Drag Race Is Back! RuPaul on What Makes a Queen a Star — vogue.com

Tonight is the premiere episode of the seventh season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the hit reality competition and the latest success in the long career of RuPaul Charles. An enduringly joyful icon, Ru has had pop hits (“Supermodel”—You better work!), talk shows, movie roles, and MAC modeling contracts, and since breaking through in the early nineties has been the consummate pop-culture hustler, reinventing consistently to meet the era’s needs (a Drag Race–themed iPhone app was released in December) but remaining always the glamorous, hilarious queen we’ve grown to love. Ru has also become something of a philosophical compass for queer America, popularizing a number of trademark phrases—“If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” and “You’re born naked—everything else is drag.” Who could’ve guessed that a six-foot-four black drag queen from San Diego would become such a cultural fixture in prudish America? Ru knew. “When I went out and tried to go mainstream, well, who said I couldn’t do it?” he said by phone from Los Angeles. “I knew it could happen because it’s so obvious.” Ru spoke with Vogue.com about Drag Race’s new cast, the spark that makes a queen a star, and Ru’s place in the history of gay rights.

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