Cover Story
Holiday 2019 Issue

Cover Story: RuPaul: The Philosopher Queen

As drag’s greatest living ambassador, the performer born RuPaul Andre Charles has spent decades bringing the art form out of the nightclub and into our living rooms. With a new, scripted show on the way and another evolution under his belt, he’s moving beyond the limits of reality TV—and confronting the nature of reality itself.
RuPaul Cover
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

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It is September in Burbank, and a golf cart is carrying me toward a little corner of gay heaven. Specifically, it takes me to a low-roofed building on the Warner Bros. lot, an unassuming almost-bungalow where the television writer and producer Michael Patrick King has his offices. Inside, the walls are adorned with various posters for his series (and subsequent movies) Sex and the City, while the (in)famous tracksuit worn by Lisa Kudrow on The Comeback rests proudly on a mannequin. It’s an exciting, almost squeal-worthy experience, to be in those hallowed rooms. And then I turn a corner and there’s RuPaul.

The entertainer—drag queen, television host, recording artist, actor, salesman, amateur spiritual guru—projects an instant grandeur. On this sweltering Monday after the Emmys, he’s wearing one of his trademark vibrant, chicly tailored suits, this one a somehow calming electric fuchsia, over a softly patterned pink shirt. He’s doing a little makeup touch-up—compact in one hand, pad in the other—and when I go to greet him, he gives me a hug, because his hands are full. I feel honored—as one does in RuPaul’s presence, let alone when he is hugging you—but am then quickly brought back down to earth in very RuPaul fashion.

“Why am I hugging you?” he asks with a bewildered laugh, probably not even half joking. “I don’t even know you.”

SASHAY, SHANTAY
RuPaul at Smashbox Studios in Los Angeles. “True drag will never be mainstream,” he says. Gown by ZALDY; jewelry and clutch by David Webb.


Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

It is a fair question, but I’ve traveled to Burbank to ask another: Do we really know RuPaul? Sure, we may remember, and cherish, his hit single “Supermodel,” the winking dance track that brought him national attention all the way back in 1992. And we’ve watched him on season after season of his now decade-old Emmy-winning reality competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race. (He’d picked up another statuette for outstanding reality competition the night before.) He’s done cameos in TV series and movies. He hosts a podcast, What’s the Tee?, which covers pop culture ephemera and personal anecdotes. He’s put out three books—1995’s Lettin’ It All Hang Out, 2010’s Workin’ It!, and 2018’s GuRu, the latter a sort of spiritual guide featuring an introduction by Jane Fonda. Recently RuPaul started hawking wares on QVC—a makeup line that sold out on its first appearance on the network. RuPaul has seemingly been everywhere over the last 30 years, and yet there’s still something sphinx-like and enigmatic about him. In a way, he projects everything and nothing at once, a majestic magic trick shrouding a formidable, but also vulnerable, human being.

The prevailing sense one gets when looking back at RuPaul’s career is that he, much like he demands we all do in “Supermodel,” has worked. Like, really worked, pulling himself up from the hazy, fraught club-kid scene of late-1980s and early-’90s lower Manhattan to become a revered media mogul whose personal net worth has been estimated to be as high as $60 million. And he’s by no means done. Fresh from his most recent Emmy coronation, RuPaul is on the Warner lot having just finished audio editing for an upcoming scripted Netflix series called AJ and the Queen, a collaboration with King that will premiere in January. It’s a job that requires a lot of acting, both comedic and dramatic, and marks yet another reinvention for its star. Or, if not a reinvention, a revelation of ever more ability and interest.

Looking at the way he has pushed his brand toward the mainstream, one might figure that RuPaul has transcended the counterculture that birthed him. But he’s not at all concerned that he’s going to somehow lose access to its transgressive spirit.

“I don’t worry about it,” he says. “It’s what I am. I’ve always seen behind the curtain. I’ve always seen that the guy controlling the buttons, that’s the Wiz. I’ve always been able to see that the emperor is wearing no clothes.”

Drag Race has brought an art form once relegated to dark clubs in big cities beaming into the homes of millions of people, inspiring a new and varied generation of young people to appreciate, and attempt, drag in all its splendor. Drag Race is regularly the number one cable program in its time slot, and was watched, across a variety of platforms, over 180 million times in 2019. Its success eventually led to the establishment of RuPaul’s DragCon, a yearly exposition that began in Los Angeles in 2015, which has since added a New York iteration that will expand to London in 2020. Tens of thousands of practitioners, fans, and drag hangers-on have attended the conventions since their inception. And then there’s the language: various terms and vocal tics that Drag Race brought to the broader discourse and that have been deeply absorbed by online teen culture. Any VSCO girl worth her salt is likely using terminology that made its way into her vocabulary by way of RuPaul’s show.

