by RuPaul
Other times I would come on as a guest, talking or showing videos that I made myself. At one point they did a spinoff show called Dancerama USA. I got a big break on that show with a segment called "Learn a Dance with RuPaul." It was a new wave American Bandstand.
Gradually, as the Now Explosion warmed up to me, I would do things with them. It was during one of these special appearances that I stumbled unwittingly on my future—although it would take almost another ten years for me to claim it.
As a gimmick the Now Explosion had a wedding in one of their shows, and Lahoma and Lady Clare got married on stage. All their friends who were guys dressed up as bridesmaids, and all their friends who were girls dressed up as guys. Not to state the obvious, I dressed up as a girl. Believe it or not it was the first time I did real drag in a dress, heels, and with hair; I had never worn tits before, I'd never shaved my legs before, or even worn a wig before.
Honey, the impact it had on people was amazing. But the impact it had on me was even more amazing. I honestly didn't know I had a great pair of legs until I got into drag and slipped on those pumps. Even after this first drag experience, it took years of experimentation before I landed in the glamour drag that started paying my bills. If in my mind's eye I always knew I was going to be a star, I never thought it was going to be as a drag queen. The thought never crossed my mind.
Around the same time I started putting up posters all over Atlanta. It really made me famous there 'cause no one else (apart from the Now Explosion) was doing posters.
I took pictures of myself and blew them up by Xeroxing them. I didn't have a budget for air-brushing, so I would do it myself by taking a pencil eraser to shape up the outlines, white out those unsightly marks, and, using my own natural artistry, enhance the eyes. Then I would slap on a slogan like "RuPaul Is Red Hot" or "RuPaul Is Everything," make 200 copies, and plaster Midtown armed with a paint brush and a bucket of wheat paste.
Generally the slogans were borrowed from other places. One of my favorites was from the Donna Summer album Donna Summer. It read: "This is the hottest summer on record." Isn't that genius? For Donna Summer, the hottest summer on record. Another of my favorites, "The future belongs to those who can hear it coming," was on David Bowie's Heroes LP. I took that and made it, "The future belongs to those who can smell it coming." I've always loved clever advertising slogans, like the ones Samantha came up with on the TV show Bewitched.
Funny enough, some of the people I have shared this detail of my career with have been quite shocked and said, "What, you didn't make them up yourself?" Of course not! The point about pop culture is that so much of it is borrowed. There's very little that's brand new. Instead, creativity today is a kind of shopping process—picking up on and sampling things from the world around you, things you grew up with. That's very much my modus operandi. If you knew all the references, you could deconstruct one of my performances and place every look, every word, and every move I do. I know all the references, and watching myself on tape I love to sit with friends and unstitch (to their amazement) the patchwork of my performance, identifying this bit from here and this bit from there. I really see myself as a sampling machine. Even the supermodel drag queen I would later become is a kind of Frankenstein's monster—a collage made up of bits and pieces from old television shows, copies of Vogue magazine, and advertisements. I think at this late stage in the twentieth century it's almost all been done, and everything now is a kind of rehash. My life and my work is really just a question of filling in the blanks and coloring by numbers.
The posters were a huge success and helped establish me in Atlanta. By that summer I had gotten enough money together to get my own apartment in Midtown with my friend Cathy, who later changed her name to Carson, who later changed her name to Cabbage—it was a punk thing. Shortly after Cabbage and I moved in together, I met up with other kids who had moved to Mid-town Atlanta from the sticks of suburbia in search of something. Like John Ingle, who would later become renowned as the "Lady" Bunny. She was straight off the bus from Chattanooga, and without doubt the sharpest wit I ever met. He had me in stitches. Like Floydd, who was Bryan Chambers then, but fresh out of high school and looking for trouble. Although Floydd is one of my dearest friends today, we didn't really like each other at first because we were both know-it-alls. The question would come up, "What movie was it when Bette Davis says 'What a dump'?" And we'd both simultaneously say "Beyond the Forest" and look at each other thinking, "I can't stand this guy."
