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.

How do you cast the queens on the show? We find the best queens to fit the genre that she represents and then have our fingers crossed that one doesn’t outshine the other too much, so as to not give away who’s going to win. Queens surprise us all the time. Sometimes the ones who I think are going to go really far fizzle out fast, and the ones who I had no idea about go the distance. It’s always interesting to find out what is someone’s kryptonite, what they can’t move beyond.

But surely certain queens have a spark. Underneath the makeup and wigs, what makes a queen a true star? It’s true in everything, not just in drag: To be a success, you have to understand the landscape, you have to know thyself, and you have to know your history, so that you can draw from people who have figured out the equation you are faced with. It’s not rocket science. You also have to be able to see yourself from outside of yourself. Now this is important, because most of the queens get that opportunity when they watch the show, but very few understand what it’s like to take the judge’s advice and utilize it in the moment. It’s like having a reflection for yourself from someone else. A good friend who can say, “Oh girl, you have a little spinach in your teeth.” Those are truths for anyone on this planet: Know thyself, know your history, and know how to read the landscape.

You’ve said many times that drag’s place in the culture goes up and down depending on the politics of the time. Where is drag right now? Oh, honey, this is an up time. This is probably the golden age of drag right now. There are many different pieces of this puzzle that have enabled this to happen. But history will prove that it’s cyclical. Most of the time, people feel very comfortable with fear and hostility. But right now, there isn’t that fear and hostility. People are open to being loving. You see that with gay marriage and with so many other aspects of our culture that have opened up. But I’m old enough to have seen those windows and doors close so fast you could’ve never seen it coming. That’s why someone my age is still a little apprehensive—cautiously apprehensive.