In New York’s East Village, near the Pyramid Club; In San Diego in the early ’60s; In Atlanta, 1979.

Clockwise from left: by JON WITHERSPOON, COURTESY OF RuPAUL, BY TOM HILL/WIREIMAGE.

But that doesn’t mean it will ever be truly mainstream, RuPaul insists. “A superficial aspect of drag is mainstream. Like, the ‘Ooh, girl’ or ‘Hey girlfriend!’ or ‘Yaaas.’ That’s mainstream culture,” he says. “But true drag really will never be mainstream. Because true drag has to do with seeing that this world is an illusion, and that everything that you say you are and everything it says that you are on your driver’s license, it’s all an illusion. Most people will never in their lives understand what that is. Because they don’t have the operating system to understand that duality.

“I love that scene in The Matrix where you see the countless [rows] of people living their lives in a pod, but they’re dreaming about this other world. That is such a powerful picture. I think most people have the ability to understand that but dare not go there. Because then they would be forced to deconstruct their whole belief system and build another one. Building a new belief system and then maintaining it is a tall order. A lot of times it means you have to leave your family and friends behind. Because they’re not gonna get it.”

Plenty do seem to get it, though. RuPaul has a devoutly loyal coterie of friends and collaborators; many of the people he works with on Drag Race have been his comrades in arms since just about the very beginning, when RuPaul left the club scene in Atlanta and arrived in New York with a resounding splash.

RuPaul was born RuPaul Andre Charles in San Diego in 1960. After his parents’ divorce in 1967, he lived with his mother, Ernestine, a Louisiana native who partially named her son after roux, the flour-and-butter base of much Creole cooking. Perhaps heeding a premonition Ernestine received from a psychic—that her son was going to be famous one day—RuPaul moved to Atlanta at 15 to study performance, journeying cross-country with one of his three sisters, Renetta. Once RuPaul arrived in Georgia, he gigged and scrambled, go-go dancing for the band Now Explosion and appearing on public access cable. Eventually, Now Explosion brought RuPaul along to New York, where he quickly caught the attention of other young people trying to make something new and daring.

Fenton Bailey, the cofounder of the production company World of Wonder, which produces Drag Race for VH1 (the series used to air on Logo, a much smaller gay-aimed cable network), recalls first laying eyes on RuPaul in the mid 1980s, at a music conference held at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. RuPaul couldn’t gain access to the actual conference, but he could at least situate himself somewhere prominent to hawk his album, Sex Freak. Bailey recalls, “Ru was in that incredible lobby in thigh-high wader boots, jockstrap, shoulder pads, and shredded bin liner, waving his album and a big red wig.” World of Wonder’s other cofounder, Randy Barbato, recognized immediately what we can now all see as a prodigious work ethic. “As wild as [RuPaul’s] presentation was, and as crazy as that scene was, I think we were instantly kindred spirits in that we spoke a similar language. We knew how to play and have fun, but we were also hard-working people with ambition. Shortly after meeting, we were producing his Star Booty album. I have such distinct memories of how focused he was during that process. Even though he looked like a freak, he was so studious.”

The kind of drag that RuPaul does—glam but satirical, imposing with a knowingly raised eyebrow—requires a certain observational skill, a surmising ability to read the world, that RuPaul says he’s always possessed. For years, he’s shrewdly anticipated bends in the cultural arc and figured out how he can best maneuver, and exploit, them. In person, the fluorescents in the bungalow office switched off at RuPaul’s request so we’re bathed in pale, contemplative natural night, he talks a lot about consciousness. He explains that he’s ever alert and aware of the world’s artifices—and in so being, realizes that maybe nothing is actually new. “For right now, what sustains me is maintaining. . .and being conscious,” he says. “It’s not about learning something new, it’s about remembering what you already know.”

