Lettin It All Hang Out

by RuPaul

  I believe it’s the only way we can save this world and our planet—by letting the goddess blossom inside each one of us. To do that we have to unlearn the lessons that a loveless world has taught us.

  My mom said you can’t trust men and you can’t trust people in general. She taught me how to be fearful of them. She said, “People take kindness for weakness, Ru.” And so, as a defense mechanism, we learn how to regulate our love. We learn not to open up, and not to show our true selves because people will use that against us. This is how we deal with being in a loveless culture. We put on armor to protect us from people who will take advantage of us.

  When we see children and animals we say, “Come on, come here, I love you.” We love them so much because we recognize the part of ourselves that’s been suppressed, and we never really lose that part of us, it’s always there. Or if someone falls, our natural instinct is to rush over and help them without a second thought. It’s our natural essence to Love and perpetuate life. But along the way we learn these loveless behavior patterns—that’s the way of the world as we know it today.

  But starting today, that must change. It’s all about coming full circle. That’s what being reborn is. You’re born into this world full of love and wonder. Then you learn the ways of an unloving world. The next step is to be reborn into what you were initially, which is loving and full of wonder. This process is no different from the evolution of Christ, Buddha, and Krishna. And this is the process that every living thing must experience.

  That’s why we need teachers. I’m just getting my education right now, but the education I got in school— what was that? That was not how I got my education. School should teach you about the existence of your soul, how to feed and nurture it. It should teach you the importance of gazing out of the window, how to channel that energy and where to go when you do. But, instead, school is like prison, and all it really does is suppress the imagination and kill off your curiosity.

  I wish they taught this lesson to children at the beginning of school, but from a very early age we are taught that we are not really clean unless we are Zestfully clean. All we learn in school are the ways of the material world, basing self-worth on what we can acquire. Instead of learning about love, all we learn about in school is about shopping, about going to the mall. We learn about how to enslave the soul and how to enslave our brothers, by buying and selling things, buying and selling each other. But we can only go to the moon so many times, we can only do so much and buy so much. My sisters would tell me when I was growing up that in the future everybody in our society was going to have eight pairs of shoes. The idea was that The People In Charge are going to make it better for the other people, and I said, “Yes! hallelujah! Eight pairs of shoes!” As I got older and discarded my Mary Tyler Moore-isms I realized that it wasn’t going to happen. The Fat Controllers are only making it better for themselves. If they have their way they will have eight million pairs of shoes, and everyone else will have to go without.

  The reason The Wizard of Oz had such a profound effect on me was that Dorothy has to go all the way to the end of the yellow brick road to realize that she already had what she had been searching for inside of her. So, as I got older, I began to realize that the final frontier was not outer space, it was inner space.

  I see this time as a time of transition, a sort of interim stage. I call it the age of Oprah. The Age of Oprah is about everyone finding that part of themselves that’s special. An initial part of that process is to go through a cleansing. One way of doing this is going on television and talking about all your stuff, and as a country we seem ready to talk and spill the beans. Recently on Ricki Lake they had people coming on and revealing major secrets on the air. This pregnant girl came on and said to her husband, “Honey, I got something to tell you... Darling, the baby I’m carrying—it’s not yours.” Why would someone do that on national television? I’ll tell you why—they’re cleansing the parts that Zest or any other deodorant soap cannot reach. The Mayans used to sacrifice one another in front of the gods, the Polynesians used to throw themselves into the mouths of volcanoes, and we, to cleanse ourselves, go on daytime talk shows and confess. It’s all part of America’s craze for twelve-step programs. This trend is really quite recent. When I was a kid there were all these things I wanted to talk about with people, but no one was ‘fessing up. I said to myself, “Why aren’t people talking about these things?” Well now they are—and with a vengeance!

  I have to say that when I became an adult and got out into the world, I thought I was such a damn freak. But now, having watched a zillion episodes of Oprah, and having heard what other people’s lives are like, I feel quite ordinary. But taking my cue from Oprah, my goal is to open up more, and show more of myself—show my depth. I don’t want to be an imitation of Oprah, but in the way that Oprah is herself—undiluted, unadulterated—that is what I want to work on.

  And I think doing that is going to take one more chapter, at least.

  Being a man attracted to other men has never been a problem for me. It’s just the way I am.

  When I was eight I had an abdominal hernia operation. I remember being in the hospital, getting in the wheelchair, and going to the bathroom. In the bed next to me there was this guy who was eighteen or so. He had a broken leg, and it was up in traction. As I passed by I looked over, and he had nothing on underneath his robe. Obviously, it wasn’t the first time I had seen a man’s penis, but the emotional jolt took me by surprise. My heart was racing. Up until this point everyone else had told me I was a sissy, now I was making the connections for myself.

  About a year later, I had a similar eye-popping experience with an older boy. Bernie, a neighbor, must have been about sixteen when he took it upon himself to be my big brother. Like me, he had older sisters, and wanted to make sure that I had a male influence. For about three years he would take me places on his motorcycle, like down to Tijuana looking for whores. But I wasn’t interested in them, I was interested in him. One day I saw him getting out of the shower, naked, and I thought to myself, “Wow!” My mouth just dropped open because he was so beautiful. He still is. Gorgeous.

