by RuPaul
So even though she was a very remote, secretive, and not particularly affectionate person, I loved her very much. I was always close to her and passionate with her. Whenever I went to hug her she would say, “Get your hands off of me.” But I would say, “Nope, nope, nope, hug, hug, hug!” and she’d just have to put up with it.
I think she liked it, really.
With Mama out at work all day, I really came into my own. I was free to let my hair down, quite literally. By age ten I was braiding and bleaching it. Mama would come home and say, “Nigger, you are crazy. Why’d you wanna do that?” I had a huge red Afro. My mother hated it, but she didn’t make me cut it. At one point I took a tape measure to it, and it was seventeen inches deep. It was so big that it would flop in the middle, so I finally cut it.
I also smoked my first joint when I was ten. My friend Albert had stolen it from his brother, June Bug. We went up the street to the new tract home development they were building, where we sat on this box and smoked it. We giggled endlessly for about six straight hours, busting up about everything. We were in heaven. From that day on, I was hooked. But as a mere ten-year-old it was difficult to finance my pot smoking. I didn’t know what to do. Then I came up with the idea of collecting cans and bottles for coin redemption. My sister and I would scour the neighborhood with a big plastic bag collecting them. The neighbors loved the fact that we were helping to clean up the neighborhood. “Such good little children,” they’d say! Little did they know what we were spending it on.
We were terrors. We had a clubhouse in Albert’s garage, where we would smoke our weed and listen to music. We used to have sleepouts in the backyard, go on stealing sprees at the drugstore, and hang out on the corner under the streetlight until one o’clock in the morning—all pretty innocent stuff. Sometimes we would sit in Renetta’s old Ford, parked in my mother’s front yard, and smoke pot. Sometimes we would steal the keys and take off driving. We almost wrecked the car, but it was a good way to learn how to drive.
With pot I’d found what I needed to get through my horrible adolescence. Because I felt I was just biding my time, I needed something to placate me and help me tolerate my mundane existence. To me, at the time, San Diego was Nowheresville, so I would get stoned and daydream about moving to New York and becoming a star. In those days pot was a godsend. Of course, I don’t feel that way anymore.
Most of my teenage years and my twenties were spent stoned on pot, but I’m not interested in being stoned now. I want to be there for myself. Eventually I learned how to get high naturally without doing drugs, because the truth is that you have it all inside of you, all the highs and all the lows.
From kindergarten to sixth grade I was in the same school, Alphonso Horton Elementary. It was a block from my house. In seventh grade my mother said it was okay for me to go to the children’s theater at Balboa Park, and I started taking acting lessons there. I loved it so much I started taking drama in junior high too.
I was already quite popular at school because I was never anonymous. Everybody always knew who I was. I had a unique name, so in roll call it was always, “Who’s RuPaul?” I also had freckles, which definitely made me different from most other kids in my school, and I was also very feminine looking. From being around girls all the time I acted feminine too, and was continually being mistaken for a girl. So, I already had something of a name for myself as an androgynous enigma.
When ninth grade rolled around I decided to make something of it. At school they had a thing called the Breakfast Club. For an hour in the morning the cafeteria was turned into a disco before classes started. For breakfast you could buy chocolate milk, donuts, and chips, and they cleared out the tables so you could dance. It was the perfect way to get the kids to school on time. At the time, the bump was really big, and everybody was bumping to death—double bumping, regular bumping, electric bumping, every kind of bumping. Now I knew I could bump, but there was a part of me that was reluctant to shine, to assume “the position”—I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. So I used to sit on the sidelines and watch my classmates boogie down. But on the other hand, there was another part of me, a bigger part of me, that did want to assume the position, that did want the attention, and that’s what gave me the nerve to join in. I decided to make my debut with a new dance from L.A. called the Crypt walk. Apart from myself and this girl called Michelle, no one knew how to do it. So one morning I grabbed her and said, “Let’s dance!”
This was the first time I ever danced at the Breakfast Club. And everybody parted the way as we were doing it, and I could hear them all whispering, “Oh my God, they’re doing that new dance called the Crypt walk!” Olivia Newton John did it in her TV specials and in Xanadu. It’s a very basic simple step, just like putting one foot behind the other, but at the time, coming out of the bump, it was revolutionary.
So that year I broke into the Breakfast Club scene, and went from being a freak to being a super-freak—and a popular one at that; I was voted Best Dancer of the year and Best Afro of the year. I look back on it now and realize—not to sound too grandiose about it—that I was just answering the call of the Universe, simply saying, “I accept my destiny!”
Once you do that, your life can flow like a river.
After the ninth grade I went to Patrick Henry High School. It was an open campus and you could sit outside. I do not exaggerate when I say that I never went to one class while I was there. Annette Bening was going there too, and I suppose had I gone to class I might have met her, married her, and she’d be having my babies instead of Warren’s! But, instead, for three months I smoked pot, ditched class, and went to lunch. Then one day on the bus the vice principal got on and said something to me and I gave him a piece of my mind. He checked my records, saw that I hadn’t been to classes, and said, “You go back to where you come from.”