Part of that heightened consciousness has been found in sobriety, which RuPaul arrived at, with the help of therapy, in several stages. He first quit chemical drugs and alcohol in the early 1990s. Marijuana, a more constant crutch, was harder to let go, but he gradually weaned himself off by 1999. Nowadays, RuPaul says, “It’s difficult for me to stay up past nine o’clock. My indulgence, honestly, is taking time with myself. I go hiking, around 6:30 in the morning. I meditate.” That’s a life change that has had a significant impact on his psychology and his creative output. “I drank and smoked so much weed because I wanted my world view to change,” he says, eyes glistening with tears. “The truth is a very powerful thing. The truth of what’s really going on. I wanted to shut that out. Once I stopped doing that, the work became how to process the truth. The truth of what this world is, the truth of what people are. And how far we have come in civilization. Which, by the way, is not very far. We are a very primitive people. And for people who are sweet, sensitive souls, it becomes kind of torture.

“People who operate at a certain level have a lonely road to travel. Just a fact of life. And learning to navigate that—the other people in your life, or the reality of your family, the reality of the state of business, or politics—it becomes really boring. And for people like us, being bored is the most excruciating thing of all.”

In Atlanta, 1988.

PHOTOGRAPH BY AL CLAYTON.

It’s hard to imagine RuPaul being bored. What he’s really talking about, of course, is something deeper, a restlessness of spirit that he has always poured into his work, and into the persona that made him famous: what he calls the Monster, a blonde-wigged, nearly seven-foot-tall diva whom he discovered after years of doing a more androgynous act. “When I really wanted to go for it, to go for the mainstream, above 14th Street in New York, I went out and I started doing my David Bowie thing, my androgynous thing at nightclubs, and toured back to Atlanta,” RuPaul says. “People would see me and go, It’s cute, Ru, but when are you gonna do Star Booty? When are you gonna do the drag thing?”

As he always tries to, RuPaul paid attention to the universe’s cues. “I changed my ideas about myself. I said, I’m gonna do this in drag. Not only am I going to do this in drag, I’m going to do it in glamazon drag. And I’m going to take some of the sexual subversiveness out of it and make myself like a Disney caricature, so that Betty and Joe Beer Can won’t feel threatened by the sexual aspects of drag. They won’t be threatened by the fact that I’m actually mocking identity. That was the scientific combination that I used to break through to the mainstream. So that’s what I did. I enlisted the help of all my friends, my tribe members, and together we came up with this look. That’s how ‘Supermodel’ happened. That cracked the code.”

After “Supermodel,” RuPaul’s looming titaness solidified her stardom with VH1’s underappreciated-in-its-time chat program The RuPaul Show, which premiered in 1996. It ran for just 100 episodes, but the startle of RuPaul’s unapologetic pose attaining such a prominent position on major airwaves enshrined the Monster as an emblem—perhaps the emblem, both inviting and defiant—of modern drag.

RuPaul has presided over a major renaissance—or at least popularization—of the art form, a movement culminated by the success of Drag Race. It’s no exaggeration to say that the show, which features contestants competing in irreverent challenges to become America’s next drag superstar, has fundamentally altered the nature of gay socializing while also endearing drag to legions of fans beyond just the many gay men shrieking at bars across the country (and globe) with their friends and lovers every Thursday night.

Drag Race began as a niche, under-the-radar cult curio. But through social media and the older infrastructure of queer cultural exchange—and aided by a broader social mandate for inclusivity and representation—the series steadily built its profile into the awards-bedecked hit it is now. Though it maybe looked a bit dicey to the casual media observer of the day, Drag Race’s creators say they always knew the show was going to be significant. Tom Campbell, an executive producer who’s been with the series since its inception, saw the potential immediately upon shooting the first episode. “While we were filming it, we knew something special was happening,” he says. “You have all these great plans on paper of what it could be, and I think it exceeded all that. It wasn’t just a parody of reality shows. It wasn’t just queens gone wild. It was this incredible exploration of the LGBTQ community, speaking their language and telling their truths.”

When Drag Race moved to VH1 for season nine, in 2017, it more than doubled its ratings, according to the network. By then, the show’s viewers were ardent worshippers at its church, not just enjoying its spoof and sass but also finding something much deeper in its messaging. “Parents come up to me [now] and say [the show] helped them understand their queer child a little bit more,” says Michelle Visage, one of RuPaul’s besties and a regular judge on the show since season three. “This little TV show has changed and saved so many people’s lives.” That kind of phenomenon, fun but freighted with a heap of emotional weight, could become something of an onus for its star. And yet, RuPaul doesn’t let himself get too fussed about any sort of responsibility owed to his congregation.

Top: At Northside High’s 1983 prom, Atlanta; Making a music video with Diana Ross in West Hollywood, 1996. bottom: With Elton John at the 1994 Brit Awards, London; With Jean Paul Gaultier, 1994.

