THE HOUSE OF HIDDEN MEANINGS: A Memoir, by RuPaul
As “The House of Hidden Meanings” is RuPaul’s fourth book and his first straightforward memoir, it’s understandably being marketed as an opportunity to see the pop culture icon in a new light. The striking, almost intimidating, black-and-white cover photograph notably subverts the expectation of seeing Ru in glamorous technicolor drag. All the artifice has been stripped away, we’re being told: This is RuPaul stripped bare.
But the meanings laid bare in the text contradict RuPaul’s narration again and again. What’s revealed is a striver high on his own supply who tries to spin his story as empathetic wisdom draped in Instagram-ready captions.
About 70 pages in, RuPaul — at the time, a Black high school dropout driving luxury cars across the country to help a relative flip them for profit — declares without irony, “Americans have always been frontiersmen, people who are open to a new adventure, and I felt this as I drove cars alone, back and forth, across the United States.”
I wearily recalled an earlier section of the book. Explaining the conservative environment of his childhood in San Diego, RuPaul summarizes the Great Migration in a paragraph that would be considered too concise even for a Wikipedia entry, then declares, “All the Black people in our neighborhood were transplants from the South, and so they had inherited a kind of slave mentality, which was based on fear.”
Aside from breathtaking dismissiveness of the decades of racial violence that made the migration necessary, it’s chilling to see a public figure known as a champion of the marginalized so easily dismiss survivors of Jim Crow-era terror as people who “hold onto their victim mentality so fiercely; it becomes a defining feature of their identity.”
The way we tell our stories has a way of telling on us. The memoir reveals an author who thinks he understands outsiders when, really, all he understands is that he wanted to become famous and eventually became famous. And given RuPaul Charles’s truly extraordinary talent, that would be fine if the book (and his brand) weren’t so invested in trying to convince the rest of us that he has unique insight into the joke called life.
Whether your introduction to RuPaul was his 1989 appearance in the “Love Shack” music video, his breakout single “Supermodel (You Better Work)” or, more recently, his Emmy Award-winning run as the executive producer and host of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” currently in its 16th season, you know that RuPaul isn’t just famous, glamorous and funny; he’s interesting.
At his best, he has reminded us that “fierce” is a warning, not just a compliment. (I’ll never forget sitting cross-legged in my living room, watching RuPaul onstage at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards, confronting Milton Berle’s anti-gay disrespect in real time while they presented an award together.) And as the self-declared “Queen of Drag,” an art form and pop phenomenon that remixes identity, music, fashion, comedy and politics into a fantasia that’s wickedly entertaining and often radical, RuPaul has lived a life, honey. Without question.
But living a life and coherently expressing a life story on the page are two very different arts. Rather than patiently allowing his tale to unfold, he struggles not to remind us that everything that has ever happened to him happened for a reason.
Then again, maybe he has a point. When RuPaul’s mother — one of the book’s truly standout characters — was pregnant, a psychic told her that she would have a boy and that he would be famous. As RuPaul writes, “With that in mind, she gave me the name RuPaul because, as she put it, ‘Ain’t another [expletive] alive with a name like that.’ Fame, for me, was less a dream than a predestination.” In other words, “The House of Hidden Meanings” is less a memoir than a prophecy unpacked in reverse.
And so, via a fire hose of anecdotes, minor characters and ready-made wisdom (much of which longtime fans will recognize from TV and other books), “Hidden Meanings” traces RuPaul’s curlicue path from early life in San Diego to the Black Mecca of Atlanta in the late 1970s and ’80s, to the club kid scene in New York and, finally, to the early years of true fame brought into focus by the success of “Supermodel.”
For readers who approach the celebrity memoir as a scavenger hunt, there are some fun finds here. A friend comes back from an Atlanta bar and quotes Lakesha Lucky, a drag queen there, saying, “You’re born naked, and the rest is drag,” during her act. The mantra has since become a RuPaul staple.
Madonna glares at RuPaul one night at the Pyramid Club. Elton John, Crystal LaBeija and Susanne Bartsch make brief appearances. Liza Minnelli drifts through a paragraph and is gone before the paragraph is over.
More than half of the book is set in Atlanta, where RuPaul and a revolving cast of “bohemian scallywags” embraced public-access television, drag bars and dilapidated apartments to create a punk scene. In successfully bringing this world to life, the book allows us to see an outsider embracing his fellow outsiders, by necessity, sure, but also out of deep love.
The most compelling chapter comes at the two-thirds mark, after what looks like a promising start in New York City falls through, and Ru ends up back in his mother’s California home.
Though he spends much of the book on the thin side of poverty, this protracted ordeal is the first time we see the glimmer in his eyes start to flicker. The precarity of this moment is all the more moving because RuPaul hits it big in the next chapter. He just has to hold on a little longer.
With 30 pages left to go, he meets Georges LeBar, the man who eventually becomes his life partner. The search for love is a consistent theme, which makes such a rushed depiction of its turbulent arrival all the more confusing. The moment our author — a triple Scorpio for those of us keeping tabs — actually finds love, he cuts himself off in the middle of the story.
Throughout “The House of Hidden Meanings,” RuPaul doesn’t hesitate to mention that luck was on his side. He nods to the specter of H.I.V./AIDS, the crack epidemic, even his run-ins with the police, then quickly turns back to his once-in-a-generation fortune.
But in this chapter, we’re reminded that the true miracle isn’t that he became famous, but that he survived an era that claimed the lives of countless young gay Black men, many of them just as talented, funny and interesting. Perhaps they are the meaning this country has worked so hard to keep hidden from us.
THE HOUSE OF HIDDEN MEANINGS: A Memoir | By RuPaul | Dey Street | 256 pp. | $29.99