The one thing I knew I could not do was go back to where I came from. I was fourteen years old, more awkward than ever, and feeling more like an alien than ever before. Where was my UFO to take me home? My only refuge was in bong hits and television, and I did lots of both. I was changing fast, and something had to give.
My sister Renetta would prove to be my salvation.
I grew up in a house that was all girls. Surprise! I have three sisters and we all have the same initials: Renetta Ann Charles, Renae Ann Charles, and Rosalind Annette Charles. I once asked my mother why she did that, and she said it was because we were all “Real Ass Crazies.”
My mother and Renae were always up against each other. Rozy is the stubborn one, and Renetta was always my mother’s favorite. Even though Renae and Renetta were the twins, Renetta was my soul sister—we really were the twins. Rozy who is a year younger than me taught me how to tie my shoes, but it was Renetta who taught me how to walk the runway, having been a graduate of the Barbizon school of modeling. She was so excited about having a baby brother. Once she was baby-sitting me while our parents were out and decided to give me a bath. After the bath I would not stop crying, no matter what she did. When my parents got home they realized that in putting me into the bath she had broken my arm! She was heartbroken and felt so bad. Every time my dad has a few drinks he brings up that time I was in the hospital, just three months old. His eyes well with tears as he tells how it broke his heart to see his little Bunjo—his nickname for me—laid up with a broken arm.
Then when I was four I saw Diana Ross and the Supremes singing “Baby Love” on the Ed Sullivan show. It wasn’t their first time on, but my first time seeing them. It was love at first sight. I remember saying to myself, “There, that one there, the one in the middle, that’s me!” I recognized her energy as my energy. She looked so happy, so radiantly happy to be there, and it just blew me away. She had it. She was the girl with something extra. The other two girls were lovely, but they did not have the effect that Diana had on me. Immediately afterwards I went out to the garage, scrunched my shoulders up, bared all of my teeth, and started singing “Baby Love.” All the time thi
nking to myself, “I love her! I love her!” I was in ecstasy. It was nothing short of a vision. My experience in seeing Diana was a landmark for me, in the same way that it was for many other people. I’ve heard tell that when Oprah saw her she said, “Colored girl on television!Colored girl on television!” What I knew right away, and at that precise moment, was that I wanted to be a big star. And as fate would have it, my mother went to see a psychic around that time who told her that I was going to be famous. From then on I knew what my mission in life was.
I always felt lucky having two older sisters. Being seven years older they were a world unto themselves and seemed to know so much about everything. In fact it was my twin sisters who turned me on to pop culture. They told me about Cybill Shepherd, who at that time was the big teen model for Seventeen magazine. She was everywhere. She was the Kodak / Noxema / Coppertone / Maybelline spokesperson. She was the girl. They told me about Sonny and Cher, and that Cher never ever wore dresses. At the time that was revolutionary. They told me about the Motown myths; how one of the Temptations had pulled a gun on Berry Gordy, and that Diana Ross had had his baby.
Over the years they taught me so much. They were the ones who told me about Sylvester and the Cockettes. That was the first time I’d heard of Sylvester, and that he was a drag queen. For Christmas my sisters would give me books about Hollywood. They couldn’t give me or tell me enough. I stored up every detail, and little did they know that they were helping to create a monster. Thanks to their example I became a magazine junkie. I used to go up to Thrifty’s drugstore and spend hours just looking at magazines like Photoplay, Rona Barrett’s Hollywood, and anything that had to do with showbiz. It was at the time Desi Arnaz, Jr. and Liza Minnelli were going out. They were the hot couple. To this day I can still pick up a magazine and be totally entertained—doubly so, if there is a picture of me inside (although to tell you the truth every queen’s preference is to be on the cover rather than on the inside).
In their early teens Renae and Renetta were part of a clique of about seven or eight girls their age.
They all hung out at Deborah and Aletha’s house, and I used to tag along too. The thing about their place was that they had a record player. Because their mother was a maid in LaJolla she would be gone all day, so they would go over there, play all the latest records, and smoke cigarettes. Every day in the summer of sixty-seven they would have a dance party after summer school, and we would go up there and dance to “Grazin’ in the Grass” by Hugh Masakela and “I Think I’m Going in Circles” by the Friends of Distinction, “Uptight” by Stevie Wonder, and “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells. That’s where I learned how to cha-cha and boogaloo. I just picked it up by hanging out with them. I’ve always had a sense of rhythm, so it just came naturally. We would also make up dance routines and teach them to other people. That’s when I realized that girls were much more fun than boys. Meanwhile, my sisters were always trying to get rid of me because I was the kid brother. But, honey, there was no getting rid of me.
