There is a moment at the end of every series of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the Emmy-winning drag queen reality competition, in which the glamorous host asks the finalists to address their younger selves with words of advice and encouragement. No matter how many times you have seen this happen (since its inception in 2009, there have been 16 US seasons, 20 international editions, eight all-star versions and two celebrity spin-offs), watching the contestants open up about their darkest days remains an astonishingly effective emotional suckerpunch, precision-tooled to wrest tears from the eyes of even the most jaded viewer. In The House of Hidden Meanings, it’s RuPaul Charles’s turn to look back and take stock of his own life, from finding himself homeless in California to posing backstage at Versace surrounded by supermodels.
It is a memoir that is by turns shocking, poignant, fantastically egotistical and often wise, punctuated with equal amounts of LSD-inspired epiphanies as hard-won lessons about sobriety and personal growth (complete with mantras). Each sentence is recognisably in RuPaul’s voice – arch, funny, given to epigrammatic pronouncements – distilling the cadences and assorted pop culture references that have come to characterise his TV persona. We learn the origins of some of his favourite phrases (“Why don’t you pick one up and smoke it sometime?” comes from a Mae West-inspired 60s cigar advert), as well as the influence of role models such as Diana Ross and the “unapologetically rebellious” Cher.
RuPaul Andre Charles was born in 1960 in “very white, very conservative, and very segregated” San Diego, California, just far enough from the ocean that it raises eyebrows when he takes the bus to visit the beach. He traces his love of performance to wishing to impress his mother, Toni, a complicated woman given to dramatic outbursts; in one pivotal scene she threatens to set fire to her husband’s car, causing a young RuPaul to dissociate. His charming but unreliable father, Irving, runs off with his mistress; while he continues to dote on his daughters, he is neglectful of his strange, feminine son.
What follows is a dizzyingly fast-paced account of RuPaul’s roundabout rise to fame (first predicted by a psychic, a prophecy RuPaul seems to take at face value). He starts off in Atlanta, flipping cars for his cocaine-smoking uncle Gerald, then gets involved in the local DIY punk and new wave scene, starting a succession of bands with progressively more terrible names (RuPaul and the U-Hauls, Wee Wee Pole), eventually winning over New York’s cold and unwelcoming crowds.
Each vignette is described with brisk efficiency, like a well-rehearsed anecdote: this could start to feel tiresome if the stories weren’t so consistently entertaining. On one page, he is bursting into tears after being confronted by an angry coke dealer; on the next, he is digging out Prince vinyl from the ashes of a burning building. It also wouldn’t be a celebrity memoir without some score-settling: he calls out club promoters who have wronged him, and describes an unsettling encounter with Madonna where she “looked at me with an expression I’ll never forget – a snarl of contempt at the sight of me, cold fury that I would deign to enter while she was in the room”.
A central tenet of the book is that reality is a construct. Watching television as a child, RuPaul realises that not only are the actors playing roles, but so is everyone else. “Life was just one big fucking joke. Anyone who was taking it seriously was missing the point,” he notes the first time he takes acid, a conviction that is further reinforced at a number of later stages. A boyfriend mentions something he heard at a drag show, “You’re born naked, and the rest is drag” (a line widely assumed to originate from RuPaul; he attributes it here to drag queen Lakesha Lucky), and it feels as if he has “just unlocked the secret of the universe”. This peeling back of layers is mentioned so many times that you expect it to lead to a realisation, yet it is never explained further; you are left guessing as to whether the joke is benign, irreverent, or something more nihilistic.
He is on surer ground examining the minutiae of sex and power, writing about the pain caused by feeling alien to those around him: “I was so different, so not of this world. Very tall, Black, artistic, feminine. I believed I was too many kinds of other to be seen as sexually desirable in the hierarchy of gay men.” Drag allowed him to escape the narrow confines of gender, bringing him to a status that had always been beyond reach. Later, he writes thoughtfully about the power imbalance between him and his husband, Georges LeBar, at the start of their relationship, when LeBar was 21 and RuPaul a celebrity, and the effect it had on them both psychologically.
Occasionally, there are lines that do not demonstrate the same capacity for self-reflection, where you wonder whether an editor ought to have intervened: early on, he writes, “the Black people in our [San Diego] neighbourhood were transplants from the south, and so they had inherited a kind of slave mentality, which was based on fear”; French people are described as “haughty and superior, or even downright rude”. RuPaul is no stranger to controversy: in 2018, he apologised after comments he made to the Guardian about whether or not trans women should be allowed to compete on his show; in a New Yorker profile this month he defended the fracking that takes place at his husband’s 60,000-acre Wyoming ranch.
Neither incident makes it into the memoir, which ends in the mid-1990s, around the time RuPaul presented the Brit awards with “my new friend Elton John”, with a seeming digression about renovating a condo in Miami that ends up leading to rehab and 12-step meetings. There are some surprising omissions: only half a paragraph is devoted to the Aids crisis, before turning the attention back to RuPaul; there is no mention of his brief but culturally significant friendship with Nirvana.
Ever since the psychic’s prediction, RuPaul’s journey has been one defined by endless self-mythologising, from pasting “RuPaul is red hot” posters on every telephone pole in 80s New York to his Drag Race catchphrase “available on iTunes”. As the RuPaul brand goes global, The House of Hidden Meanings attempts to shore up his countercultural credentials, looking back to his “genderfuck anarchist drag” roots (amid reports that contestants end up thousands of dollars in debt to afford the outfits for his shows). Despite his visibility over the years he has remained an inscrutable, enigmatic figure; here he lifts the curtain, giving us a glimpse into the things that have shaped him and his sometimes idiosyncratic views. It also serves as a nostalgic snapshot of a time when a penniless twentysomething could arrive in New York with nothing but a tiny suitcase, coming up in the world using only wit, charm and unshakeable self-belief.
• The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir by RuPaul is published by 4th Estate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
