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I’m sitting in a bar in West Hollywood with RuPaul Andre Charles, the world’s most famous drag queen, and he’s started to cry. ‘That part in The Wizard of Oz when they go into the poppy fields. Sorry, I choke up when I think about this… the Lion and Dorothy and Toto fall asleep and the Tin Man, who’s immune to the poppy — which is heroin — says, “Wake up! Wake up! You’re falling asleep!” ’ He dabs tears from light brown cheekbones dusted with a sprinkling of natural freckles (no pancake today, the 53-year-old is working preppy realness in the form of a £2,000 Isaia check suit) and in a voice containing the softness of Michael Jackson and the child-like intensity of Dorothy herself concludes: ‘You need those friends who are going to shake you up and look out for you, you know?’

It could be a scene straight out of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the gossipy, smart, big-hearted reality TV show, which debuted quietly in 2009 on the US cable channel Logo and has gone on to become a juggernaut on Netflix. It’s Project Runway meets Priscilla Queen of the Desert as a group of spicy drag queens compete through photo shoots and performances to see who has the ‘C.U.N.T’ factor (charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent), guided by the gently authoritative father/mother figure of RuPaul.

Transvestites had a sleazy image in America before RuPaul came along (they were the New York club kids of Paris is Burning, or John Waters’ big, brash and trashy Divine), but if Diana Ross made it OK for African American R&B acts to find mainstream success in the States, then Ru has done the same for female impersonation. Catchphrases from the show such as ‘Sashay away’ and ‘Good luck and don’t f*** it up’ have become reference points for any self-respecting gay scenester, and season seven is already in production.

‘The show is about the tenacity of the human spirit,’ he says, stroking his smooth head with long, artistic hands. ‘And we see ourselves in each of these girls, whether you want to be a drag superstar or not. Drag, especially in a male culture, represents the absolute biggest no-no, so to watch these courageous characters break down or break through is fascinating.’ Drag, he believes, is having a big moment.

‘Conchita Wurst is, like me, taking this opportunity of openness in our culture to send the message that we’re all really the same.’ He jokes that you need to pay him a lot of money to get him into female drag these days. And, no, he doesn’t get off ‘vacuuming the apartment in high heels — it’s always been about the power’.

Part of that power comes from the fact that Ru can pass as a stunning, real-life woman of 6ft 4in before heels. ‘If I walked in here in drag, it would blow your mind because it’s huge, it really is. It’s like Superman’s costume. I’ll see pictures of myself and I’ll go, “Oh my God!” ’

He admits that ‘the partying part of it, the naughtiness of drag sort of disappeared as soon as I got famous’, referring to his 1992 surprise hit ‘Supermodel (You Better Work)’, which reached number two on the US Billboard dance chart smack in the middle of the grunge era.

The brash, sexy, über-camp classic came about thanks to an ‘open sesame’ moment when he realised that the ‘radical drag’ he was into (‘think smeared lipstick and army boots meets David Bowie’) wasn’t exciting the crowds. What was working, in the era of Linda, Naomi, Cindy and Claudia, was the glamorous black hooker persona he’d been toying with. When Larry Tee, a music-producer friend he knew from his early clubbing years in Atlanta (Larry Tee would go on to launch gay-friendly acts such as Peaches, Fischerspooner and Scissor Sisters), suggested Ru write a song called ‘Supermodel’, he stopped taking drugs, buckled down, made a demo and sent it round until he got a deal with Tommy Boy Records.

When the video came out in 1993, shot in New York’s then-scuzzy Lower East Side and styled up in faux Versace, Kurt Cobain pronounced ‘Supermodel’ to be one of his favourite tracks of the year and the drag queen who’d been slogging away in the clubs of New York and Atlanta throughout the 1980s was suddenly travelling the world meeting Linda Evangelista and Diana Ross. Elton John took him on his first Learjet and Gianni Versace was soon sending him real Versace.

RuPaul refers to his female incarnation as ‘the Monster’ and underlines that he doesn’t care if you refer to that creature as ‘he’ or ‘she’. He’s currently a hot potato with the trans community for using the phrase ‘You got she-mail’ (a pun on email) in the show, but he’s unrepentant. ‘Trans has always been up against drag because drag is saying, “This is all fake.” Trans is saying [big, serious, deep voice], “God made a mistake.” OK, God made a mistake. Right on. It also says, you don’t have a sense of humour.’ He sighs, adding: ‘I’ve never censored myself because the intention has always come from a place of love.’

