RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business

I met RuPaul at the end of January in Britain, at a rented cottage in Windsor and at Pinewood Studios, nearby, where movie franchises including James Bond and Harry Potter have been filmed. He was shooting “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK,” one of nineteen regional variations of his competition reality show, while promoting a memoir, which will be published this week, called “The House of Hidden Meanings.” (The title comes from a friend’s comment during an acid trip. “After the drugs wore off,” he writes, “I realized it was nonsense.”) RuPaul now hosts seven versions of “Drag Race,” a pastiche of competition reality-television tropes that follows participants, in and out of drag, through eclectic challenges including costume-making, lip-synching, and standup comedy (testing “charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent”—the resulting acronym is representative of the show’s bawdy sense of humor). He has taken an underground, subversive form and made it so mainstream that Nancy Pelosi has appeared as a guest on the show. The sixteenth season of the U.S. version, currently airing, has some of its highest ratings yet, and RuPaul recently won his fourteenth Emmy, making him the most decorated competition host and the most decorated person of color in the award’s history.