COURTESY OF RuPAUL, © PAUL HARRIS/ONLINE USA. bottom: by ALAN DAVIDSON/ SHUTTERSTOCK, FROM TIME & LIFE PICTURES/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES.

“It’s important for me to focus on my experience,” he tells me. “You know how on the plane they say put the mask on your face before you put the mask on your child’s face? It starts with me. I cannot help someone unless I am first having fun, or being fulfilled.” He’s used that airplane analogy in interviews before, but it remains an apt one. There is something disarmingly self-possessed about RuPaul; he’s not selfish, certainly, and he doesn’t even seem that vain. But he knows who he is and what space in the world he wants to occupy, and he realizes that, with an assured sense of belonging. “I don’t do this because I want to be a role model,” he stresses. “If somebody can get something from what I’m doing, I say right on, sister. But that’s not why I do it.”

On occasion, RuPaul has been criticized for not thinking quite progressively enough about what his star presence and the cult of Drag Race mean to the outside world. He’s been the subject of controversy because of some statements about gender identity, perhaps most keenly in 2018 when he suggested that Drag Race would probably not cast trans women who had undergone gender confirmation surgery. And this past September, RuPaul came under fire when some of the Drag Race production team joined him onstage to accept the outstanding competition series Emmy and it was a largely white group of people. At a backstage press conference, RuPaul dismissed a question from Essence reporter Danielle Young about that lack of diversity, further stoking the flames. RuPaul suddenly, and uncomfortably, found himself having to justify and defend his choices, the way that perhaps all stars do when they go mega these days.

RuPaul in Times Square, November 1992.

By Catherine McGann/Getty Images.

I ask RuPaul about the Drag Race trans issue, one of the few times when the room goes a little chilly. “Yeah, I don’t want to talk about that,” he replies evenly. “It’s a lose-lose situation. There’s not one thing I can say that will make people feel better about it. I know what I am. I come from a place of love. I’m not here to make people feel bad.” The conversation then shifts to the more general topic of how public statements are read and processed in our very online era. “You have to look at the intent behind words,” he reasons. “You can say a lot of words and you can interpret them however you want. But you have to go deeper to understand what that really means. It’s harder to do, and that’s what people don’t want to do. They want to make it black-and-white. Nothing is black-and-white.”

As for the matter of racial diversity behind the scenes of Drag Race, it was clarified immediately post-Emmys that one black woman deeply involved with the show, co-executive producer Jacqueline Wilson, had died earlier that month. Todrick Hall, a RuPaul fan who became a colleague when he was hired as a choreographer for Drag Race two years ago, says he sees a good deal of diversity on set. “There are a lot of people on the crew who do hair and makeup and people that work behind the scenes. I would consider it to be a diverse group of people. I’m one of the people who works on the show and I’m African American. When people come in [and] show that they want to be there and are willing to put in the hard work to be able to make the show be the success that it is, everybody is welcome.”

In front of the camera, Drag Race has been more demonstrably representative. Bob the Drag Queen, who was inspired to do drag partly because of Drag Race and who was the winner of season eight, says the show “could be better about casting wider on the gender spectrum, but in terms of racial diversity, I can’t think of a show that does it better.”

The series has been a boon for many of its 140 contestants, elevating and outright launching careers for many of the queens who have passed through the show’s bedazzled crucible. “My career changed way before I won. Once the rumors of the cast had been announced, my career had changed,” says Bob. Past Drag Race contestants have released albums, gone on tours. One queen, fan favorite Bianca del Rio, has performed at Carnegie Hall. And all have enjoyed a leg up in booking nightclubs and other traditional gigs thanks to their newfound visibility. “Everyone’s a winner who’s on it,” says Randy Barbato. “It’s the only competitive reality show where virtually the entire cast walks away with a career.”

Lady Bunny is a veteran drag queen who came up with RuPaul and Now Explosion in Atlanta and later in New York and has watched as the Drag Race tide has raised many boats—with only a few wrecks along the way. Bunny has been a guest on the show and has gone on tour with some past contestants. Still, Bunny says, the show does have its limits. “Sometimes the show de-emphasizes talent because you’re only really performing when you lose. There are many wonderful performers from Drag Race, but there are also some performers who appear to spend more time on their makeup than they do on their act. [Though] makeup is itself a talent! One which I don’t have. I look like I apply contour with a brick.”