  But in spite of these experiences, I was still quite naive. One time when we were stoned and talking about sex, my best friend Albert said, “I’m really horny right now,” and before I could say Jack-in-the-box, he whipped it out to prove it. He had a massive hard-on, and I couldn’t believe how big it was. I think he wanted me to do something about it, but all I could say was, “That’s not your dick! That can’t be real!”

  When I was older I started going to the gay center, where I made friends with a counselor named Raymond. We would meet once a week, twice a week, whenever we could get together, and talk about gayness. One day he said, ‘Would you like to kiss me?” That was the first time I ever really kissed a man, and he was a good kisser. I felt my knees buckle. I left the planet. He was thirty-six, and knew I was a virgin, so he said if you want to have sex, you’ve got to wait until you’re eighteen. The next two months, until my eighteenth birthday, crawled by. The day after I went to his house. It was my first time.

  Soon afterward he left town. Left to my own devices, I started going to the local gay club. I was a little nervous at first, because I had never really done that before, but I soon became a staple on the scene because the music was so good: “Relight My Fire” by Dan Hartman, “Dance Disco Heat” by Sylvester, “Heaven Must Have Sent You” by Bonnie Pointer.

  Then I met this boy in Balboa Park, the local cruising ground. He was a sailor named Johnny from Pine Bluff, Arkansas — an all-American boy. He was twenty-one and had brown, brown skin, and sandy hair. He was really cute. I would go pick him up at the navy base and we went out for about a month, having sex in the back of my mom’s car. But then he broke up with me because he was religious, and having sex with another man did not work for him.

  It was never an issue with my folks that I was gay—it was just assumed. It was common knowledge. I was always flamboyant.
So to say, “Hey, I’m gay” to my mother would have been like, er, duh! My mother used to make fun of me and say, “You’re a punk, you’re a sissy,” but it was never like, “When are you going to get a girlfriend?” It wasn’t until years later, after a devastating relationship, that I started thinking about how I dealt with men. My mother would always say, “You can’t trust men,” and that was something all us sisters learned from her. Whenever it came to boyfriends, it was always, “Oh, men! Oh my God, no!” So one day I called her up and we had a real good heart-to-heart all about it.

  My father did talk to me about being gay one time. My sister Renae warned me that this was going to happen because someone told him they had seen me in Balboa Park. Sure enough, my daddy called and said, “Ru, I need to talk to you.” So we went into the park and he said, “Ru—this lifestyle—you’ll be very lonely.” I cut to the chase and said, “This is not something I’ve chosen, this is something that I have always been.” And that was that.

  But it wasn’t. Because what I didn’t tell him was that I thought, “How dare you come into my life now and tell me about being lonely, when you left me alone all those years ago?” You see, I don’t remember very much about him being around, or being there for us as a father.

  He always used to say, “Remember your family. You need to know who your cousins are, Ru, so that if you need them they’ll be there for you.” Meanwhile, when I needed him, he wasn’t there. He said that he loved me, but he wasn’t there for me when I needed him. So he sent me a message that love is painful and that you can’t trust people who say they love you.

  When he lived with us he was very strict with us. He would put pork rind cracklins in the cornbread and make us eat them. I hated that. But when he moved out of the house, he was always very sweet. He loved to laugh, had a great sense of humor, and loved to tell jokes.

  After my parents divorced, my father moved to Los Angeles to live with his girlfriend Betty and went to work for the people who make Skippy peanut butter. He had visitation rights and would spend weekends with us, which consisted of him taking us down to Tijuana to get my haircut for fifty cents. Then he would take us to the Agua Caliente, the horse races. Mexico wasn’t very far away from where we lived, and on a clear day you could see Mexico from the front door of my house. We were always coming back across the border with cheap liquor under the trunk. He would say, “Okay you kids, when Border Patrol ask you your nationality, you say ‘USA.’” After they had looked in the trunk or whatever, they would point at each of us and we would say, in turn, “USA,” “USA,” “USA.” They never caught us because they weren’t bothered about a few bottles of booze—they were looking for drugs and illegal aliens.

  Dad was a big gambler, and he was also very unreliable. He was always late. He would say, “I’m going to pick you kids up at eleven.” Twelve o’clock would pass, one, two—no Daddy. We’d sit on the porch waiting and playing games betting that the next car that went past would be Daddy’s. We’d count cars coming by, but it would never be him. Sometimes he would show up later that night and be drank. Other times he’d never show up at all. That was my father’s modus operandi, and it’s taken me a long time to deal with it.

  My mother would say, “He ain’t no damn good.” I really did not want to believe that, but after years of her reiterating it, and after years of him never being able to keep his word, I simply couldn’t help believing it.

  So throughout my life I’ve always had a problem with men, because I never trusted them. The child inside of me is still there, and is still holding on to my experience of my father’s shortcomings as Truths. But the past is the past, and I don’t want to project it on the future. So it’s simply a matter of telling the child, “That’s not how it is. That may have been him, but that’s not everybody.”

