Conchita who? The return of RuPaul, the original drag queen

I’m sitting in a bar in West Hollywood with RuPaul Andre Charles, the world’s most famous drag queen, and he’s started to cry. ‘That part in The Wizard of Oz when they go into the poppy fields. Sorry, I choke up when I think about this… the Lion and Dorothy and Toto fall asleep and the Tin Man, who’s immune to the poppy — which is heroin — says, “Wake up! Wake up! You’re falling asleep!” ’ He dabs tears from light brown cheekbones dusted with a sprinkling of natural freckles (no pancake today, the 53-year-old is working preppy realness in the form of a £2,000 Isaia check suit) and in a voice containing the softness of Michael Jackson and the child-like intensity of Dorothy herself concludes: ‘You need those friends who are going to shake you up and look out for you, you know?’

It could be a scene straight out of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the gossipy, smart, big-hearted reality TV show, which debuted quietly in 2009 on the US cable channel Logo and has gone on to become a juggernaut on Netflix. It’s Project Runway meets Priscilla Queen of the Desert as a group of spicy drag queens compete through photo shoots and performances to see who has the ‘C.U.N.T’ factor (charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent), guided by the gently authoritative father/mother figure of RuPaul.

Transvestites had a sleazy image in America before RuPaul came along (they were the New York club kids of Paris is Burning, or John Waters’ big, brash and trashy Divine), but if Diana Ross made it OK for African American R&B acts to find mainstream success in the States, then Ru has done the same for female impersonation. Catchphrases from the show such as ‘Sashay away’ and ‘Good luck and don’t f*** it up’ have become reference points for any self-respecting gay scenester, and season seven is already in production.

‘The show is about the tenacity of the human spirit,’ he says, stroking his smooth head with long, artistic hands. ‘And we see ourselves in each of these girls, whether you want to be a drag superstar or not. Drag, especially in a male culture, represents the absolute biggest no-no, so to watch these courageous characters break down or break through is fascinating.’ Drag, he believes, is having a big moment.

‘Conchita Wurst is, like me, taking this opportunity of openness in our culture to send the message that we’re all really the same.’ He jokes that you need to pay him a lot of money to get him into female drag these days. And, no, he doesn’t get off ‘vacuuming the apartment in high heels — it’s always been about the power’.

Part of that power comes from the fact that Ru can pass as a stunning, real-life woman of 6ft 4in before heels. ‘If I walked in here in drag, it would blow your mind because it’s huge, it really is. It’s like Superman’s costume. I’ll see pictures of myself and I’ll go, “Oh my God!” ’

He admits that ‘the partying part of it, the naughtiness of drag sort of disappeared as soon as I got famous’, referring to his 1992 surprise hit ‘Supermodel (You Better Work)’, which reached number two on the US Billboard dance chart smack in the middle of the grunge era.

The brash, sexy, über-camp classic came about thanks to an ‘open sesame’ moment when he realised that the ‘radical drag’ he was into (‘think smeared lipstick and army boots meets David Bowie’) wasn’t exciting the crowds. What was working, in the era of Linda, Naomi, Cindy and Claudia, was the glamorous black hooker persona he’d been toying with. When Larry Tee, a music-producer friend he knew from his early clubbing years in Atlanta (Larry Tee would go on to launch gay-friendly acts such as Peaches, Fischerspooner and Scissor Sisters), suggested Ru write a song called ‘Supermodel’, he stopped taking drugs, buckled down, made a demo and sent it round until he got a deal with Tommy Boy Records.

When the video came out in 1993, shot in New York’s then-scuzzy Lower East Side and styled up in faux Versace, Kurt Cobain pronounced ‘Supermodel’ to be one of his favourite tracks of the year and the drag queen who’d been slogging away in the clubs of New York and Atlanta throughout the 1980s was suddenly travelling the world meeting Linda Evangelista and Diana Ross. Elton John took him on his first Learjet and Gianni Versace was soon sending him real Versace.

RuPaul refers to his female incarnation as ‘the Monster’ and underlines that he doesn’t care if you refer to that creature as ‘he’ or ‘she’. He’s currently a hot potato with the trans community for using the phrase ‘You got she-mail’ (a pun on email) in the show, but he’s unrepentant. ‘Trans has always been up against drag because drag is saying, “This is all fake.” Trans is saying [big, serious, deep voice], “God made a mistake.” OK, God made a mistake. Right on. It also says, you don’t have a sense of humour.’ He sighs, adding: ‘I’ve never censored myself because the intention has always come from a place of love.’

Humour is key with RuPaul and he credits it with saving him from the anxieties of a volatile childhood in San Diego with his parents, Irving and Ernestine, who would fist-fight in front of him. The ‘Ru’ in his name refers to the binding roux sauce needed to make a gumbo, the local dish of his Louisiana-born Creole mother. Ru describes her as ‘a very dark character’ who, he says, once poured petrol on the family car in front of his philandering electrician father as Ru, his twin sisters Renae and Renetta (seven years older than him) and his younger sister Rozy looked on. She then threatened to set fire to it but luckily the ‘lady from the church’ came over and talked her out of it, he recalls.

His mother sported Op art dresses, costume jewellery and Jackie O shades when she was well, but he says she started taking lithium and Valium when her divorce came through, when Ru-ru, as his sisters called him, was seven. She began wandering round the house in a kaftan in increasingly unpredictable moods. By ten, RuPaul was smoking pot and developing a hairdo that would soon be voted the best Afro in his school.

He was ‘saved’, he says, by his older sisters who distracted him with music from Motown, Sonny & Cher and Sylvester and the Cockettes. They also introduced him to the idea of escape via the imagination. ‘We were on public assistance [welfare], but they put some cookies in an old bag one day and said, “Come on, we’re going to have a picnic!” The word “picnic” — that was magic right there.’