Drag Race will likely carry on for many more seasons. It recently expanded to Canada and the U.K., the latter iteration hosted by RuPaul himself, while versions have been running in Thailand and Chile for several years. A celebrity-based tweak on the series will arrive sometime this coming year.

QUEEN OF QUEENS
On acting in his new Netflix series, he says, “I proved to myself that I could pull those emotions up. It’s intoxicating.”


Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Bodysuit and shoes by ZALDY; bracelet by BULGARI High Jewelry (above elbow); earrings and ring by David Webb; tights by Wolford. Throughout: hair products by Oribe; makeup products by Kevyn Aucoin.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

RuPaul remains committed to Drag Race but is ever eager to expand into new territory. He no longer does the nightclub circuit, because he’s busy with television and because the scene has been forever altered by technology. “Right when I was winding down my nightclub act, the whole cell phone revolution of people just filming the whole thing was taking off, and it fucked the whole thing up,” he says. “You couldn’t get anything from the audience. It used to be this sort of give and take, where the audience would give energy to the performer, and the performer would give energy to the audience. It was a give-and-take, a lovefest. Now it’s just one-sided, where they’re just filming you, and you look at them and think, What the fuck are you doing? Why don’t you wake the fuck up?”

RuPaul instead followed his creative hunger to AJ and the Queen, a road-trip drag dramedy in the vein of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert or To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, only with a precocious little girl in tow, played by newcomer Izzy G. The idea to incorporate a young character into the show arose out of recognizing that, as RuPaul tells it, the emerging audience for Drag Race is “13-year-old suburban white girls.”

But this is not a show for children, really, RuPaul insists. “This show isn’t about a drag queen in a kids show. This is about a kid in a drag queen’s show. It’s edgy, and it has some dark themes in there.” He thrilled to the challenge of playing a fully realized person, removing the makeup of arch social commentary to get at a rawer truth. “It was something I was eager to explore. To prove to myself that I’m not dead inside,” he says with a wry laugh. “I proved to myself that I could pull those emotions up. It’s intoxicating.” Watching a 15-minute segment of the show on the Warner lot, I feel that ardency. The acting is solid and present. It’s a pleasant shock to see RuPaul so unhidden, expressing frailty and grief alongside the familiar fabulousness.

RuPaul has been working up toward something like this for some time, having tested the acting waters on various projects, including a recent turn on Netflix’s Grace and Frankie. “He never tried to grab attention,” Jane Fonda says of his time on set. “RuPaul, the dervish of glam and camp, as humble team player? This I had not expected...I’m not long on time with him, but he’s made me love him.”

King says the experience of working with RuPaul exceeded his already-high expectations. “I’ve never seen someone who is more determined to not fail. Even in failing he keeps going forward. Most actors or artistic types, if they feel like they’re failing, they collapse in on themselves and start beating themselves up and getting paler and weaker and less confident. Ru holds his ground and he just keeps going, till he gets as close to the target as he can.”

That tenaciousness paid off, both for the show and internally. “Our humanity, our laughter, our sense of irony. Fashion. Everything. It’s all in there. I couldn’t be more proud,” says RuPaul. King agrees. “After [Ru] saw the first episode, he turned to me and said, ‘I thought this was going to be the show where I revealed myself to the world. It turns out it’s the show where I reveal myself to myself.’”

All the talk of RuPaul’s grit and determination makes one wonder if, or worry that, there must be a breaking point somewhere—that he’s putting himself at risk, somehow. The designer Isaac Mizrahi, who says his was the first fashion house to play “Supermodel” during a runway show, told me a story from the old days, about RuPaul getting conked on the head by a falling stage light during a dress rehearsal and, after a visit to a Parisian hospital, carrying on with the show as usual. “She literally came back and did the show in full drag, full wig. She did this amazing show. I thought, What a pro.”

King had a similar story of physical toll from the set of AJ and the Queen. “He had to throw his hair around to a song, and he really throws himself into shit. He threw his head around like Ann-Margret slash go-go girl for, like, 12 takes. Next day, he couldn’t stand up because he dislodged one of his inner ear crystals.” The solution was not for RuPaul to take a day off work (“I’ve never not worked,” he told King) but to instead shoot a scene sitting down instead of standing up.

ROAD TRIP
From top: Izzy G and RuPaul get touch-ups on the set of AJ and the Queen; RuPaul, Izzy G, and director Michael Patrick King; a scene from the show.


