RuPaul: 'Drag is dangerous. We are making fun of everything'

Before he was the world’s most famous drag queen, RuPaul Charles was a punk in a downtown Atlanta band called Wee Wee Pole. There’s an internet-famous prom picture of him in 1983, when he was 23 and dressed as if he’d just stepped off the set of the David Bowie movie Labyrinth. He was there as the date of his bandmate’s sister, but, he tells me, he dressed like that even when he was at the same school. “I was always RuPaul. Always. Even as a kid, I would dress up in my sisters’ clothes, in cowboy outfits, in sailor outfits. I loved putting on different costumes.”

RuPaul’s laugh is so long and so loud that you hear it from two rooms away. “I remember something about Michelle Obama and the press said she was throwing shade at someone! Which is a direct correlation to our show! Hahahaaaa,” he hoots. (For the uninitiated, the term “shade” is a form of slapdown that comes from Latino and black gay culture.) “Our show” is RuPaul’s Drag Race, a cult reality series now seven seasons in, which pits drag queens against each other as they bid to become America’s next drag superstar. It makes circuit stars of its girls and has originated multiple catchphrases, from “Gentlemen, start your engines, and may the best woman win!” to the kindly kiss-off “Sashay away”. It ruthlessly mocks the reality format while still managing to be one of the most sensitive shows on TV. And now, after a late-night, soon-abandoned slot on E4 years ago, it’s coming back to Britain; truTV, in fact. On Mondays and Tuesdays. If I didn’t know this from the huge billboard behind RuPaul’s chair in this fancy London hotel suite, I’d know it from the number of times he says “truTV” or “on Mondays and Tuesdays” during our chat. RuPaul has been doing this sort of thing for a long time. He’s slick, professional, and he flogs his wares with the gleaming white smile of a 1950s used car salesman.

In the mid-80s, RuPaul moved from Atlanta to New York and answered what he calls, hammily “the universal stage direction that said: do it in drag”. Putting on a dress made him a superstar. He danced in the B-52s’ Love Shack video in 1989, and before long he had his own chatshow on VH1, was getting papped with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, had a bona fide pop hit with Supermodel (You Better Work) and became the first male face of MAC cosmetics.

Yet at 54, there’s still something of the punk-rock club kid in him, the rebel who dressed like “the boy who fell to Earth” throughout high school. For all his cheery polish and the plugs for the show, there’s something irresistibly naughty about RuPaul – and steely, too. “The only time you will ever see me in drag is when I am – what? Getting paid. It is my job,” he told Oprah in 2013.

“I started out with a genre [of drag] called genderfuck,” he says, today in a pristine turquoise suit and Ronnie Corbett glasses, emphasising the word like a patient teacher. “It’s punk rock and irreverent, and I learned all those things from Monty Python.” He has cited the British comedy greats as an influence, but since we’re in London, I suspect there’s a little Anglo-American diplomacy at play, too. Drag Race itself is both hugely entertaining as a reality show, and a hugely successful satire of one. For all its wit and bounce, however, there’s also a seam of vulnerability running through it. Most of the girls taking part have had difficult lives. It’s hard, for instance, as season four’s Latrice Royale showed, to be an obese drag queen from Compton who has spent time in prison. Trinity K Bonet came out as HIV positive during season six. And during a sit-down with “Mama Ru”, season seven’s Kennedy Davenport discussed the recent death of her father and being a carer for her disabled sister.

“They’re not just some pretty girl from a small town who goes on a modelling show to say: ‘I’m the prettiest one,’” RuPaul explains. “Most of them have been thrown out by their families. Their parents don’t approve. Society doesn’t approve.” It puts the heartstring-tweaking “journeys” of other reality shows to shame. “When you become a shapeshifter, when you choose to live a life so contrary to what society tells you to do, you become a walking testament to the other side. Yes, we’re a competition reality show, but because we’re doing it in drag, other levels of consciousness seep in.”

Outside of stag-night “banter” or cheap sitcom laughs, drag is largely a cult concern, but its mainstream impact has been felt more keenly in recent times, from Kim Kardashian pushing drag-style contouring makeup, to the concept of “throwing shade” being adopted in everyday conversation. “But, listen. It’s always been that way, and we’re used to it. Mainstream culture has always co-opted gay culture or subcultures; our vernacular, our fashion, our language. But guess what? We’ve got way more where that came from. We’re still 10 years ahead of the curve.”