RuPAUL'S FAVORITE DRAG QUEEN MOVIES
- Mahogany: I live for the modeling montage.
- Paris Is Burning: The film that inspired Supermodel (You Better Work).
- Valley of the Dolls: The rise and fall of three queens and their hair.
- Funny Face: Kay Thompson is brilliant—think pink!
- Rocky Horror Picture Show: Don't dream it, be it.
- Torch Song: Joan Crawford in blackface with red hair!
- Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: Fun-loving road picture.
- What a Way to Go: Shirley MacLaine has a million Edith Head costumes.
- Cleopatra Jones: At 12 I wanted to be Tamara Dobson.
- Mommie Dearest: Ups and downs of being a queen.
- All About Eve: Bette Davis—Strong as a man, made like a woman.
- A Streetcar Named Desire: Misunderstood queen caught in reality.
- Vertigo: Girlfriend gets clocked.
- Auntie Mame: Life is a banquet and most drag queens are stuffing their faces.
- Stage Door: Queens trying to make it on the Great White Way.
I would wear makeup and spike my hair in various new wave styles. The first wig I ever got was from Lady Clare in the Now Explosion. She had tons of wigs. After she gave me one she couldn't stop—she gave me another, and another, and another. I would pile them up and wear all of them at once in an Elvira-type thing. It wasn't officially drag yet. It was punk or gender fuck drag. I wasn't being fashionable, I was being hooty; bad wigs and thrift store clothes and size-ten Candies, with my feet hanging all out the back. In my mind I was hot, so I was hot, and you know what? Men would love it! Men don't care, they really don't, as long as you have the stuff on they don't care. They're really into the paraphernalia, the accoutrements.
And I was fearless. The South has always been a hotbed of racial tension and a stronghold for the Ku Klux Klan. From time to time they march, heavily protected by the National Guard, and from time to time everybody else marches against them, also heavily protected by the National Guard. Decked out in all my grunge drag—jockstrap, fishnets, high heels, and a humungous Mohawk—I went on a march in Forsythe County. When I told people I was going, everybody thought I was mad. If anyone was going to get lynched by the Klan everybody thought I was the number-one candidate. But, you know, while marching up the street, I looked over the shoulder of the National Guardsmen and into the eyes of one of the Klansmen. And our eyes locked. I realized then that many of them probably liked Michael Jackson's Thriller album, Haagen-Dazs ice cream, and springtime in Georgia. What's the brouhaha? I understood then that my uniqueness was not just a spectacle for its own sake. When I looked that person in the eyes I realized that I was looking at myself. He had found a way to bring attention to himself and validate himself. And so had I. No matter what uniform we may be wearing, underneath it all we are all the same—unique individuals, alone, aching to belong. Ultimately, we all have more in common with each other than we don't have in common. That's all.
I started doing shows at this punk club TV Dinner, where Dick and the American Music Show crew were hanging out. It was there that I had my first hit of acid. It was incredible. I did a lot of LSD from ages twenty to thirty. Once a week. At least. It was such an easy drug to do: cheap, fun, therapeutic. I was able to see myself in this detached way and turn the volume up on my subconscious, although in the end unconscious is all I became.
I started popping pills when I was fourteen. Reds were the big things. They're barbiturates
, downers, and they make you feel like you're on heroin. I remember as a kid seeing a girl OD on reds in the park. Still, I never thought twice about taking pills. I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. "Feeling down? Take a pill!" Of course anyone could be forgiven for thinking that, just watch TV; if you have indigestion, a headache, feeling fat or simply tired—take a pill! Taking drugs is a symptom of something else. Simply eliminating the drugs does not eliminate the something else, and usually that something else is you. You feel insecure, you feel like crap, and you want out. Drugs are a handy escape. If the government really wanted to stop drugs, they should not take away a person's sense of self-esteem, sense of worth, and dignity. And one more thing. When the drug issue comes up in the media, there's something that everybody knows but never owns up to: Drugs can be fun.
