Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, we revisit some admittedly out-of-context highlights from our September 2013 issue, in which the drag icon RuPaul spoke to designer Jason Wu. This month marks the return of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, now on MTV. Sit down, superstar, and you just might learn a thing or two about charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent.
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“What happens is, like a witch, you can dictate how people see you—you get to organize how they interpret your own energy. And then their energy, reflected back at you—or me—becomes hypnotic. I felt like Superman to my everyday Clark. That’s what the drag—what fashion—really does.”
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“I always look on the bright side, and I think that what ends up happening is that the face that you get is the face that you develop or that you deserve. It’s a cliché, but I think that who you are on the inside shows on your face.”
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“Even now, I change my clothes three times a day when I’m not in drag. Right now, it’s the middle of the day here in L.A… I’m on my third outfit.”
RuPaul, 1979. Photo by Tom Hill/Wireimage.
“That’s the most exciting thing in working with all of these young people and seeing all these girls come through our show. They’re courageous—and they’re not afraid of color or of what people have to say about their bodies. They use their bodies as a tool, as a gift, and I love that.”
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“People always ask me why I was able to transform something that has been thought of as subversive into something that was mainstream—where grandmothers and grandfathers would accept it with open arms—and I think that had more to do with the fact that it was a calculated effort to take sexuality out of my image. It was more like a Disney caricature, rather than a sexualized, subversive character. For whatever reason, people don’t feel threatened by me, and I think that it has to do with the sexuality. They don’t think of me that way; they don’t feel sexually threatened by me.”
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“All of a sudden, it was like the world shifted. By changing my own mind, the world changed.”
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“I love to laugh, I love color, I love texture, and I love creativity, so I was always inspired by people who incorporate those things into their work. I love David Bowie and Cher and Diana Ross. I wanted to follow in their footsteps.”
RuPaul, 1996. Photo by Herb Ritts/Trunk Archive.
“By the time I moved to New York, in the early ‘80s, I’d learned how to create a persona, and I knew what my persona would be. I knew that my platform would be love and acceptance.”
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“I have an even deeper gratitude and understanding of how difficult and lucky it is to hit gold twice in one lifetime. Young people take it for granted, but the truth is that I’m at an age now where I can really appreciate it so much more than before because I understand how much hard work it takes to get here—and how important it is, what it means to people, to see diversity, and to see themselves in a way that they’ve never seen themselves represented before.”
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“Drag has everything to do with being a shape-shifter, and feeling free enough to try all the colors and not be limited by other people’s opinions.”
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“On a personal level, my goal is to extract the shame out of femininity and out of being yourself. That is, I think, the biggest thing that young gay people face: shame. And that’s an inside job.”
Photo by Steven Pan.