RuPaul emphatically denies the suggestion that drag has crossed over. “Drag will never be mainstream,” he says, “because it breaks the fourth wall and it mocks our culture and identity: how much you have, where you’re from, your economic background. Drag mocks all of that. It’s the antithesis of mainstream.”

In May, RuPaul hosted a DragCon event in Los Angeles, which attracted over 13,000 people, and indicates that, while drag may not be mainstream, it is certainly becoming commercially viable. Does it still belong to the outsiders? “Absolutely. People will never break their belief system because it’s too scary to look beyond what they were taught. That’s why in the Wizard of Oz she [Dorothy] says: ‘Why didn’t you tell me all I had to do was click my heels three times?’ Because you wouldn’t believe me. You had to go out there and own what it means to be a badass bitch. I could tell ya how to do it, but you wouldn’t believe me.” Oh, go on, I plead. “Hahahaaaaa,” he trills. “You know, it’s a rebirth. It’s the story of the hero with a thousand faces, and Superman and Jesus Christ and Buddha and Krishna. I always say this persona is my Superman to this Clark Kent. And it’s true for everyone, really. There’s a hero lurking – thank you, Mariah Carey – in everyone.”

He says that his mother, Ernestine, who died in 1993, first gave him the confidence to be an outsider while he was still at school in San Diego, where he was born (he moved to Atlanta with his older sister when he was 15). “She was very punk rock, she questioned authority. In one of my songs, Sissy That Walk, I say: ‘Mama said, unless they’re paying your bills, you pay them bitches no mind.’ That was, in a nutshell, her philosophy about everything, and that was the philosophy that informed my life.” Did he feel brave? “Do you know what? It felt like a survival mechanism. I felt like I couldn’t do the other thing. I remember being 14 and at that crossroads and thinking: I can either check out, or be a Stepford wife, so to speak. And I decided to for ever be me. I’m going to walk through this thing on my own terms. Which is a lonely road, for most people, until I found my tribe.”

Even the brightest, bravest queens have dark days. “When I was 14, I thought one way of dealing with this is to commit suicide,” he says, “because I can’t be the way society wants me to be. I know a lot of kids feel that way. Thankfully I had the support of my family and I had music, and I was well-read, and I knew my tribe was out there. But it was something I thought about.” At the end of every episode of Drag Race, he signs off with: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love someone else?” Clearly it comes from the heart.

Between his 90s Supermodel heyday and the emergence of Drag Race, RuPaul all but disappeared from public life. It was a conscious choice, he says. “During the Bush era, I retreated. I stepped away from the canvas for several years.” Isn’t it more important than ever to be visible in challenging times? “Well, it was clear to me that I couldn’t fight. I would do interviews and I would have to defend my life. I’d read the piece and it would have this tone of like, snarky unbelievability. You’d see an interview and it would say, ‘he, er, she, er, ahh’, every single time. Like, what? Then I got it: they can’t go over to this thing because then their whole belief system would crumble. So they have to mock it. You know what? I got better things to do.”

Last year, RuPaul found himself under fire from an even less likely enemy. A number of people from the transgender community objected to the show’s use of the phrase, ‘You’ve got she-mail’ following a challenge called Female or She-male? There were complaints to its US network, Logo, which dropped the line for the new season. “I would not have changed it, but that’s their choice,” he says now. “Our intention was always coming from a place of love. On paper, you cannot read intention, so it was actually hurtful. First of all, drag is dangerous. We are making fun of everything. But when someone doesn’t get the joke or feels offended by it, it’s a lose-lose situation, because you can’t explain a joke. It isn’t funny if you explain it.”

Is anything off-limits when it comes to comedy? “Not with me. It has saved my life. Some of the trauma from my childhood and my sisters and some of the stuff going on in my family, we just fuckin’ laughed.” This is what he learned from his punk-rock “tribe” in Atlanta – to laugh in the face of “how horrible the situation was on Earth”. He grows serious. “If you cannot laugh at it, you gotta buck up and get strong. Cos I think everything is a fucking laugh riot.” And right there, you get a glimpse of the 14-year-old who decided not to check out, but to own what it means to be the most badass bitch of all.

RuPaul’s Drag Race is on every Monday and Tuesday at 10pm on truTV in the UK