When it comes to drugs, you name it, I've done it. Heroin's a yucky drug—just like having some sleeping powder. It's like bad Ecstasy. I never shot up. Mercifully, sticking needles in my arm never appealed to me. Cocaine is the worst drug I've ever taken, and I particularly didn't like the evil person that came out when I was freebasing. Special K has to be a close second because it's nauseous stuff; it makes you so disoriented you can't even walk. You have to hold onto the wall. Everything's weaving. You turn a flip inside your own body, and you don't know where you are or what's going on.
You want to know the truth about drugs? You can only go one of two ways. You can go up, or you can go down. That's it. After a certain point, though, no matter what you do, what you take, you don't go anywhere, and that's when you've got to sit down and face yourself.
After a year of working the Midtown club scene with the U-Hauls, out of the blue these two high school kids, Robert Warren and Todd Butler, came to me with the idea of starting a band. So we started playing music together. We called the band Wee Wee Pole. We chose "wee wee" because it was cute, and "pole" just sort of happened. It also sort of sounds like Ru Ru Paul. We all wrote the music, and I usually wrote the lyrics.
We'd rehearse after school at Todd's parents' house. Their door was always open, and I would go over and raid their well-stocked refrigerator, which was a junk-food addict's dream.
After rehearsing for about a month we got our first gig, opening for the Now Explosion. Eventually, we became pretty popular ourselves. Throughout eighty-three we performed all over the East Coast, taking the gigs wherever we could get them. The lineup consisted of Robert on bass guitar, Todd on guitar, David Klemchek on percussion, and me on vocals. Sometimes we would have the U-Hauls up there with us.
At this point the U-Hauls had changed over to these two other girls, Chrissie and Gina. They were about 250 pounds each and five-four, and were the quintessential U-Hauls, the famous ones!
The sound was new wave tribal melodies. At the time my look was very Bow Wow Wow. I was wearing a Mohawk and did jungle looks, like Tarzan. I wore a loincloth and war paint. The show was designed to entertain, Vegas-style. There were costume changes, choreographed dances, and a gimmick I stole from Prince's group, the Time. A valet would come on stage between numbers with a mirror so I could fix my makeup and then run off. During the numbers themselves I would hoot and holler all over the stage and do all these wild things, like run out into the audience with this big stuffed pole. About twelve inches in diameter, this big round thing was our wee wee pole, our mascot. It was brown and it had flowers on it (it was actually part of a couch). Once I went out into the audience waving this thing around and knocked a table over. Later I learned that someone's foot had been broken when the table fell. I remember playing with Wee Wee Pole at a club in Birmingham, Alabama called the Cavern.
The only black person in the club was me! I remember making comments about it, but the audience loved it. On another occasion a couple met at our show and later got married—such was the power of the wee wee pole.
In September that year Wee Wee Pole traveled to New York and performed at Danceteria, thanks to Ruth Polsky, who booked talent at the club. I met her at a party the Now Explosion had given for New Order. They were on tour, Ruth was their tour manager, and they all took a liking to me. At their urging Ruth said, "If you ever want to play New York, give me a call." So I did, and she gave us a gig. I became her pet project, and she was very good to me.
After we played New York, we went in the studio and recorded some songs—"Tarzan," "In My Neighborhood," and "Body Heat." But then in December we broke up. It was perfectly amicable. Robert's thinking was you should only be in a band for a year, and if it doesn't happen in that time, you should move on. Because he had been in bands before, and because he was a really good bass player, I respected what he had to say. So, he went to join another band, and eventually the songs we recorded ended up on my first album, Sex Freak.
I found myself without my band, and I said to myself what does a star do when the band breaks up? You write a book and you start making movies of course!