  So, I grew up believing that everything that was male was rotten to the core, even my own maleness. I felt my father had betrayed me, and my reaction was to shun my maleness because I thought that was him, and part of his legacy. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I denied my manhood and thought that it was a bad thing.

  Now that’s over with. I’ve since forgiven my father and that has enabled me to move on. I’ve become my own father, not my father who is my real father, Irving Charles, but my own father in terms of for myself and being the man in my life that I never had. I feel comfortable with my masculinity really for the first time.

  A psychic helped show me the way. She told me that my father and I had shared past lives together. This is how she explained it: When I appeared in this life, my reaction to him was, “Hey, buddy, how are you doing? Don’t you remember, it’s me?” But his reaction to me was, “I cannot see you because I cannot see myself, and I cannot love you, because I cannot love myself.” My response to that was, “Let me help you, let me remind you who you are. You want sorrow? Here’s some of mine. You want love? Here, I have plenty. I can make you laugh, I can sing for you. Whatever you want my spirit will merge with yours, and you can be how we used to be.” But he could not see that. So, in essence, I spent a lifetime trying to get his attention, trying to get him to acknowledge me, and never receiving the acknowledgement I wanted so badly.

  This scenario with my father continued when I started to get into relationships with other men. Men just like my father. Very beautiful and charismatic, but unable to give me the love and approval I ached for.

  At school, when I was eleven, I had this friend named Danny, and that was the first time I fell in love with someone. Although he wasn’t gay or anything, I think he liked me a lot, but he wasn’t in love with me. One day he came to pick me up for school and my mother answered the door and cussed him out, as usual, and she said, “Get your fucking ass away from here, what are you doing?” Later that Jay at school he was devastated. So from then on I went to visit him up in his neighborhood, which was across the freeway. After a glorious year with him in seventh grade, he decided to go to another school. I had to be with him, so I followed him out to Lewis Junior High. It didn’t work out for me. He was into a whole other world, and had a girlfriend and everything. So I went back to my old school with a broken heart. But I still carried a torch for Danny for years afterward, even later when he was dating my sister Rozy.

  Looking back, this marks the first of many relationships I had with men who didn’t love me the way I loved them. Throughout my school years I fell in love with other straight boys, and it seemed like the same hopeless scenario as with Danny.

  It took me years to realize that I was just repeating this scenario again and again and again. I kept on falling in love with men who were unavailable to me for reasons I could only trace to my father. In my subconscious mind, if a man was distant but kind to me, I couldn’t help falling in love with them, because I knew they couldn’t love me back, and Danny was the first in a long line of men who fit this description.

  For example, the second time I took a hit of acid I was in Atlanta. I did it by myself and went for a walk that led me directly to the park where the water was. That’s where my voice was telling me to go. It led me directly to a group of young kids, one of whom, Christopher, would become my first real boyfriend. The moment I saw them, I started doing my California thing: “Hey, guys, how you doing?” and they were like, “What’s this?” They were all about two or three years younger than me, but when I saw Christopher, it was love at first sight. I had never felt this way before. I sat down on the swing next to him and our knees met. I could feel the vibrations coming from him, and he (as he later told me) could feel the vibrations from me. He was about six foot three, very skinny with fair skin and dishwater blond hair, crooked teeth, and a huge nose. Very redneck-looking. Even to this day I think he’s gorgeous.

  That summer was the summer of love for me because we fell in love in a big way. We were inseparable, and eventually moved in together. Christopher and I lived together for six months off and on. We had fights galore and broke up and got back together. Then broke up again, and then got back t
ogether again. He was very distant and emotionally remote. I on the other hand was the complete opposite. I liked to talk things through, and get things out in the open.

  Rather than face the music, Christopher would run off to Athens, Georgia, to be with friends. We’d make up and he’d come back home. This happened so many times, it was embarrassing. But, eventually, we faced the fact that our summer of love had become a winter of discontent, and we finally split up at Christmastime. I was devastated. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I was obsessed with him, and, just as with Danny, it took years for my obsession to fade.

  There were other relationships in between, but nothing so profound. I didn’t make sense of the deep, deep pain until years later when I fell in love with someone born on the exact same day and the exact same year as Christopher. His name was Jack. I fell in love with him at first sight also, and this was the summer of ‘89. By now I was beginning to decipher the pattern, and this relationship unfolded almost exactly like the others. He pursued me and we had a wonderful summer together, and as I returned his affection, he began to back off. All that year we went through the wringer together. We were friends for three months, and then not speaking for three months. Ultimately, and bitterly, our relationship ended. If I had been devastated in the past, this time I felt annihilated.

  With no other choice, I was determined to break the chain. I was determined not to live in limited love. I was determined to figure this problem out. I could not understand how I felt such deep feelings for someone I had known for only a few short months until I retraced my steps back to the wounds of a seven-year-old left unattended. I learned that the feelings I had were not necessarily for Christopher or Jack, but the deep pain I felt for my father, feelings that I had transferred from my father on to them. As a child I had pushed those feelings deep down inside because I was simply unable to deal with or even understand them. In this way I just deferred them. Finally, I got to dig them up, and instead of just feeling the scale of the pain as I had in all my relationships to this point, I got to understand the nature of the pain.