by RuPaul
World of Wonder was the production company started by the Pop Tarts. I knew that their pop dreams had crashed and burned thanks to a couple of rotten record contracts. But at least they had gotten the record contracts in the first place. They had also notched up a couple of publishing deals and had gotten disco diva Dan Hartman to produce their record. So, thinking that there might be something for me there, I started sounding them out about management, and soon we had an agreement in place.
I knew it was a new chapter of my story, because I was around people who were making it happen on a real level and not on a bullshit level, drunk in a club saying, "I'm writing a screenplay and I'm gonna fly to the moon tomorrow." World of Wonder was a place where it actually happened: "We shoot next week, you gotta be there at such and such a time." With World of Wonder, it was the first time I was sober, ready to work, and I felt like it was a chance for me to really make it.
The hardest thing of all was that in the course of getting sober I inevitably distanced myself from all the people and the places I was hanging out with. I had to do it, but they weren't having any of it. Maybe they felt abandoned, betrayed. Maybe they felt threatened when they saw that I was really trying to make a career for myself and go for it with my music. "Oooh, child, who she think she is? She thinks she's the passionate one." And so when I changed my life in a positive way, maybe that sent a message to some of my friends loud and clear that it was probably time for them to clean up their act too. Of course, people generally don't like wake-up calls. No one likes to get out of bed in the morning until they're good and ready, and even then it may not be a pretty sight. I had already had my wake-up call with the fact that the life I was leading and the stuff I was doing just wasn't working. There was also the success of Deee-Lite. When they made it, I was like, "Hey—they were supposed to make it after I made it." I admired them, but in my mind I was before them in the queue for international stardom. Unless I got my act together I was going to miss my turn—and there was no way in hell I was going to let that happen.
Skipping the drugs and the drink was easy, but having no friends—that was the hardest part. I felt like a divorced wife. Mind you, there wasn't anything I could do except ride it out. I had been in that exact same situation before. When I was a kid in San Diego, I'd go to the beach. When I got back home the kids would say, "What are you doing going to the beach? You must think you white or something." People in my neighborhood didn't go to the beach, it wasn't ours. But there I was venturing outside of my area to do something different—something I've done my whole life.
For the first time in my life I made a real effort at making it happen. I'd always taken my creativity for granted, really. I'd always subconsciously thought, "This is mine," but now I made a concentrated effort on really making it happen. I figured I had enough time to invest a year in something and make it really good, and so just after the new year I started writing songs with Jimmy. The first song we wrote was "Under the Influence of Love," and the second was "Prisoner of Love"— the song that ultimately got me my record contract.
Meanwhile, I was supposed to be out promoting Larry's record, "I Got That Feeling," but the record wasn't doing much. When I did track dates I was wearing a hot pink bodysuit with tight-fitting hood and matching ostrich trim. I looked like Gumby on a Pepto-Bismol diet. After the shows people would say, "That's great, but what's happening with Starrbooty? What's happening with your drag career?" At that point I felt that if I was ever going to become a star, I'd have to be androgynous or whatever.
Anything but a drag queen. I wasn't fighting it, but I did think that beyond an underground downtown audience, drag simply wouldn't translate. I had no idea that what worked at the Pyramid would work just as well in a massive stadium, or in a Hollywood movie. With the exception of Divine and Sylvester, no one had carried it off, and even then, for all their groundbreaking success, they seemed to make it only so far. Sure, I'd done my movies in drag, but I never thought of presenting myself as the premier drag queen for mass consumption, for the MTV kids who go to the mall.
But that was the message people were sending me, and then suddenly it clicked. I thought to myself, You know, these people want to see you in drag. I know in retrospect it must seem like, "Duh," but so often the most obvious things, the things that everybody else can see, are the ones that we have the hardest time seeing ourselves. I looked around at my favorite stars and realized that they were drag queens too. In fact every celebrity is a drag queen. They put on glamourous personas and masks for their audience. At the same time I realized that there wasn't an out and out drag queen who is a total star. So why not just take it over the top completely? Why not just pump glamour to the hundredth degree? And why not have the most unlikely person of all do it—a big old black man? I thought people could get off on that. So I said to myself, "I'm going to wear the longest legs, the highest shoes, the shortest hot pants, the biggest hair, and ... show as many teeth as possible."
A supermodel was born!
And so you see I had to go all around the block to find out that what I should be doing was right there for me all along. Tres Oz.
Ever since the day I made that decision, everything fell into place. Well, almost.
I continued to spend a lot of time at World of Wonder: They were sending out my demo tapes and producing a late night series called "Manhattan Cable" for British TV. While we waited for the deal offers to pour in, I made some cash money by doing some roving reports on the streets of Manhattan: interviewing the Rockettes and doing a segment on the new black Barbie doll, Shani. But my first assignment was transvestite hookers.
