RuPaul Andre Charles

RuPaul Andre Charles was born November 17, 1960 in San Diego, California.  He studied the performing arts in Atlanta, Georgia.  Later he moved to NYC.  RuPaul has been an actor, writer, musician and model but he is most well-known for his art as a drag queen.  In 2009, RuPaul produced his first season of RuPaul’s Drag Race.  The show was an immediate success and this year, 2023, he produced season 15.  The show has gone global and at the time of this writing, there are Drag Race franchises in 21 countries around the world. 

I chose RuPaul as my rhetorician because through RuPaul’s Drag Race, he and other drag queens have taken gay slang and made it mainstream.  Due to a growing acceptance of queer folk, gay slang is often no longer used as an antilanguage by LGBTQ+ people to keep themselves separate and to protect themselves from harm.  Drag queens continue to use gay slang as an essential part of their drag performances.  They have in essence become the guardians of gay slang.  Not only are they keeping gay slang alive, they are expanding its vocabulary each season on RuPaul's Drag Race with ever more creative uses of “The Queen’s English.”  

RuPaul and RuPaul’s Drag Race have taken performance drag from the back door to the front door.  In the past, in many cultures, drag queens and drag kings were honored as spiritual healers and mediums.  They were often the shamans, medicine men and women, herbal healers, and priestesses and priests in their communities.  That changed when powerful world religions persecuted them, condemned them and drove them underground.  

Not very long ago, drag queens were scorned by most people; sometimes even in queer communities.  Now they are once again openly taking their rightful places as performers, leaders, teachers, shamans, and magicians in our world.  They move us with the pathos of their stories, the authority they show in the strength of their presence, and the magic we sense in their transformations.  Their rhetoric speaks loud and clear through their words, slang, storytelling, humor, songs, costumes, bodies, and gestures.  As RuPaul says at the end of each Drag Race episode:  "If you don't love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else?"  RuPaul is teaching all of us to more authentically be ourselves! 

Contributed by Jonas Slonaker Spring 2023