“MANY of us have a secret girl living within us.
Mine awakened when I was twelve years old . . .” hints the most commercially successful drag queen of all time, RuPaul Andre Charles, a.k.a. RuPaul in his recently launched memoir, The House of Hidden Meanings.
The pop culture icon-cum-television personality adapted his book’s title from wisecrack uttered by a childhood friend who, once when the duo was indulging in the folly of youth whilst high on a certain drug averred: “Libra represents the twelfth house of Scorpio’s hidden meanings.”
The narrator (now aged 63) didn’t quiet grasp what his buddy, in their then state of haze, was onto – suffice that the ring of the declaration made an impression upon him enough to select some of it as the title to this literary testament!
Born and raised in San Diego, California, the unusually named – the ‘Ru’ in the name emanated from ‘roux’, a French term for the base of gumbo (a stew which is the official cuisine of the U.S. state of Louisiana) – actor-cum-musician wasn’t like any other boy peer in his outlook on life, just as he didn’t possess looks appertaining to the masculine gender. In early youth, he bore the appearance of a girl, a cute kind of pretty accentuated by huge natural Afro hair (an accompanying image of himself featured in one of the tome’s segments attests to his fetching physical attributes) – so much so he was repeatedly mistaken for one.
The name had been given to him by his mum, Toni, a descendent of mixed-race freed slaves and native of Louisiana who, with her straight and sandy brown hair, could have been referred to as a ‘mulatto’. She could also had been deemed contrarian since she had an affinity for dark-skinned people like her husband, whose convertible automobile she once threatened to torch upon discovering his cheating on her with another woman – with the ruckus witnessed by people of the neighbourhood, including a fire brigade which had arrived as a contingency measure.
RuPaul’s initial venturing into drag had its genesis when he was cast in a Tennessee Williams play titled Camino Real, in the role of a drag queen called Queenie, whilst a student at Northside School of Performing Arts. One day, sans explanation, his older sister Renetta handed him a newspaper cutting article regarding the first woman who became well-known in America for having gender confirmation surgery.
Since he was developing modelesque proportions at the time, he interpreted her gesture as her way of trying to be helpful in his recognizing his gender identity. ‘Twas Renetta too who made him aware of Sylvester when, upon spotting a picture of the disco singer depicted looking decadent and feminine on her apartment’s wall, he enquired: “Who’s that?” “Oh, Sylvester is this transvestite in San Francisco who puts on shows,” she had responded at the time.
An unmistakable proclivity he recognized from early on was that he was gay, queer and very much attracted to boys (and men later on as he grew up) – with him noting that being gay around Black folks translated to being in a continual state of secret-keeping and pretending.
If Renetta sympathized with his sexual orientation, his mum – who he suspected intuitively knew he was gay from the onset – never passed any judgement on him!
Yet the San Diegan lamented the hots he had for some boys going unrequited – with one who momentarily befriended and flirted with him ending up marrying one of his sisters!
The multi Emmy Award winner (8 consecutive gongs, with the most recent one garnered in January of this year) whose Drag Story Hour project entails drag artists reading books to children, thus aiding them in learning from LGBTQ+ stories and experiences, in libraries, schools and bookstores – in the process provoking the ire of conservative politicians and ‘family groups’ in the US – became a ‘supermodel’ upon being crowned ‘queen’ in the King and Queen of Manhattan Pageant.
The pinnacle of nightlife success, it propelled him to recognition by the relevant set (club promoters, journalists, etc.) of New York’s downtown scene and happened at a time when he was striving to establish himself – along with his Southern coterie – in the Big Apple via a new weekly party known as La Palace de Beauté in the 1980s.
Referred to as a ‘self-created masterpiece’ by John Simone, the photographer who documented that particularly hedonistic epoch, RuPaul – all dolled up with a seductive aesthetic ‘she’ described as being somewhere between “Black hooker” and “Soul Train dancer” – suddenly found himself being the center of attention with people enquiring: “who the f – ck is she?” It was this period in time which confirmed the Cletis Tout (a 2001 comedy flick in which he is cast with Hollywood leading man, Christian Slater) actor as a drag queen (defined as a male who performs femininely for entertainment purposes) pre-ordained for global appeal!
From avoiding San Diego’s twin trapdoors of drug addiction and penitentiary during youth; flunking school and ending up moving to Atlanta to assist a brother-in-law in selling automobiles between states as a teenager; surviving freewheeling drug-fuelled times pending the HIV-Aids epidemic to catching a glimpse of the supermodels of the era, viz, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford at a Versace fashion show in Milan and wanting to be like them – and having Gianni Versace later flying him to the selfsame city to perform at an after party and have a picture snapped with Campbell at his feet and Turlington gazing up at him; being hired to appear in a Robert Palmer music video and subsequently fired for passing out on a recreational drug and realizing commercial success with the album, Supermodel of the World (which contained the signature song, “Supermodel (You Better Work)”), ‘she’ has experienced it all lock, stock and barrel!
A trade paperback published by HarperCollins UK, The House of Hidden Meanings is distributed across South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
It is available at leading bookstores countrywide and retails for R450.