Manhattan's transvestite hookers hung out on the streets where I lived, virtually next door to the Anvil and the Vault, two sex clubs. They were a nice bunch of girls catering to the bridge and tunnel crowd, straight men who would come in from New Jersey looking for the girl with something extra—about twelve inches extra. I got to know many of them and found that I identified with them very strongly. In fact, I felt that in terms of what I was doing and what I wanted to do, I was one of them. When I was doing Queen of Manhattan, I was basically a classy hooker—sort of. I had to schmooze people, I had to put out for people. People I didn't necessarily like. And what is a pop star other than a hooker? When I finally got the hit record I was dreaming of, I wasn't actually going to sell myself body and soul, but the more I thought about it, that was exactly what I was going to have to do: I was going to have to sell my ass in every way possible—in print, on video, on television, on radio—whore myself for the sake of the record.
I was going to have to bow and scrape and kiss ass to a bunch of assholes, so, really, what was the difference? They were doing the same thing, except that it was much more direct, much more honest. Hookers—transsexual or otherwise—really are the unsung heroes of our society. Although they are spurned and treated like trash, they have tremendous power, and I have nothing but awe and admiration for them.
I'd never actually been one per se, although I have had a couple of experiences. Once, after getting off work at the Red Zone on Fifty-fourth Street, I hailed a cab to take me to the World, down on the Lower East Side. As luck would have it, the driver was a foot worshipper. As I got in he said that if I would put my foot over the seat while he jacked off he would give me the cab ride for free. For a career girl working in the city on a fixed budget I was never going to pass up the opportunity to save a dollar—nine dollars and fifty cents to be exact— although it took a little longer to reach my destination.
To do my assignment I decided it would be a good idea for me to go "undercover," and disguise myself as one of them—what a stretch of the imagination. Somehow I managed to pull together an appropriate outfit, and a few hours after midnight on a sultry summer night, we hit the streets. In search of meat.
First we began with some general shots of my pounding the streets working the look and feel of a whore. Then we decided to get some interviews. I would run up to the girls, explain what we were doing, an
d ask them if I could interview them. Once I had managed to persuade them to speak to us (and get a signed release), I waved the camera crew over. We got a lot of great stuff. I mean, come on, a bunch of drag queens and a camera crew, what more could you ask for? After we got a bunch of good sound bites, including a pretty in-depth description of a famous male comic who enjoyed boy/girls, all we needed was a sexy ending to the story.
"Why not," I suggested, "get a shot of me approaching a car as a hooker?" Seemed the obvious thing to do, really. As the cameraman and crew ran across Fourteenth Street, I positioned myself in the middle of the intersection. A black car came cruising up the street, and it slowed down right alongside of me. This was perfect. I couldn't resist taking it further, and decided to get him to roll down his window and engage in a little chitchat. So I bent down, positioning myself so that I wouldn't block the window from the camera. Sure enough the guy rolls down his window just as I had planned. What I didn't plan was that this guy was the most gorgeous man I had seen in a lifetime. He was a corrections officer. Twenty-three years old, from Yonkers, New York. Hot Italian—mama mia, what a spicy meatball. Totally KFC. He began rubbing his crotch.
I explained that I was a reporter for British TV doing a story on transvestite hookers and that we were filming the final shot. He didn't believe me—who would? As I was trying to point out the camera crew, he was telling me that my legs were gorgeous, and that if I were a thorough reporter I would get in the car and do some in-depth investigation. Of course I resisted. After all, I was a journalist not a hooker. But, trust me, this man was a god—an Italian stallion. Then he said that a good reporter wouldn't pass up a lead like this, and he started to unzip...
By now the camera crew must have got more than enough material, but I started thinking to myself, "Gee, if I get into the car and it drives off, now wouldn't that be the perfect ending to my report" I grabbed the door handle and hopped into the car, sacrificing myself for the story, like any good journalist.
As we drove off, the camera crew walked into the center of the street and then, when the car did not stop and I did not get out, they started running after the car. Meanwhile, I had my hands full with the driver.
It was a quick ride around the block, although the camera crew didn't think so. When I finally got back, I bought them all breakfast with the thirty-five-dollar bonus I had just earned, so they weren't too upset. To this day it cracks me up to think that my debut on national British television as a reporter ends with me turning a trick.
A few weeks later the phone rang. My demo tape had landed on the desk of Monica Lynch, the president of Tommy Boy records. Within moments of listening to the tape she had picked up the phone and announced her intention of signing me to the label. I was stunned. Tommy Boy was, after all, a hard-core rap label; what could they want with a big black drag queen?
The negotiations went on for the requisite number of months, and during that time Wigstock swung around. Wigstock is the drag queen version of Woodstock. It is an annual all-day downtown extravaganza held every Labor Day weekend, hosted by its founder the "Lady" Bunny.
All the drag queens get together in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, and later at the Christopher Street pier once it outgrew the park, for a festival of peace, love, and hair grease. My first Wigstock had been in 1989 when I did Whitney, "So Emotional" before a medium-sized crowd. But in the intervening years the festival had grown into quite an extravaganza attended by drag queens from all over the country and all over the world. The crowds had grown to tens of thousands, with dozens of news crews from CNN to the BBC hovering in the wings. Wigstock 1991 would prove to be a particularly important gig for me because Monica from Tommy Boy announced that she was going to come down and check me out.
