RuPaul, drag famous person and popular culture icon, has been busy on his lifelong approach to stardom—a future, he reveals, foretold by a psychic earlier than he was born. He has been an actor, producer, creator, mannequin, dancer, singer, songwriter, media host, enterprise mogul and creator of the multi-Emmy-winning actuality TV collection, “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” He has labored his means from unhoused nomad to celeb star, together with an precise one on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Now 63, RuPaul turns his penetrating gaze inward, in search of deeper meanings inside his journey. In The House of Hidden Meanings, he shares all with a young readability that renders him unforgettably human.
Ernestine Charles selected her solely son’s identify as a result of, she mentioned, there was nobody else “alive with a name like that.” Raising 4 youngsters in San Diego after her abusive husband left, she was “always in a bad mood.” RuPaul entertained her with “imitations, bits, sketches, little scraps of makeshift theater. . . . I put her powder on and whipped a towel around my head as if it were a lustrous head of hair,” he recollects. As a young person, he escaped to Atlanta and ultimately labored his approach to New York City. Club scenes stored him performing and partying. He at all times acted like a star, he says, as a result of he knew he was one.
RuPaul paints wildly vivid metropolis scenes: gritty New York, Atlanta alive with punk and drag, and San Diego, the place his difficult childhood haunts him nonetheless. Relationships had been usually sidetracked by too many medicine and dangerous intercourse, however he in some way survived, at all times believing in his future—and in drag. His 1993 breakthrough video, “Supermodel (You Better Work),” turned homosexual stereotypes on their heads and showcased an exuberance that appealed to each the mainstream and the LGBTQ+ group.
Here, we don’t discover his rise to fame, the lead-up to “Drag Race” and even his activism and philanthropic work. That details about the often-profiled star is available elsewhere. The House of Hidden Meanings is about beginnings. RuPaul reveals the internal work of therapeutic from previous wounds and repairing his relationship with himself, and his memoir celebrates the potential for reinvention. “In a system where things insisted on being one or the other, drag was everything,” he writes. “That made it magic.”
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