Humour is key with RuPaul and he credits it with saving him from the anxieties of a volatile childhood in San Diego with his parents, Irving and Ernestine, who would fist-fight in front of him. The ‘Ru’ in his name refers to the binding roux sauce needed to make a gumbo, the local dish of his Louisiana-born Creole mother. Ru describes her as ‘a very dark character’ who, he says, once poured petrol on the family car in front of his philandering electrician father as Ru, his twin sisters Renae and Renetta (seven years older than him) and his younger sister Rozy looked on. She then threatened to set fire to it but luckily the ‘lady from the church’ came over and talked her out of it, he recalls.

His mother sported Op art dresses, costume jewellery and Jackie O shades when she was well, but he says she started taking lithium and Valium when her divorce came through, when Ru-ru, as his sisters called him, was seven. She began wandering round the house in a kaftan in increasingly unpredictable moods. By ten, RuPaul was smoking pot and developing a hairdo that would soon be voted the best Afro in his school.

He was ‘saved’, he says, by his older sisters who distracted him with music from Motown, Sonny & Cher and Sylvester and the Cockettes. They also introduced him to the idea of escape via the imagination. ‘We were on public assistance [welfare], but they put some cookies in an old bag one day and said, “Come on, we’re going to have a picnic!” The word “picnic” — that was magic right there.’

He approaches drag with the same lightness of spirit. ‘The creed of drag is to mock. Drag is the court jester, the shaman, the witch doctor. It’s there to say, “Remember, this is a dream you’re having, don’t take it too seriously.” ’

In his late teens, he started to attend what he calls a ‘free university’, a nightclub in Atlanta called Weekends where he got to know Larry Tee. He’d moved to the Southern city with his sister Renetta and her husband

Laurence, who ran a luxury second-hand car business. He drove around in old Rolls-Royces for a while, but realised he was learning more important things while go-go dancing by night. ‘How to market myself’, as well as becoming ‘a big pothead. Real wake and bake stuff. Acid, too. It was only $5, so a big bang for your buck.’ Larry Tee functioned as the Tin Man character when Ru had a career dip at 28, was unemployed in LA, tripping, toking, boozing and contemplating suicide.

Ru shrugs when you ask if it was exciting to finally hit fame at 33 with ‘Supermodel’. ‘It sounds weird but I felt like a star from early on. A psychic told my mother that I’d be famous and I grew up thinking that. Even the private jets with Elton, it was how I thought it’d be: rules don’t apply to super-duper stars.’

He also learned that fame is never quite what you expect. When he met his heroine Diana Ross on Concorde, he ended up scrubbing the dirty toilet because she was behind him in the loo queue and ‘I didn’t want her to think I’d made the mess!’ His impish giggle fills the room but he admits at the end of our two-hour chat that ‘darkness is always in my peripheral vision, so I have to focus on straight ahead’.

Yet light has come from the darkness. His mother was a handful, but ‘she had the strength of a man and the heart of a woman. To this day, when I pull out my sassy persona, it’s Ernestine Charles I’m channelling.’

Mainly he steers clear of the gloom through work, and luckily there’s a lot of that right now. You sense this is his final drive for more mainstream recognition. He’s come up with a chocolate bar for his new pop-up shop on Hollywood Boulevard. ‘Milk chocolate with peanut butter and then these little rocks of sea salt that you bite into and you’re like, “Oh! Oh! What’s this?” ’ he enthuses. As well as filming the seventh series of Drag Race, he’s organising an LA retrospective of all his old costumes from Gianni Versace to Bob Mackie, Isaac Mizrahi and Todd Oldham.

But music is where his heart is and his new album, Born Naked, has some stand-out tracks including ‘Can I Get an Amen’ (featuring Martha Wash). It’s a beautiful, soulful tune and shows a side of RuPaul that until now he has kept for his secret sorties (where he luxuriates in cowboy garb) to visit his boyfriend of 20 years, Georges, a stonking 6ft 7in Australian who owns a ranch in Wyoming. ‘We’ve tried to split up many times but I’ve never met someone I liked more than him.’ The secret of their longevity? ‘Have an open relationship because if this person is your best friend, you want the best for them.’ He admits he has to work on this philosophy: ‘I’m a Scorpio so I have a possessiveness I’m not proud of.’

When he’s not in Wyoming, he loves to go hiking near his house in the Hollywood Hills every day at 6am. He talks about the wild flowers he saw this morning as if they were the latest bevy of ‘extravaganza eleganza’ Drag Race contestants. ‘I just had to stop and say, “Hey, you guys, love what you’re doing! Welcome, wow, gorgeous!” It reminds me of the stillness, the elegance, the majesty of just… being, you know? It’s like the hippie creed, which is: all is love, have fun and don’t take any of this too seriously because if you do, you’re missing the point.’ ES

Born Naked is out now