Increasingly, I was getting in touch with my feminine side shall we say. I would roll my hair in rollers and use my mother’s makeup. I tried to do it in a natural way so no one could tell. Marcus Allen—who went to my school and became a famous football star—once came up to me and said, “You put a roller in your hair, didn’t you?” He always knew he was going to be a football star, and I suppose I always knew I was going to be a rock and roll star. I didn’t see that I had anything to hide, so I told him that yes, I had put rollers in my hair. What of it? He just muttered something about me being a sissy and walked away. The kids would always tease me about being a sissy and a queer, but they were never vicious.
When The Partridge Family came out, I put together a band in our neighborhood. I was the motivator. I went over to our summer clubhouse and sketched out the game plan for the new band. The other kids were never as enthusiastic about it as I was, and I could never get everyone together for rehearsals. One day I wrote a song called “Love, Love, Love,” but the next week, before I could get the band together to learn it, I found out that Bobby Sherman had already released a song called “Love, Love, Love.” That was a little depressing.
My sisters’ pop culture lessons came to an abrupt end when they were fifteen and ran away from home, leaving me and Rozy behind with Mama. They were having trouble with my mother because they were too big for their britches: just typical teenagers who had a mother with a temper. They got caught and went to Hillcrest Receiving Home, which was a halfway house for juveniles. They lived there for a while. Then they got a foster parent, actually their high school counselor Alfreda Smith, and lived with her for about six months while they finished their high school education.
When she was sixteen, my sister Renetta started going out with my brother-in-law to be, Laurence. Laurence was a huge influence on my life, because he was the bridge between my neighborhood and the rest of the world. Laurence was ambitious, more ambitious than anyone I’d ever met before. He was the vice president of his class, and his parents were very upstanding citizens within the black community. He came up to meet my mother and said he wanted to date Renetta. Of course she cussed him out, but he didn’t back off. He was carrying a briefcase, wore a suit, and seemed very together. He said that his goal was to be an executive, and he sure was pumping an executive realness look. My mother was very impressed with his stick-with-it-ness, and they became friends. Once he got in good graces with my mom he would take us all up to LaJolla, which is where all the rich people lived, in his ‘65 Impala low rider. His passion was looking at beautiful homes, and his dream was to live in one.
So, on Sunday afternoons we would cruise the streets looking at the most expensive ones.
After dating for a year, Laurence and Renetta got married. She was only seventeen. My mother gave her consent, but only to spite my father who didn’t want them to get married. Laurence got a scholarship to UCSD, and they lived together on campus in student housing. His plan was to become a lawyer.
Laurence also had a big record collection and was amusic aficionado. He worked at the college radio station doing some small-time promoting. Once he took me and Rozy up to L.A. to watch a taping of Soul Train. Later that day we went into a studio on Hollywood Boulevard where we met Little Anthony who was recording there. He had been a big star in the early sixties with his group Little Anthony and the Imperials, and was attempting a comeback. My sister and I were very excited to be in Hollywood. We had on matching outfits: very-high-waisted bellbottoms in ice cream blue, flared from the thigh down. Our pants were known as Fred Astaires because they had a big cuff on them, and with my big Afro I looked like Foster Sylver of the Sylvers. This weird promoter-producer type sidled up to me and said that I should be a singer. He had a big flashy diamond on his pinkie, and there was a sleazy air about him. That was my first taste of showbiz.
In many ways Laurence was really my ticket out of San Diego. He was a major influence on me. He educated me so much in terms of how to speak properly and how to articulate my thoughts. He would constantly correct what I was saying and grilled me like a sergeant. He was socialized in a different world than the ghetto life I grew up in.
He and Renetta became surrogate parents to me. In fact I even went to live with them. When I was kicked out of Patrick Henry High School (the school I had gone to without attending a single class), Renetta said, “You need to change your environment, why don’t you come live with us out in El Cajon?” They were living in a ritzy area in a house with a swimming pool, three-car garage, the works. So I did. They had just adopted a baby, Scotty. Scotty and I were kindred spirits starting out at this new house on a new life together.
I went to Valhalla High School in El Cajon, and of the two thousand students there, I was one of five blacks. That was total culture shock for me, the first of many. I’d never lived around white people before or kids whose parents had money. That was the first time I really broke into a new clique. Those fifteen-year-olds were gnarly cat
s, and I taught myself how to drink beer, even though I hated it. I realized my ability to be a chameleon, to deliver what I felt people wanted from me. I became close with about three or four of those boys who would come over to Laurence’s house where they could drink and do bong hits. Recently I saw the movie Dazed and Confused. It was a trip, because the movie was exactly what my life was like at Valhalla High—dazed and confused.
DRAG TIPS
- Be sweet; there are enough bitchy queens.
- Never let people see you eat.
- Never respond to someone who refers to you as “Slim”—as in “Yo, Slim!”
- If someone clocks you and starts to dis you, pay them no mind.
- Matte your face at least every 30 minutes.
- Never wear flat shoes.
- Posture is essential. Elongate your neck. Straighten your spine.
- Never perm your own hair.