring fans, posed like Linda Evangelista and crooned, “You better work!”
And work he - and she - did. (In “Lettin’ It All Hang Out,” RuPaul explained, “You can call me he, you can call me she, you can call me Regis and Kathie Lee, just so long as you call me.” In lieu of calling RuPaul directly, I will be calling him “he” when he is out of drag and “she” when she dons one of her signature platinum blonde wigs.) In the intervening years, he and she amassed an empire. The key to RuPaul’s queendom was the hit television show “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” now in its 16th season, in which the nation’s most accomplished drag queens compete for the coveted title of “America’s next drag superstar.”
RuPaul has made his fair share of mistakes on his path to celebrity. Initially, he expressed reluctance to allow trans women on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” arguing that they were akin to athletes who had taken performance-enhancing drugs. But when fans pointed out that trans women have always been the heart and soul of the drag tradition, he apologized and changed his tune. Now, several trans women and one trans man have appeared - and excelled - on the show.
As for the merits of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” as a piece of entertainment, it is an unqualified sensation, not only a riotous joy to watch but a moral and political force. There is no question that it has done more than any other cultural artifact to popularize the strange and beautiful art of drag, once a fringe practice and now a national obsession. Thanks in large part to RuPaul, locutions like “shade” (backhanded hostility) and “fierce” (bold and fashionable) are part of common parlance, and thanks to RuPaul, drag queens are widely understood to be jaw-droppingly polymathic, masters of fashion design and dancing and singing and acting and stand-up comedy. Many of them can also do splits and backflips in gowns and six-inch heels.
Best of all, “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 consummately 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 neighborhood kids called her “mean Miss Charles.” Before the ill-matched pair separated, the household they shared was tumultuous: At one point, mean Miss Charles poured gasoline on her philandering husband’s car and threatened to set it ablaze. After the split, she went from mean to dazed. RuPaul recalls that she “took to her bed and stayed there for a long time.” Later, he learned that she was prescribed both Valium and lithium.
While his family crumbled around him, the young RuPaul coped by watching stars on television. To him, the glamour on screen represented “the platonic ideal of reality,” more true than the truth. 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.
“We had been anointed with fun,” RuPaul writes of the carefree era before he made it big. The crowd he ran in was edgy and arty, and the looks they sported were not feminine but androgynous. In Atlanta, RuPaul played in several bands, peppered the streets with posters that read “RUPAUL IS EVERYTHING” and performed on an offbeat television show with a cult following. One of his projects involved what he describes as “a group, not a band - we wouldn’t be playing instruments. We were just going to be fabulous, in a Warholian way.” 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. As he puts it, “Fame, for me, was less a dream than a predestination.”
Pre-destiny came to pass when RuPaul went high femme in the late ’80s. In the video for the B-52s song “Love Shack,” she appears with an Afro and a smoky eye, dressed in a bustier and hot pants. From there, RuPaul embarked on the inevitable move to New York, then the inevitable move to L.A., where he proceeded to get sober and find himself, as celebrities nearing the end of their memoirs are wont to do.
Few of the plot points in “The House of Hidden Meanings” are new. Almost all of them (and even a few of the exact same anecdotes) 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.
If the earlier RuPaul was more fun, this one is a better stylist. He (or his co-writer) manages some deft turns of phrase: “a memory cuts through me,” a “silvery” streak of sunlight glints and shines. And even when it is not lyrical, “The House of Hidden Meanings” is admirably readable, so long as it sticks to vignettes, particularly those that conjure up the heady days of disco.
But it does not succeed in comprehensive scene-setting, insofar as it is virtually silent on questions of political climate. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” emphasizes the political character of drag - as it could scarcely fail to do at a time when gender mischief and nonconformity of all kinds are under such cruel and unimaginative attack - but this memoir tracks RuPaul’s life from the early ’60s through the late ’90s with just a scant few mentions of AIDS.
Still, a memoir can be forgiven its solipsism, a not uncommon liability of the genre. What it cannot be forgiven is attempting philosophy, or more aptly in this case, philosophy-cum-therapy. In “Lettin’ It All Hang Out,” RuPaul included “A Return to Love” by Marianne Williamson on a list of his favorite books. “The first book I ever read three times. Bought 50 copies for friends and family,” he wrote. Its New Age, feel-good influence is palpable when RuPaul recounts that he bought a condo in Miami because “water represented the subconscious, the endless undulations of the mind, and the hidden meanings submerged under the surface,” or when he lapses into the sorts of bromide that often mar buzzy celebrity memoirs: “We all have that magic within us,” “The number one evil that we face is unconsciousness,” “It’s impossible to be powerless if you recognize that you yourself are power.”
Tellingly, the title has little to do with the book. When RuPaul and a friend were tripping on LSD, the friend turned to him and said, “Libra represents the twelfth house of Scorpio’s hidden meanings.” “It was nonsense,” RuPaul admits, “but it was beautiful nonsense.” Maybe it is less beautiful than he thinks.
These platitudes disappoint because RuPaul is capable of drive-by meditations that pack a punch. The Ru-isms that he is justly celebrated for voicing on the show are aphorisms with a bite. Who can top “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag”?
But “The House of Hidden Meanings” is oddly and incongruously fixated on authenticity. “What do I mean when I say ‘real’?” RuPaul writes. “I mean that there are moments that snap you out of the illusion, the waking daydream that we all move through in this, the world that we have created.”
What if I would rather luxuriate in the illusion, in those televised fantasies that are so much more vivid than reality? As a trans woman in Pedro Almodóvar’s film “All About My Mother” so memorably and movingly puts it: “It cost me a lot to be authentic. But we must not be cheap in regard to the way we look. Because a woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she has dreamed for herself.” I would rather remain in “the waking daydream” until I make it true.
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The House of Hidden Meanings
A Memoir
By RuPaul
Dey Street. 239 pp. $29.99
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