It so happened that Laurence had just bought a video camera, which was just what I needed to start my film career. I asked Jon Witherspoon to film me in a movie called Trilogy of Terror. It was a parody of a 1975 Karen Black TV movie, and we filmed it at his house. In the film a little blue boy statuette becomes possessed and chases me around the apartment. Jon has a collection of blue boys, so as the piece went on they started changing, getting bigger and more sinister. It was the beginning of my film career and the first of the Trilogy of Terror series. In the sequel Terror 2, I was joined by my costars Lady Bunny and Floydd. It was basically the same story as the first, but this time it was three girls in a house being chased around by an unseen sinister evil. We did it as a trailer with Dick Richards doing the voice-over. Terror 3D reunited the same team in an hour-long thriller with the three of us in a bigger house terrorized by a hatchet-faced demon and murdered one by one. Since I was the star, I was murdered last.
These films brought me a certain amount of notoriety and kept my name up in lights, but they weren't putting food on the table. So I wrote a book. You may say pamphlet, I say it's a book. I had already been making postcards of myself, which I would sell for fifty cents in clubs, and decided to take it one step further. The book was called If You Love Me Give It to Me. First I put twenty blank pieces of paper on the floor, then I put a full-page picture of myself on every other page. Then I put a picture on the cover, and a picture on the back cover, and filled in the remaining blank pages with dialogue and anecdotes. I basically went over my life story, what I believed in, my favorite things, my favorite food—everything. I sold them in clubs for two dollars apiece, and went through the first printing in an evening. It was such a hit that I went on to publish four more different titles: If You Love Me, Give It to Me One More Time, RuPaul—Your Guide to Health, Beauty and Nigger Love, New York Is a Big Fat Greasy Ho, and Freak Sex.
My books kept me fluid but not enough to prevent me from being evicted from my apartment come January of 1984. So there I was, a successful author, pop star and TV star, homeless and penniless. By that fall I had become fast friends with the new kid on the scene, Jon Ingle. He later became Bunny Hickory Dickory Dock and then, in New York, the "Lady" Bunny. We were inseparable and we were even homeless together.
FAVORITE MUSIC VIDEOS—DRAG
- Ashes to Ashes, David Bowie
- I'll Be Your Shelter, Taylor Dayne
- Show Some Respect, Tina Turner
- If I Could Turn Back Time, Cher
- Chain Reaction, Diana Ross
- So Emotional, Whitney Houston
- Running Back to You, Vanessa Williams
- My Lovin' (You 're Never Gonna Get It), En Vogue
- Love on Top of Love, Grace Jones
- Sweet and Low, Deborah Harry
During those three to four months we would roam the streets of Midtown together all night, getting into trouble with black guys, taking them behind buildings and getting them to show us their dicks. It was just horny partying around. We would say, "Can we feel it?" They'd say, "Yes," and we wo
uld just laugh and take off running. During the day we would crash in all these different places: friends' houses, abandoned cars, Piedmont Park, wherever. Being homeless is much easier when you're young. Eventually, Floydd, Bunny, and me got an apartment together at Tenth and Juniper. It became the party house.
Midtown Atlanta was probably the closest thing to Haight Ashbury I've ever seen. In the sixties and seventies it was the hub of bohemian lifestyles—hippies, rock 'n roll, the whole shebang. The area dates back to the Civil War, when it was called the Tight Squeeze because there was a drainage problem. It was a place where the misfits of the war, the lost and the wounded, would wind up. It was Misfitsville, and I fit right in. The gay community was also there, and all the artists too, because of the affordable housing. There was a go-go club called Cheetah 3, and guys would come into town, go to the club, get horny, and then look for the hookers hanging out in the vicinity. In addition to Cheetah 3, TV Dinner, Weekends, Illusions, Backstreet were all within a four-block radius. Across the way the male hustlers were up and down Cypress Street. You could get pot, you could get drugs, you could get whatever you wanted. You could even get the cops! They were not like cops in other places. They were very friendly, and you could walk down the street in drag, no problem. I tell you, it was happening.
New York still beckoned, and so that summer I put together a revue called "RuPaul is Red Hot." I got Floydd—who was called Felicia at this point—Bunny, Opal Fox, and the Lady Pecan as costars. We went up to New York and did our show at the Pyramid.