All BY BETH DUBBER/NETFLIX.

I’m curious if RuPaul—who talks in such enlightened, almost Zen-like terms about states of being—ever gets angry. He says he does sometimes, in traffic. But, even then, he tries to turn that feeling into an exercise in self-reflection. “I have to recognize what my anger is really about. It actually has nothing to do with them. My anger has to do with my own frustration surrounding maybe how slow the world is, or how unconscious the world is.”

What about politics? During this heated, horrible time, surely something in that realm must be impossible to rise above. Not so, it seems. “I have to be careful about politics and religion and all those things that get people angry at you. When I take two steps back, and I realize what’s really going on, it’s not really even about [particular] issues. It’s about unconsciousness and people’s inability to see themselves from outside themselves.”

Over the course of our conversation, if things ever start getting perhaps too prickly or too personal, RuPaul catches himself and shifts into broader philosophizing, ruminating on the nature of all of our beings rather than specifically his own. He repeats charming anecdotes I’ve read and heard in other interviews. He returns frequently to The Matrix and The Wizard of Oz, tales of altered, faux-reality that are touchstones of his world view. He often evokes the “sweet, sensitive souls” of the world, including himself, the artists and freethinkers more attuned to the pain—and beauty—of the human experience. He’s fascinating to listen to, soulful, and almost sorrowful with a hard-won wisdom.

He also likes to evoke the novels of Anne Rice, the movie Poltergeist, zombie films that speak to the dead-minded way so many shuffle through life. RuPaul manages to find positive, or at least instructive, messages in these dark things. He seems to interpret just about everything that way, the world a vast, arrayed grid of neutral-to-benevolent signs and symbols and clues meant to help the keyed-in along their path. He talks about listening to the universe’s stage directions, about following those. It’s hard not to feel like a lesser, baser creature in his presence. But RuPaul is careful to break up that new age talk with sassy jokes and asides, turning on a bit of the Monster voice to leaven the mood in the room. Such has been his accommodating work throughout his career as a Prometheus bringing gay fire—in all its pride and innuendo—to the masses.

Shortly after we spoke, RuPaul left for a three-week European vacation with his husband, Georges LeBar, a Wyoming rancher (yes, really), whom RuPaul met while partying at the long-gone Chelsea nightclub Limelight, a quarter-century ago. The couple maintains a guarded privacy—indeed, many of the people I spoke to for this piece brought up how private RuPaul is. He does offer, at least, the cheery tidbits that, when traveling, the pair likes to see shows and go shopping, and to stay at posh hotels—happily, and finally, enjoying the fruits of all their perspiration. They recently bought a lavish Beverly Hills mansion, for a reported $13.7 million. They also like to take helicopter rides wherever they go, something to consider the next time you’re flirting in Paris or gasping at the Grand Canyon and hear a chopper whirring overhead. It could be RuPaul, looking down upon our planet with that forever-assessing gaze of his.

After all the work of unpacking and analyzing his reality, RuPaul still isn’t sure that what he’s seeing is, well, real. He’s a fan of the late British philosopher Alan Watts, who ran thought experiments imagining existence as a series of dreams, each different than the last—thoroughly lived reveries that could be controllable, lucid in a way, if you could just figure out how. “You could design for yourself what would be the most ecstatic life,” Watts suggested in one lecture. “Love affairs, banquets, dancing girls. Wonderful journeys. Gardens. Music beyond belief.” That notion, for perhaps obvious reasons, speaks profoundly to RuPaul. “We are doing these random dream things,” he says with excitement, there in the dim little bungalow in Burbank, so much busy activity happening outside its walls, some of it of RuPaul’s own making. “This time I’m this gay, black man, an American, who chooses to do drag and to make it a household craze, whatever it is, [a] phenomenon. And I’m digging it. It’s fun,” he says.

If life is but a series of enterable and escapable dreams, I wonder which one RuPaul would like to have next. He looks toward the ceiling and sighs, a conscious icon considering future consciousnesses.

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I’d want it to be interesting.”


Throughout: hair products by Oribe; makeup products by Kevyn Aucoin. HAIR AND WIG DESIGNER, CURTIS WILLIAM FOREMAN; MAKEUP BY DAVID PETRUSCHIN; TAILOR, CLAY G. SADLER; SET DESIGN BY MARY HOWARD STUDIO; PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY PORTFOLIO ONE. PHOTOGRAPHS, THIS PAGE, BY BETH DUBBER/NETFLIX. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS