In this season of life, the first order of business was this: Get high. Just that one simple, clear directive would start the process. It typically began with cannabis, but if somebody had coke, or acid, or something to sip on, we were all for it. But weed was the accelerant and the thing that could activate us. Somebody’s got weed at their house? Let’s go!
Once stoned, the events of the day’s remaining hours unfurled with a kind of lazy ease. On the corner, we’d run into somebody who would say, “They’re giving away T-shirts down at 96 Rock for Bob Seger!” What? What are we waiting for? Or we would go to a lesbian bar on Cheshire Bridge Road called the Sports Page, where they had a Sunday tea dance and a buffet where you could eat for free. There was some kind of performance happening every night; if nobody was performing, it was taking acid and making a trek through midtown to get in free at the 688 Club or the Bistro or Weekends and dance.
There were girls working the streets, some of them trans, others assigned female at birth. We knew them all by name. A trans girl named Cornisha was very suspicious of our little posse as we rolled up and down the street, but we were so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable. Her pimp had just gotten out of prison, and I thought he was hot, like a young Smokey Robinson. He’d say hello as we sashayed along night after night.
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Is it the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia that makes me yearn for how fun and free that time was? I had always felt like a solo agent. I knew, even from my earliest moments, that I would have to leave the nest of my family and trudge the road alone. The sense of being a part of something, of belonging, that had once felt so elusive now felt vital. We had been anointed with fun, and maybe even as it was happening, we knew how special that was—and that it wouldn’t last forever.
As we all fancied ourselves entertainers, the other main focus, besides getting high, was to plan some type of show, whether it was an art opening at Metroplex or an upcoming performance at the Celebrity Club, which Larry Tee oversaw. Everybody we knew had a band, or at least some type of act. To build a career in show business—that was the expressed goal, even if most folks were just following the crowd, because everyone had a creative outlet of some kind. We had seen other people from the scene become millionaires from having nothing more than a garage band—what was stopping us from doing the same? In the interim we were just trying to get enough money to survive, waiting tables or working at the arthouse theater down at Ainsley Mall, which is what I did for a time, tearing tickets for gays and intellectuals who came to see French New Wave films or avant-garde American features.
Throughout the day, if we weren’t asleep at one another’s houses, we would be out walking around. We listened to music and talked about music. When the building across the street from us burned down, we went rooting around in the wreckage for anything we could find that was salvageable. There, in the charred remains of somebody’s home, was a copy of Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, only slightly warped from the fire damage. We played her cover of Prince’s song “When You Were Mine” over and over and danced on the balcony outside of my bedroom.
In the spring, Prince released “When Doves Cry,” which was playing on repeat—along with its B-side, “17 Days”— from at least one of our apartments at any given time. And each weekend, somebody we knew would be playing a show, often at the Celebrity Club. One night I went to see a group called Eastern Stars who just banged on pots and pans. Leading the group was my old roommate Kathy who I’d lived with on Charles Allen Drive, although by then she was calling herself either Cabbage or Carson—it was hard to keep up.
Get high. Have adventures. Get ready for the weekend’s gig.
That was the life.
I had worn out my slogan RuPAUL IS EVERYTHING, so had moved on to a new one: RuPAUL IS RED HOT. I pasted posters with that one over every telephone pole in town. I knew the message was spreading because when Floyd, Bunny, and I were out on the balcony of my room, getting stoned or dancing around, people passing in cars below would stick their heads out of windows and scream: “RuPaul is red hot!”
Eventually, someone launched a counter-campaign, crossing out my name and writing who-paul. Around the same time, a piece of graffiti in the dressing room at the 688 Club was pointed out to me. It read in the blink of an eye, rupaul will fade into obscurity. I took it as a compliment. You’re nobody until somebody hates you.
The first concert I ever went to was in 1969, to see James Brown and the Famous Flames Revue at the San Diego Sports Arena. I understood that a revue was a show centered around one star that also incorporated supporting cast members. I needed a new act, and the answer was obvious: I had so many friends who were entertainers, too. They could help me round out the show. I would open, bring on two or three additional acts while I changed costumes, then close the show and invite everyone back on for a grand finale. And I knew that I could get booked, because I had built a name that was now recognizable. I was self-aware enough to know that this was marketing 101—the only thing I didn’t know is why other people weren’t forging ahead with the same kind of brand-building.
We previewed the RuPaul Is Red Hot Revue in Atlanta before we got ready to take it up to New York in July. We all knew, even if we didn’t say it to one another, that New York had the toughest crowds in the world. I had learned this from experience. At clubs like the Pyramid—which was at that moment probably the coolest club in America—the audiences were jaded and precious. This was not so much the case at Danceteria, which was more commercial in its sensibility but still intimidating. The Pyramid would never willingly court the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. People in New York were dead-set on holding on to their identities as downtown dissidents—and that’s where we’d be going, in an attempt to charm them into laughing along with us.
The owners of the Pyramid arranged for us to stay in an apartment right above the club, with the two waitresses who also lived there. They had a boyfriend, an Israeli guy named Ayel, who flirted with me shamelessly. Two women sharing one bisex- ual beau? It couldn’t have been more cosmopolitan.
I’d had a feeling our show would be a hit—it was fun, optimistic, and glamorous. But the reception felt rapturous in a way it hadn’t in my earlier performances in the city. New York was still recuperating from its dreary, bankrupt darkness, and here we’d come from Atlanta—gorgeous and dripping in fringe, showcasing a low-rent Vegas morality, luminous in our fake Bob Mackie best. To win them over with love and kindness, the message I’d always wanted to spread in my work, felt like conquering Goliath—as if we had vanquished the darkest, most cynical monster imaginable. On my arc to stardom, this was a triumph—a local one, but a triumph nevertheless.
My friend Floyd and I decided that we wanted to stay in New York, but we wanted to go back and get some things organized before moving. Back in Atlanta, I cleaned out my room in my apartment and liquidated what little I had. I brought just one tiny suitcase back to New York with me, packed with underwear, a few pairs of homemade pants and tops, a coat for when it got cold, and some makeup. Those elements could be combined to create perhaps three different costumes, interchangeable pieces that could be mixed-and-matched. For shoes, all I needed were a pair of thigh-high rubber boots I could dance in. It didn’t matter—the promise of New York was irresistible. Never mind that we didn’t have a place to live. We would figure it all out.
And we did. Floyd and I met a pair of girls, Suzie and Jennifer, with an apartment on Sixth Street east of Avenue B, who would let us crash on their couch. We slept in parks, on benches, and on the pier, but only during the day. We showered wherever we could, but that wasn’t a high priority; after all, we were bohemian scallywags.
The owners of the Pyramid Club let us store our luggage there, which was a mercy—that way we always knew where to find our meager belongings, no matter how chaotic things got. Sometimes we’d end up somewhere because the guy who was hosting us wanted to sleep with Floyd. I was never the object of sexual desire, which was just as well for me—I’d get a better night’s sleep.
I have always believed that kindness is the highest form of intellect.
From my earliest memories, I had been called names—sissy or f—–—but they never stuck to me. In Atlanta, in the first apartment where I was living, someone spraypainted the word “f—–” on my wall while I was out. I genuinely forgot about the whole incident until years later, when an old roommate reminded me. I could feel that these boring, mundane forms of cruelty were just the tics of those who had no imagination.
Part of the security I had found in Atlanta with the gang of oddballs I’d met was the certainty that I’d be understood—perhaps not fully, but enough to feel a sense of community. I expected the same in New York, given how scrappy and bohe- mian that vibe was. But I came to see that kindness, my religion, wasn’t practiced universally.
I began dancing on the bar at the Pyramid Club, earning maybe fifty dollars a night to spend on cigarettes or food or whatever else I needed. I could see that I was better than the other dancers at working the patrons, pointing at people and imploring them to come over, then asking them for a dollar. “For good luck,” I would say. On a good night, I could clear a hundred and twenty dollars in tips just by engaging with the clients, locking eyes and working the crowd. And yet among the cool kids of the downtown scene, I was treated with disdain, and while we found pockets of kindness here and there, there was something frostbitten about East Village people. Late one night, we were closing down the club, and it had started pouring down rain. I hadn’t made arrangements to stay anywhere, so I asked one of the guys who ran the club if I could crash at his place for a couple hours.
In a very straight-faced way, he just looked at me and shook his head. “No,” he said. Not: I’m so sorry, but that would put me out. Or a lie: Unfortunately, I already have a houseguest. Just no. What could I say? That was how it went in New York.
I had first learned of Madonna back when she was working the coat check at Danceteria; by now, she had become a star. Not long after we arrived in New York, Floyd and I volunteered as helpers at the New Music Seminar in 1984, which was put on by Tommy Boy Records—one of the leading hip-hop labels—and the owner of Danceteria. It was a weekend where unsigned bands, music executives, and fans from the public would gather for a three-day convention with panels about the music industry, explaining how to get signed or how to advance your independent label. People would come hear speakers at the Marriott Marquis in midtown during the day, then later go to showcases featuring unsigned artists at the Peppermint Lounge, Danceteria, or the Pyramid. By day we’d mostly be at Danceteria, stuffing bags or envelopes with packets for the paid attendees of the conference, but eventually, we got to go to the seminar, and Madonna was on a panel.
We listened to her speak about her struggle to make her way in the city. She had been trying to get a record deal for a while, she said, and she talked about being relentless about getting signed. Somehow, she got to Seymour Stein, the head of Sire Records, when he was in the hospital with a heart infection; it was then that he signed her. I loved hearing about her tenacity, and it was thrilling to know that a girl who came from a similar scene with the same hustle could have rocketed to stardom in the way that she had. As we were leaving, we saw her standing outside with her publicist, Liz Rosenberg. They hailed a taxi and disappeared into the stream of yellow cabs heading down Forty- Seventh Street.
Sometime later, I went down into the break room of the Pyramid and she was there, holding court with a small group of people assembled around her. She looked at me with an expression I’ll never forget—a snarl of contempt at the sight of me, cold fury that I would deign to enter while she was in the room. Of course, it was our break room, and I was on a break—it’s not as if I’d done anything wrong. But her look said: What are you doing in here? Why are you here right now? How dare you take up oxygen in my world? She made no attempt to veil her derision for me. The fact that I saw it so nakedly was the whole point.
I felt intuitively that, in an instant, she had sized me up and seen that I had nothing of value to provide her. The world ran on a system where sex conferred power; she had become such a big star by seizing control of her sexuality. But that also meant she sized up everyone she encountered, determining whether they’d add anything to that equation. In clocking me as a eunuch, I became worthless to her. It was a microcosm for the rest of the world, but I saw it most clearly in her.
From the book THE HOUSE OF HIDDEN MEANINGS: A Memoir by RuPaul. Copyright © 2024 by RuPaul Charles. Excerpted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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