Now the day before that particular Wigstock I moved out of Nelson's old place, where I had been living for the past year with Lahoma and Larry Tee, into an apartment with my new friend P.J. on Fifth Street and Avenue C. When Nelson died the whole downstairs of his three-story house was a warehouse of stuff from twelve years of junk collecting. Boxes and boxes of stuff. I had moved in there and made a home for myself. I went through the boxes of stuff he had left behind, stuff that no one wanted. Some I kept—like an old stereo—and most I gave away. I gave things to everybody: tripods, ties, shoes. Then, when I finally moved out, I brought this air conditioner with me that I found under the stairs. I suppose I shouldn't have taken it—but no one had been using it when I found it. I didn't think that I was stealing it, but that was the word that went around, that I had stolen their air conditioner.
But it wasn't really about the air conditioner, no one cared two cents about that old thing. What they cared about was someone stepping out on their own, taking control of their life. Whenever that happens it's always the same old story: "Oh, you think you're too good for us." The air conditioner was just the lightning rod for everyone's pent-up resentment.
Because there I was, at Wigstock on Labor Day 1991, waiting to go on stage, knowing that so much hung on my performance. But waiting backstage to go on and do my number no one said a word to me. Not one. Not even the stage manager who was normally in my face about his poetry readings. And so that I could be in no doubt about the hostile vibes I was being sent, seconds before I went on Jack, my old heart throb, spoke up and said, in true Ru monster tradition, "Everybody say 'Thief!'" in a cruel parody of my trademark saying, "Everybody say 'Love.'"
"What?" I said. I simply could not believe that I had heard what I thought I had heard.
Like the kids calling me a sissy all those years back, he was not shy about saying the same thing twice.
"Everybody say 'Thief!'" he hollered.
It really took me aback. But there was no time. Suddenly I heard my name being announced on stage, and as I stepped out to the opening bars of "Everybody Say 'Love,'" I remembered thinking, "I'm gonna show these motherfuckers!" And that's what I did, even though Jack's remark was still ringing in my ears.
I was featuring a prototype supermodel look—some glamour but still the hooker. A cheap, cheap, cheap, red sequined dress, a big blond Ivana Trump updo, and huge black and white op art earrings. For the show I changed into a shiny black plastic raincoat, which I removed at the beginning of my second number to reveal a white bathing suit with a waist cincher that was cutting me in half like a pair of scissors (no pain, no gain is always the golden rule).
Coming off stage it was just as icy. No one had a word to say. Fortunately, I had my posse there, my new buddy P.J. and his friends. But I didn't have too much time after the show to stew in my own juice, because we were all selling T-shirts. I learned early on that you make your money in concessions, not ticket sales. Even as a little bitty drag queen I knew it was all about merchandising. I sold the postcards, my books, T-shirts. It's all for sale, baby, we're all born to be sold. That's what pop culture is—one big marketplace. If you're gonna be out there signing autographs, why not make it something that you can sell?
I stood outside the backstage area hawking them until they were all gone. Appropriately, the slogan on the shirts was "Everybody Say 'Love.'"
At the end of the day I knew that I was on my way to getting beyond all of the high school politics—at least that particular high school, the nightclub scene, where "high" is an operative word. High school prepares you for the rest of your life because if you can survive that, you can survive anything. Like I've always said, life is no different from high school: the cliques, the politics, the petty jealousies— it's just the same old shit in a different wrapper, that's all. Although I hadn't done anything wrong, I brought the air conditioner back.
Most of the people who snubbed me at Wigstock have since come back to me and said, "You were fierce and fearless, we knew you were going to make it all along." Although they couldn't bring themselves to say it at the time, they really did believe I was going to make it. They knew it, I knew it, we all knew it. And their support and that energy—however it was expressed—really did help put
me where I am today.
Although Starrbooty had always been a fashion model turned secret agent, Larry Tee noticed how in recent months I had been working the glamourous supermodel aspect of the character. He called me up and suggested I do a prequel to that story, and call it Supermodel. I was wary at first because of all we had been through in the past. But a good idea is a good idea, and this time he was right on it. My writing partner Jimmy Harry and I took that and wrote Supermodel. My favorite line is rhyming "savoir faire" with "million dollar derriere."
When we were done, we knew we had tapped into the Zeitgeist. It was just at that time that Naomi, Linda, Christie, and Co. were being worshipped as superstars with the adoration normally reserved for rock gods. I think that it had all to do with the death of the great stars of the silver screen. Think about it, there aren't anymore really glamourous film stars. Today's female stars are working women, or else the love interest of male gods like Schwarzenegger and all the other action heroes— that is where the focus is in movies. The mantle of glamour has been taken from the women and given to the men. The women toil in their shadows, plain and ordinary-looking. So that transition has left a void. It is a void for drop-dead, impossible, over-the-top glamour. Supermodels fill that void. The only thing they have to do is work the runway, sweetie, and refuse to get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars. As they sashay down the narrow strip, they don't have to say anything, because words are superfluous when you're working the pure essence of glamour. It's powerful stuff, and we all need a little bit of undiluted glamour in our lives.