RuPaul Recalls the Terrifying Day His Mom Almost Burned Down Their Home: ‘It Was a Pivotal Moment’ (Exclusive)

RuPaul Charles — known to his legions of fans as just RuPaul thanks to his hit reality competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race and legendary mission of kindness — remembers having one goal as a boy in San Diego. He was seven years old, his father left and he lived with his mother and three sisters.

“I had to break through the dark cloud of my mother’s unhappiness long enough to help her forget that anything was wrong,” he says. That dark cloud was always there, he remembers his mother Ernestine, who died in 1993. She was very tired of the world. She didn’t talk about her childhood or background.”

One day his mother shared a prophecy with him. The psychic told her that he would become a star. He says he felt “anointed” by the news and has been working to live up to it ever since.

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RuPaul, now 63, says that while Ernestine set him on the path to stardom with her prophecy, she had so many mysteries – he never even knew she had one glass eye.

“I had the feeling that something terrible had happened to her when she was a little girl,” he says. “I felt it was my duty to share my joy with her, to make her laugh and act silly.” He pauses, recalling the warring household, his “skeptical” mother who “believed in the cruelty of the world” and his “charismatic, superficial” father.

“My sisters and I used laughter as a cure for everything. I’m still working.”

RuPaul as a child with his mother and father, 1960.

Courtesy of RuPaul

All this was a big responsibility for the young boy, RuPaul admits. “But it was natural for me. Somehow I had the ability,” he says. “I’m an alchemist. I could create joy.” Even at a young age, he was already acquiring skills that would later be useful to the future actor, singer and drag queen. “I learned how to be a diplomat,” he says. “I became very calculating and read the room. I learned how to shapeshift into what the situation called for.”

RuPaul says it felt like he was on a ’60s TV show Mission Impossible, which he loved to watch with his family. “These people would gather, study the sign, the man and understand what they really want. What they needed. Where was their weakness, how can you appeal to their ego. Which is the way to reach the most people.”

His childhood shaped him into who he is today (and sobriety helped him see that clearly), but it was not without trauma. A trauma that he is still experiencing.

‘House of Hidden Meanings’ by RuPaul.

When RuPaul was a boy, his mother found out that his father had an affair. While the whole family was standing in front of the house, his mom threatened to set fire to his father’s car.

“She poured gasoline on his car and stood there with matches,” he remembers. “It was a pivotal moment for me. And I didn’t know why until I got sober. I realized in sobriety that I had separated. At that point, I had separated from myself. And I didn’t really come back to my consciousness until I got sober.”

Reflecting on that moment, RuPaul feels like he’s watching the scene from afar. “When I remember the Gasoline and the Garage moment,” he says, “I’m like a camera on an arm moving around the scene. I’m looking at myself, my family, and the situation outside of my body, which is, of course, what human consciousness does in traumatic situations. . Because in reality if she had struck that match, our house would have burned down. Both parents would have died. We would have been homeless and we would have been watching this.”

Georges LeBar and RuPaul at the 71st Annual Emmy Awards on September 22, 2019 in Los Angeles, California.

John Shearer/Getty

Today, RuPaul says he “learned to comfort the child inside me. Which I still do today.” Namely, he sleeps with a one-eyed stuffed donkey that he found on the street in the 80s. “His name is Jimmy and I found him on Christmas night 1986,” he says.

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“Like Bugs Bunny,” says RuPaul, “you have to remind yourself not to take all this, this illusion, too seriously. There are things you should take seriously: kindness, sweetness, and love. But everything else, it’s just fleeting. Everything turns to dust . So don’t hitch your wagon to an ideology that could only be today’s trend.”

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Source: HIS Education