RuPaul -The House Of Hidden Meanings

Here it is – it crept up on me while I was doing my own stuff but now I own the shop-spoiled copy from the book-shop bargain-bin and have had New Year time to meet it head-on - the Rupaul…. well, can we call it an autobiography? Or is it a memoir? Neither really, but the former is nearer the mark as memoirs are about the rich residue of memory and this is, in its very American way, a narrative, a life-so-far. And we have to give it our time because the Rupaul thing is, so far, so big that, like the antics of the current POTUS, it will impinge on many more people than music fans or drag afficianados. How long that will be true I can’t say with certainty, but we had better seize the Ru moment for what it has to tell us about…. America? Ourselves? Or just Ru? Almost inevitably it’s about a particular moment, - the moment when Rupaul Andre Charles became Rupaul, - when something coalesced. We read on through this book waiting for the pay-off – when we get to the “go”, when his definition of success is matched by events. For your reference it’s on Page 173 that we are told about Rupaul’s realization that he has to become a particular kind of she. There have been other girl-manifestations on the way, but that is the moment. From then on we focus on the quest for “naughty-lite” driven forward by a “yearning for levity”. Success comes. Not too far ahead, on Page 196 to be exact, Ru can celebrate the progress from living-room (showing off to his mother) to screen (watching himself with her in her living-room as he performs on MTV). And we might here want to recall child-psychologist Donald Winnicott’s idea that at some point children experience a loss of omnipotence, a transition which requires a lot of good parenting. Some of us accept that loss and some of us spend much of the rest of our lives trying to recover omnipotence. Greetings, Rupaul! Some parts of that quest are interesting, and just occasionally they exceed themselves, - “A window opened. I stepped through it.” As we read on we may begin to reflect on how “America” the story is. I don’t know about you but in this historical moment (another moment…!) I have had quite enough of “America” and its striving to be Great Again. It’s not a good time to be reading about an American phenomenon, but herein they are, all the cultural references without which no American story can be told – the television programmes, the cars, the diner meals, the clothes, the snacks, the tracks on the radio, - all named and paraded in detail as the very substance of growing up. Early on the boy Ru has a small epiphany. What you call something – in this case a “picnic” – , he realizes, imparts a certain magic to it. It’s all about naming things and the book is full of named places and commodities. Later he is musing with a friend on what lies behind named reality – all those hidden meanings. Wait a minute, isn’t the book called……? The American life-story is a cliché of both biography and autobiography and Rupaul’s book is in a long tradition of success-narratives (never an unhappy ending!) but it is capably and sometimes cunningly written, a cut above in many ways. Images are established as building blocks, like the stage (pleasing his mother) and the idea of catering to people’s wants and needs – if you know who they really are (those hidden meanings again). The house, containing all those meanings, often appears as the metaphor for family, community and club, but also as the actual locations where Rupaul has lived, or dossed, or developed – in San Diego, Atlanta, Miami, all over New York, Southern California. He carries his house with him, to park benches and the interior of cars, but all the while there is the World, the stage on which he is determined to feature as a powerful force, and that World widens as we travel along the life-journey. There’s a lot of messing about in between, minor incidents given emphasis for the sake of recall, but generally we know where we’re heading – which is Page 173. And eventually and often there will be home-comings. I don’t know if you have thought of Rupaul as a relatable individual – I guess I haven’t, as it seemed to me that his journey had been a ruthless one – but you are never in any doubt as you read the book that Ru is a super-cool, detachment kinda guy, a shrewd observer of the people he will have to please and cater to. Early on we get a lot of his revulsion from others – from his family, America and Americans, all those hypocrisies, his bullshit detector on full-power all the time. There’s hate and unhappiness and dissatisfaction which will, of course, moderate as he gets nearer to “success”. Let’s be clear what that “success” is – it’s potence, it’s power. When on Page 114 he muses on how he lacks both masculine strength and virility and feminine sexuality and pleasure he’s dissatisfied because the exhibitionistic gay sissy which he has become doesn’t have power either. Both his feisty mother and his flighty father have let him down. That sissy is going to have to be re-tuned, overhauled even. The problem, we are led to believe, is over-sensitivity – his mother told him so. But all gay boys are oversensitive and identity is really the big issue. “Black, artistic, feminine. I believed I was too many kinds of other to be seen as sexually desirable in the hierarchy of gay men, and it was safer for me to keep my walls up.” Earlier he says, “Later, I would find out that I didn’t have as much in common with other gay people than I assumed I would.” This then is a story about a soloist and a choir. The soloist is You Know Who – “there seemed to be that force field around me, where I was perceived as other, standing outside the sexual hierarchy in which everyone else seemed to be able to situate themselves.” The choir are all the tribes Ru is always seeking, - “The sense of being a part of something, of belonging, that had once felt so elusive now felt vital.” - and he eventually associates with them but never entirely belongs to them. The quest is ongoing. An acid trip naturally offers emancipation, and the result is a relationship, man on man, but you won’t find much intimate detailed sexual action in “The House of Hidden Meanings”. Somewhere between the soloist and the choir, the questing self and the wider belonging, is a kind of void, regularly filled by partners and lovers but never satisfying enough to surrender to. Sex is subordinate to success, and boy is only being girl when it promises success. RuPaul is no trans icon and no gay avatar. Drag will be show, will be power, will be omnipotence recovered. “I would do it as a high-femme sexy glamazon.” Fame follows but not, initially, drugs and dependencies. With fame, though, comes crises and RuPaul enters the therapy zone. Much of the rest of the book’s story is about sorting out self and dealing with trauma. Needless to say mother and father feature in these self-explorations, and we get a lot about “echoes” of his relationship with them in his subsequent love-affairs. There are more epiphanies and realizations but at the end his mother has died and he is apparently unattached. Whatever relationships he has will be better for all those crises and endings. The self-sufficiency he says he learned from her has triumphed. As he puts it earlier, - “The only option was to be kind to myself.” He calls kindness his “religion”, but is wary of expecting it from others. He will instead commune kindly with his “child within”. This might be an end – an odd one, a slightly sad one, but an end – but we know that a whole new RuPaul enterprise was waiting to happen. There was more power, more global dominance, to be claimed, and RuPaul Charles, it has become clear. is not one to rest on his laurels. He has stuck around and, “The ones who stuck around, it seemed, had an added element that people could rally around. They weren’t just talents. They were something else. Consumers are always looking for something proprietary in a product that offers more than the thing itself, whatever its utility. They want a vocabulary, a lifestyle, an aesthetic that goes along with whatever they’re buying. Nowadays we call that a brand.” The house has revealed its meanings. So RuPaul was not really gay, not really drag, not really just a talent, - RuPaul was a brand creator and marketing manager, and still is, and is now reaping the rewards of the Drag Race. He lays claim for himself to “terminal uniqueness” but there is no terminus, no end to all this. As long as the brand is current all may be well and the child within can be happy, but America and RuPaul will always need “more” – more power. Reading this life-so-far I can almost understand the U.S.A. of Donald Trump.